The Related Documents plugin for Hippo CMS allows the editors of the documents to select “related” documents of the current document. The plugin provides automatic suggestions using Similarity Search and Referring documents. Also, the document editors/authors can hand-pick the related documents.
The plugin is now updated for CMS 7.3(released last week). You can get the plugin from the Hippo Forge, the demo project is also now updated to 7.3. If you are already using the plugin, then there are no changes required in the plugin configuration to make it work with 7.3. Just update the plugin version in your pom.xml to 2.05.00 and you’ll be good to go.
Finally I got sometime to move the Smart Console project out of sandbox. The project is now hosted at Hippo Forge. There are two things that are aimed with this project . One – to provide a simple, user friendly JCR Explorer and Console for any repository. Obviously, I’ll add Hippo Repository specific features to the project soon. The second is experimenting with REST interface for the Repository. I’m using JBoss RESTEasy for providing the REST service implementation and ExtJS as the front end.
Currenlty the project is in pre-alpha, and during the next couple of weekends I’ll try to add more features – most , if not all – buttons in the UI do nothing at the moment. But the application in its current state can connect to the repository and display the node tree, and node properties (in a tab) when clicked.
Stay tuned for updates, or if you want to help, just join the project at Forge. Though the project is still in cowboy-coding phase, contributions are welcome, as always.
To see it action, check out the code and run mvn jetty:run. Make sure that your Hippo CMS/Repository is running on localhost.
Yesterday I joined the hippo professional services team for a fun filled team event with go karting evening and the first ever Golden Hippo Award event. The evening started with go karting fun, we were competing with each other. This was the first time I ever did this, I failed miserably in the qualifiers. Clearly I’m much more efficient with cars with horns and plenty of people crossing the road and blocking.
The competition was along the lines of F1 racing with one training lap, 3 Qualifier rounds. And the top 5 drivers from the qualifiers went on to compete in the grand finale. And the winners of the evening were Tjeerd, Stefan and Kenan.
After the karting, the Golden Hippo award was announced – Starting this quarter, every quarter the one of the member of the professional services will be chosen by popular vote ( by peers and Hippo partners) and will be awarded with the Golden Hippo. That’s not all, at the end of the year, the team is also planning to give out yearly “Platinum Hippo Award” – for the best team member voted similarly. The awards also come with nice little bonus as well.
The Hippo CMS team has big plans for 2010. Early in the year they intend to launch a new web 2.0 platform. This open source product is aimed at the enterprise, to ensure “improved communication, collaboration and knowledge retention while lowering the burden on IT resources.”
Features include an integrated approach to user-generated content, an “enterprise mash-up” functionality that focuses on matching content and applications with the needs of individual employees. Each user will get a personalized window to “content and applications inside and (cl)outside the organization, while IT keeps (or regains?) central control over security & access rights.”
Instead of aiming to reinvent popular applications such as Gmail, Zoho, Twitter and Evernote, this new product aims to let companies integrate such tools within their enterprise security umbrella.
On October 30th, we at Hippo are organizing the free Forge Friday hacking event. If you are using any software from Hippo or interested in implementing it in the future or even just wanted to know more about Hippo Software, this is a great time to come and join us during the Friday Forge event.
You don’t need to have any prior experience with Hippo software or codebase. The focus of this event is to hack some cool plug-ins for Hippo CMS or Hippo Site Toolkit Components and in the process learn more about hacking Hippo Stack in general. You can walk into either one of Hippo Offices across the pond (Amsterdam or San Francisco).
So join us and learn more about Hippo CMS, HST2, Portal, Repoisotory. We’ll help you with building your own plugins, portlets, components, extensions. You can use our very own Hippo Forge to publish your project and earn eternal fame!
Here’s the Signup Page for the event. If you want to more information about the event.
Berry explains how to add a workflow step to Hippo CMS. This video tutorial takes you through the process of adding a button to the CMS that calls a workflow action on the repository.
You can find the discussed code on the Hippo Forge: forge.onehippo.org/projects/workflow-action/
This post is part of a series which will be focusing mainly on Hippo CMS’s extensibility. These posts are more targeted towards the developers who want to customize and enhance the core CMS functionality.
Introduction
Hippo CMS is part of the Hippo’s Open Source Enterprise Content Management System. It provides a browser based user interface for managing the content in the Hippo Repository. Hippo CMS is fully customizable and developer friendly CMS that provides various ways to extend its functionality.
Hippo CMS application is built using Apache Wicket, one the best frameworks available today for building web applications using Java. Wicket is known for its simplicity, and its component-oriented programming, thus providing solid base for the Hippo CMS.
Hippo CMS has pluggable architecture which boasts of first class plug-in mechanism. Depending on your needs, you can create complex document types, extend and enhance the user interface and even create a combined add-on that can change the Core CMS and even replace. All you need to know to build the GUI add-ons is Java and Wicket.
I’ll try to explain each of these extensibility in detailed examples in this series of blog posts. So let us get started.
Getting and Building Hippo CMS I’m assuming you are using a Unixy Operating system (Linux/Mac OS X). If you use windows replace the commands appropriately.
Before starting to checkout the source and building please make sure you have the following installed on your computer.
Open a command line and check out the code for Hippo ECM using following command. Please note that if you are using an graphical client such as Tortose SVN, then you can checkout using the appropriate menu option.
If you are building for the first time, please note that it may take some time since maven needs to download all the dependencies. Once you are done with building Hippo ECM and you can run the provided Quick-start WAR file to get a feel of the user interface and the CMS application.
Change to the quickstart/war directory and run the hippo-cms web application using embedded jetty.
cd quickstart/war
mvn jetty:run-war
After jetty has been started, goto http://localhost:8080/cms to check the version of the CMS that you’ve just built. You can login using default username/password combination of admin/admin.
Hippo CMS Login Screen
Note that you can even deploy the generated war file in Tomcat or an Application Server. Check the documentation for more information.
This concludes the first part of Hippo CMS Customization Part 1- Getting Started . In the next post of this series we will see how to create a simple backend templates (a.k.a Document Types) using Document Type Editor provided within Hippo CMS.
