Share Extras and Alfresco 4.0
Will Abson
With Alfresco 4.0 out of the door for a couple of weeks now, the
changes in this version should be starting to become clear.
The changes that have been made make customising Share easier than
ever, but for those of us who are slightly ahead of the curve it's
going to mean changes are needed to our existing customisations.
Substantial changes have been made to the dashlets, document library
and many other places and the new extensibility framework provides
substantially more options for customising the interface.
As well as these framework changes, the new functionality in 4.0 -
which has been well covered by others - means that some add-ons have
been incorporated into the core application, while others may have
been rendered obsolete.
So, what does this mean for Share Extras? Well, if you haven't guessed
already it means that changes will be required to most existing
add-ons, and all extensions should be reviewed to make sure they they
work as well as possible on 4.0.
It also is apparent that many of the changes needed will not be
backwards compatible with 3.3/3.4. So to allow development on 4.0 to
continue on the trunk codeline, I have created a 1.0 branch in
Subversion where the existing code targeting these versions can be
maintained.
You'll notice that we're not yet at 1.0, but this is the plan in the
coming weeks, and I'll send out a separate mail about how that will
happen. There's a lot of great stuff already in Share Extras, much of
it quite mature by now, and I think it makes sense to tag a v.1.0
release based on those the existing 3.4/3.4 extensions that meet the
standard.
So make it clear to users which download should be used any add-ons
which have been modified to work with 4.0 should be labelled as v2.x,
and the existing 3.3/3.4 add-ons should be labelled as 0.x for now,
and 1.x after that release has been made.
Hopefully that is all clear. Let me know if you have any questions,
otherwise let's get started on that 4.0 compatibility!
Cheers,
Will
Peter Löfgren
Hi all,
I've updated the Google Site News dashlet to use the new help icon and
moved the config to the DashletTitleBarActions widget. Anything else
for dashlets?
The CKEditor is updated and tested for 4.0 as well. Backported some
bugfixes to the 1.0 version.
Will, will you do the packaging and releases?
I created a preview forms control, nothing committed to share-extras
yet, but I'm thinking that maybe it is better to package all form
controls in one project. That way you download one jar, and then
select what controls to use.
So maybe restructure/rename CKEditor project to something more
neutral, wiki pakes describing controls can still be individual.
Cheers,
Peter