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Dear Jahia Community Members,
Welcome to the November 2009 Jahia Community Newsletter.
This newsletter highlights the work that has been done by the R&D Team during the last sprint. We are really proud of last month’s team velocity as we achieved major user stories with a particular focus on quality.
Additionally, we have worked on new third-party modules, which allow you to extend your software solutions with tags, rating, top stories and more.
We hope that the previous newsletter was of interest to you and as we enjoy getting your feedback, we would love to hear from you, especially on the product roadmap. A dedicated forum has been created to receive your comments and suggestions.
The Jahia R&D team
Tagging
Jahia is integrating more and more Web 2.0 features. Jahia users will be able to use a new tag framework on blogs, forums and wikis deployed within Jahia. This module lets users add keywords both from the live and edit mode. Tags may be input either by authors or visitors, depending on the configuration. Tag provides a "folksonomy engine" by helping to describe specific content and allows it to be retrieved either by browsing or searching.
We have also introduced a new user interface called the "Tag manager" and it is available on the main Jahia toolbar. This manager offers comprehensive features such as displaying all the tags used in the system as well as showing usage counters for each one. This makes it quite easy to see how often tags are used. Tags may be added, removed or even renamed using this manager interface. All tags are of course stored in the JSR-283 compliant content repository connected to Jahia.
Another interesting capability is that you can insert a tag cloud dynamically into a page to visualize the most frequently used terms on your site.
Tags are listed alphabetically, and the importance of a tag is shown here using font size. The size of the keywords corresponds to the usage count associated with that keyword. Thus alphabetical or navigation "by popularity" is quite natural. The tags are hyperlinked to any content object, helping you browse and search easily.
Click on the following video to see the result within Jahia.
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Dynamic Module
In line with the concepts laid out in our last newsletter we decided to expand on our software extension framework by providing a mechanism we call "dynamic modules".
A dynamic module refers to options you can activate on a Jahia content object, that were not part of the original content definition. We have improved our existing "module extension" mechanism to make them autonomous and easy to deploy (can be a WAR archive file or just a folder with files).
Previously a module was limited to displaying a content type and handling its different views (renderings). Developers also had to manually insert into page headers the necessary calls for optional resources such as CSS or Javascript files.
Now, a dynamic module may be composed of the following elements:
- content definitions
- multiple renderings (JSP view of the module content and/or feature)
- resources (CSS, Javascript, resource bundles... that are loaded and resolved transparently by Jahia)
- custom "light" business logic (rules, classes...)
For example, imagine you want to add a rating module to an existing content type, such as an article. Thanks to dynamic modules, the author may simply activate the rating option directly in the article authoring user interface by checking (and therefore activating) an option. The option will activate the dynamic module for this content object.
Rating
The Rating dynamic module allows you to rate and review content entries. Along with the default behavior, Rating also allows you to display ranked lists of entries and to rate reviews up or down on any content. The first rating system implemented integrates business logic based on our rules frameworks (JBoss Drools Engine) to increment or decrement a counter and also recalculate results after a new vote was entered.
On the same topic, a second dynamic module has also been developed that provides stars rating capabilities. This dynamic module relies on the jQuery library and uses JSON to communicate with Jahia. It uses a different rule to update the rating count.
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Upcoming Features
More modules will be added such as vote, forms and top stories.
These new modules will expand the social tools offering in the Jahia product.
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