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 Dear Jahia Community members,
The Jahia team is glad to count you in for this first community newsletter as part of a new communication series. The aim of this community newsletter is to keep you up to date with the latest developments going on at Jahia on a monthly basis.
Our community is constantly growing and the number of members, wiki pages and other technical resources is also on a good trend. We don't want you to miss out on any of these great resources so we've decided to launch a separate newsletter aimed specifically at the developer segment of our community.
As an Open Source software provider, we would like to share more than our code with you and as always, we like to hear from you and receive your feedback.
There are lots of ways to stay in touch with the Jahia Community. You are also invited to join our group on Linkedin, subscribe to our Jahia Forums, follow Serge Huber (CTO), Stéphane Croisier (Product Strategy Manager), Tristan Renaud (VP sales Europe) and general Jahia tweets on Twitter as well as visiting our blog posts.
Serge Huber
CTO Jahia
Jahia eases the life of integrators
The Jahia development team has been working on further product enhancements to simplify the integration of Jahia by introducing or improving tools such as the use of tag Libraries, the template code generator, the simplification of the history tag and the ability to share content between portlets.
Taglib
Jahia has very much improved its tag libraries in order to simplify template development.
The goal was to remove all (!) Java scriptlets from the JSP templates, in order to make them more readable, ease code re-use and finally facilitate migration to newer Jahia releases. If you have complex requirements, which cannot be solved with the current taglibs, you may of course still use the Jahia API in Java scriptlets, but we strongly recommend you write your own custom tags (which may be even written using JSP syntax in tag files with a .tag extension), and perhaps contribute them to Jahia or ask the Jahia community to enhance the provided taglibs.
Jahia Code Generator
This Jahia tool helps you create simple content definitions, generate all definitions JSPs and resource bundles needed.
You can add as many fields as you need by clicking on the "add field" button at the bottom of the form. Each fields let you choose properties such as name, type (this values must be set, and the name must be different for each field), and set other options (default values, etc). You can remove a field if you want, except for the first one.
Clicking on « Send form » displays the result in another window. You can copy/paste its content in your template files.
Portlet Intercommunication
In accordance with our vision that everything is becoming content, the ability to share content between portlets was a key asset for us. One of the main priorities of Jahia developers is to think about how to make features easier to use. Enabling resource sharing between different portlet applications was already specified in the JSR 286 specification but was sometimes too complex for some of our customers. We decided to facilitate the process within Jahia and make the integration more flexible, while still offering full compliance with the JSR 286 standard.
Navigation History Tag
Easy navigation is key for a good website. Menus are the backbone of any navigation system, completed by a relevant sitemap and tools such as current page path or breadcrumb. In Jahia 5 a template developer had to re-use many lines of scriptlet code to provide the navigational controls. Furthermore the varying implementation had performance and scaling issues and could be the source of an under-performing website. Therefore Jahia 6 now provides a set of tags, simple but flexible, to create the different navigational elements, in a way that is performance efficient and future-ready.
Jahia Link Checker
The Jahia Link Checker allows you to search an entire site for broken or invalid links. The results are displayed in a table and can be exported as CSV. Clicking the "Check links" button will start the link checking process, and the table will be populated as the process goes on. You can browse the list at any time for broken or invalid links.
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Upcoming features
We will present in the next newsletter the following improvements:
Social Modules
Jahia will simplify the life of webmasters with the addition of various new Social modules.
Newsletter: Jahia will provide newsletter mechanisms, which help you create and customize professional newsletters, ideal for building your own marketing campaigns. Jahia will also allow authenticated users to subscribe to a page and send this page via mail to all subscribers of the said page.
Blog: We will work on a set of new blog template designs to plug into Jahia. The goal will be to provide a fresh well designed, efficiently coded and standards-based template that provides solid yet flexible starting points for anyone to use as a design for their new or existing blog within Jahia.
Jahia and the cloud
We have tested the deployment of Jahia in the Amazon EC 2 cloud computing platform. This installation included the deployment of a cluster of two nodes, with a third node being added dynamically at a later time, to assist with the load. We believe this new deployment possibility will be very interesting for both developers that need to quickly have access to varying hardware requirements, execute performance tests and validate cluster installation as well as for customers that want to have a very flexible production deployment platform that can adjust to different web traffic scenarios.
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