Jahia Community Edition V6 Available
Jahia has some big news. As of today, V6 of their Community Edition is now available. This is a big release for Jahia on a number of levels. Architecturally, they have refactored the application to make it cleaner by removing Jetspeed-2 from the architecture. JSR 286 portlets are still supported through the Apache Pluto portlet container. More importantly, they have developed a framework for "pluggable repositories" where Jahia can now connect to content providers like a JCR or a file system (see screenshot). A new rules engine can be configured to do different actions on content depending on its type. For example: unzip an archive when it is uploaded.
The Jahia 6 File Manager has a Outlook-style tabbing scheme that allows you to browse multiple repositories
There are plenty of new contributor features such as improved workflow, inline editing, and a preview feature where you can emulate preview for a specific user type on a specific date (see screenshot). There is also image cropping and scaling functionality built in. From a usability perspective, Jahia has aggressively adopted Google Web Toolkit (GWT) to AJAX-ify the user interface. There are now fewer popups and many other subtle improvements that lead to better user flow.
Jahia 6 preview feature allows a contributor to emulate a specific user type and date.
One of the biggest changes in Jahia 6 has to do with the licensing. Readers of my Jahia 5 evaluation know that I have been quite hard on Jahia for talking so much about open source but not offering a single open source product (their Community Edition had a non-OSI-certified badgeware license). Well, as of V6, Jahia Community Edition is licensed under the GPL (V2). Version 6 of the commercially licensed Enterprise Edition (due out this summer) is also going to have some licensing changes but I don't want to spoil the surprise. For now, you can try out the supportable, open source licensed Community Edition.