The Alfresco Story Part II

As promised in the comment of the Alfresco story I decided to describe the problems when working with the Alfresco community version within the Liferay portal in detail. I encountered the following two bugs in the current (2.1) Alfresco community version:

1. Validation problems submitting a Web Form (http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/WCM-833)
2. Problems completing the example press release (http://issues.alfresco.com/browse/WCM-342)

Concerning bug number one I was advised to test the development release of Alfresco 2.2 where the bug did not occur. I was quite glad about that. But when I tried to edit the form which I could submit before, it could not be submitted again. I do not know if this editing problem was related to my environment or an Alfresco bug because with a later nightly build (22th September) I could not reproduce it.

Concerning bug number two I do not think that it is grave because commenting out the appropriate line in the press-release.xsd file resolves it. In spite of everything it is a pity that the well documented WCM example does not work out of the box.

Finally I decided not to develop a news portlet for Alfresco because on one hand Liferay supports similar standalone functionality with the blog portlet which will be greatly enhanced in the forthcoming 5.0 release and on the other hand I did not want to develop a portlet which cannot be used with the current stable Alfresco release.

Instead I started to develop an image gallery based on but not limited to the Alfresco content repository. More about that later.

Greetings and enjoy the nice day (I am writing this on our terrace with blue sky above me (at least in south Germany))

Phillip

PS I almost forgot something. I personally think that Alfresco is a really great CMS. I especially like the implementation of the web forms which is based on standard  XML schema. So keep up the good work and thanks for supporting the open source community with an enterprise content management system.