If you have a custom web application that does not necessarily need a full CMS but could use a WYSIWYG editor, there are a number of open source Javascript rich text editors out there that are not too difficult to plug in. The big ones are TinyMCE, FCK, and Kupu. If you just need something simple, you might consider NiceEdit. It just has the basics (bold, underline, italics, left/right/center justification, bullets, indent, font size/family, links and images) but it looks easy to install and may be just what you need.

I am sitting on the plane on the way back from a wonderful time at CMF2007 (pics) in Aarhus. Thanks to Janus, Sara, Flemming (my guardian angel), and the rest of the J. Boye crew for putting together a fantastic conference.

Before taking the trip, I made some changes to my computing toolkit to help me be more productive in the air. For those who don’t know me, I am a proponent of server side tools for managing information. I use services like Bloglines for reading blogs, Wikis and Google Notebook/Docs for writing, and del.icio.us for bookmarks. Ideally I should be able to log onto any computer, connect to the Internet, and have everything I need.

The first change that I made was to migrate from my beloved Bloglines to Google Reader. While, I prefer the functionality and behavior of Bloglines to Reader, the addition of Google Gears makes Reader a perfect online/offline tool. I can still access my feeds from any computer but I can take my little slice of the web with me when I am offline. According to feedburner, my immigration appears to be on the tail end of a trend. The Reader wedge of the subscriber pie chart grows in proportion to Blogline’s decline.

I also installed the blogging client Ecto, which I am finding preferable to the Blogger web client because it adds little touches that are difficult to reliably support in a cross-browser web client. If it were not for packed airplanes with coach seats that are too small to work in, wasted time in the air would be a perfect place to catch up on writing blogs. From a business class seat, or at least Economy Plus, Ecto would be even better.

And with that, I will dig my laptop out of my chest, power down, and watch the in-flight movie.

I imagine it was a great challenge to write the first book on the new Alfresco open source enterprise content management system. Enterprise content management is a deliberately broad field with a diverse audience of stakeholders. Alfresco is a powerful but new and rapidly evolving product with, as one might expect, thin documentation. I am happy that Munwar Shariff undertook this challenge to write Alfresco Enterprise Content Management Implementation.

The target audience of the book appears to be a technical person who is evaluating and getting started with Alfresco. There is good information about the architectural principles and the range of uses for the product. There are also some instructions and recommendations for installing the product. As I recommended in my review of Munwars book Plone book (Plone Live), I would consider removing the installation section because that is one of the things that is well covered in the Alfresco documentation. However, the recommendations around the configuration options are helpful.

Also, it may have been a little ambitious to cover strategies for initiating and managing an Enterprise Content Management project. That is the topic of several other books on content management (Definitely read The Content Management Bible by Bob Boiko) and software development.

The core strength of this book is as an aid to explore the functionality of the Alfresco web client and to learn how to configure and extend it. As with most Java applications, most of Alfresco’s behavior is managed through a series of XML files. The examples of how to manipulate these files in the book and as part of an accompanying download are very good. And when you go through these exercises and open up the files you can’t help but notice other settings that might be useful to modify as well. I think it would be helpful to discuss the underlying technologies that support the Alfresco platform and also tips for tuning the software to meet the performance and availability demands of an actively used implementation. But those topics might be more appropriate for an advanced book. For an Alfresco beginner (and there are a lot of people who fit that description out there), this book is a great introduction.

While most WCM products and projects are focusing on AJAX technologies to deliver a better editing experience from a browser based interface, there are a couple of projects looking in other directions. Yesterday, Wyona CEO and Apache Lenya Founder, Michael Wechner showed me a new approach he is working on: Yulup and Yanel. Yulup is a FireFox plugin that provides editing tools for web assets that have been Yulup enabled. Yanel is a trimmed down CMS interface that Yulup can talk to.

If a user has Yulup installed, he sees a special icon on the top right of his browser. This icon will indicate if a page is Yulup enabled. If it is, the user will be able to execute actions like checkout, open, save, or whatever else is enabled at the server. Yulup uses FireFox’s WYSIWYG HTML editor or more sophisticated users can edit the HTML directly. The demo that I saw had a static HTML website but I could see how this technology would be capable of handling more structured content. Dialog boxes written in XUL perform functions like repository browsing and file upload.

Behind the scenes some interesting architecture is at work. Pages are enabled by adding an XML tag to the content. This tag tells Yulup to ask Yanel for a resource file that tells what actions are enabled. This resource file also maps actions to different URLs and methods. In this way, different content management systems can perform library services such as checkout, check in, add, update, delete, etc. Neutron is the protocol. Michael expressed some regret about not using an existing protocol (Atom and WebDAV were considered) but these didn’t have necessary features and it was unlikely that the Yanel/Yulup team would have enough sway to get them added.

This is still early technology and there are some important features to add. For example, the system needs a more sophisticated security model that limits the available actions before login. Also, details like how to implement versioning and workflow have not yet been fleshed out. You can see the roadmap here. The long term vision is to Yulup-enable many different CMS and standardize the user interface similar to how the JCR hopes to standardize content storage. As with technologies that threaten to disrupt the status quo, many projects may resist this attempt to hijack the interface and commoditize the CMS. But if this UI works for users (especially users that need to work on different CMS) it may be hard to fight much in the same way that many writers want MS Word or Outlook to be the interface to their ECM systems.

The other project that is trying to create a universal user interface for content management systems is the Apogee Project. They are building content management services on top of the popular open source IDE (Integrated Development Environment) Eclipse. This project appears to have stalled. I would give it low potential for survival because the project sponsor (Nuxeo) has its hands full porting CPS from Zope to Java and because Eclipse might be too techie for your average content editor. Last I checked, Eclipse was a 100MB+ download and good luck using it if your screen resolution is less than 1600×1200.

Developers working on a rock-solid CMS with an ugly face (of course, no developer thinks his baby is ugly), may want to check this project out.