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Dear Jahia Community members,
Last month was really fruitful in term of product development. The watchwords for the R&D Team were Consolidation, Quality and Testing.
As you may know the Jahia Team followed a Scrum methodology since the end of 2008, which is an agile method for project management. Its goal is to dramatically improve the productivity of the team using development phases known as "Sprints" where teams are developing "User stories" (product enhancement) listed in a "Product Backlog".
In our case, a Sprint typical duration is a 3 weeks period. At the end of a Sprint, these User stories are ready to be demonstrate and should be available with a good level of quality and documentation.
In addition to the consolidation of the JCR 2.0 / JSR 283 integration, last sprint was dedicated to some interesting evolution on the extensions architecture and search implementation sides.
The Jahia R&D team
A plug-in architecture and mechanism has been defined and implemented within Jahia. Developers will be able to create their own features in stand-alone packages and deploy, reuse them from project to project and be sure that their extensions won’t be subject to issues when upgrading the application.
Jahia developers will be able to extend the default content component delivered by Jahia on their own. With these specific extensions, developers will be able to increase the scope of features with additional applications that leverage the Jahia backend in more specific ways. In other words, the way we develop our future Jahia official applications (Jahiapps) will be open to our entire community of users.
This improvement, inspired by what exists in PHP projects will change radically the way developers work with Jahia and will contribute to develop an even more active community.
Click on the following video to see the result within Jahia.
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The improvement of the search capability is clearly a key asset for the team. We really focus our effort on facilitating visitors’ access to relevant information (documents, content, multimedia) as quickly as possible.
One of the tasks handled by the R&D team during the last sprint was to develop the "Did You Mean" (Search Engine Spell Check) functionality, which is now available within Jahia.
This new feature is a search spelling suggestion, which improves your daily search results. We use popular Open Source Java Frameworks such as Compass and Solr to check queries against common spellings of each word. When we determine an alternative suggestion that we think might improve the search results, you will see "Did you mean:" at the top of your search results page.
Click on the following video to see the result in Jahia.
On the same topic, we are currently implementing and trying to make an extensive use of "assisted typing" (sometimes called "suggested search") in the Admin User Interface. That could prove useful for larger sites containing thousands or dozens of thousands content items.
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 Moreover Jahia is also involved with the semantic search as we are active community members in the IKS (Interactive Knowledge Stack) project. The goal of this integrating project, partly funded by the European Commission, is to create an open source technology platform for semantically enhanced content management systems.
We hope to be able to demonstrate some proof of concept on this topic as soon as possible.
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If you are interested by the subject, read Stéphane’s blog.
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Jahia development roadmap is now available in the Community Website.
The aim of this Roadmap page is to keep you up to date with the latest developments (known as product backlog) going on at Jahia. We don’t want you to miss out on any of the great evolutions we are currently working on. There are lots of ways to stay in touch with the Jahia Community. Our newsletter is one of them: we communicate when software package are available for demonstration, as well as new software enhancements.
In order to discuss this further with you, we have created a roadmap forum where you can give us feedback around Jahia development and product strategy.
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Upcoming Features
The next newsletter will be focused on the enhanced user experience with Jahia. We will show you how the next Jahia version leverages the Google Web Toolkit (GWT) framework introduced in Jahia v6 even more.
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