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Dear Jahia Community members,
Summer is never a restful (pun for geeks!) period for Jahia, neither for sales nor for developers. The past 2 months were really intensive and impressive as we successfully achieved major extensions of the Jahia back end infrastructure since the last Jahia EE v6 release.
The Jahia Team is really excited to give you here a better view on our future roadmap and upcoming improvements.
Our Multi Source Content Management strategy has never been so true as we are now completing the progressive full JCR standard integration.
In addition to new interesting features (Cloud environment integration and new social modules), this strategic and technical JCR focus will give you more flexibility and capabilities.
Leveraging this additional backend extension, we are really proud to show you how Jahia is a perfect cross-repository and multiple content types / sources management architecture to build rich intranets, portals, extranets and website factory projects (and more soon !)
The Jahia R&D team
Jahia New features
As mentioned in the previous Newsletter our R&D team has worked on finalizing the procedure to install Jahia on Amazon EC 2 and the addition of new Social Modules within Jahia.
Jahia has now been validated to run in the Amazon EC2 cloud computing platform. This installation procedure includes example deployments of a cluster of two nodes, with a third node being added dynamically at a later time, to assist with the load. These new deployment possibilities 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. A specific offering will be launched in a few days.
Jahia now features a newsletter mechanism, which helps you create and customize professional newsletters, ideal for building your own marketing campaigns. Jahia allows registered users to subscribe to a newsletter and receive new editions of this newsletter by email.
Jahia packaging
To improve the reliability of Jahia and the ease of maintenance, both in development and production environments, the packaging has been drastically improved with a clear separation between the customer configuration and the default Jahia package configuration.
The whole customer data and configuration files are now externalized from Jahia. This means proprietary application server deployment will be better handled (EAR packages) but also that upgrades, patches and even client modifications will now be much easier to deploy and integrate, especially in cluster installations.
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New data model extension related to full JCR support
In the Jahia EE v6 release, part of Jahia’s managed content had already been moved to the JCR, as was for example the case for files or portlet instances. We also externalized in the v6 release all content definitions by storing them in the JCR. These last few days, we achieved the final step of this move for all other content types. As a benefit, content, users, groups, categories, files and pages can be stored by users in the JCR-compliant content repository (ie: Apache JackRabbit).
What does this mean in more depth?
The Jahia data model has been extended to allow you to work in a decoupled environment: this means you can manage content independently of its presentation on a "page". This opens the door to users and groups workspaces for all content (and not only for "files" as it is possible in the Document Management Module).
All content types can be managed in the new JCR management UI, which also allows you to manipulate versioning and metadata, whereas the presentation is managed by Jahia front-end with our well-known in-site page editing and navigation creation interfaces.
It also means that all content objects can be assembled as desired, grouped together and/or requested using XPath stored queries and linked to rules, as it was possible for files since the Jahia v6.
In addition, and for all content stored in the JCR, it is now possible for content objects that do not share the same content definitions to coexist in a same page. Yet you can still restrict a list to one or several object types if you need to. This new flexibility available for content stored in the JCR is impressive, considering the benefits from a page building standpoint as well as new capabilities for the future in-site / in-context editing interface you will be able to enjoy very soon.
An additional page rendering service has been developed allowing multiple views for each JCR stored content .This means you will be able to apply "views" on any content, based on rules or according to the editor’s choice using a dedicated GUI.
The new page rendering service is fully REST compatible. You may now access all Jahia content (JCR nodes) and manipulate it in a very standard and transparent way, using standard REST URLs. It also means that it becomes much easier to retrieve content from external systems or websites using REST calls. Last but not least, it means that projects that need strong Web 2.0 user interaction will be able to implement these features on Jahia very quickly!
We have been hard at work to reintroduce a more advanced versioning mechanism.
The new versioning implementation on files and content-items (create versions, lock versions, check-in, check-out, restore a version) is now available for JCR stored content as requested by all our community of users.
Users and groups
The hierarchical structure of the JCR allows you to have more flexibility to create large amounts of users and groups, order them, and create groups of groups (which was only available in Jahia API calls in prior versions but may now be managed easily through the GUI). User nodes may also be associated with templates for public or private rendering. User profiles are now extensible as any type of content and a dashboard will regroup user tasks and other personal stuff. Groups can also be associated with particular rendering, which makes it easier to create workspaces for instance.
We have also started to integrate Apache Shindig with Jahia to support the OpenSocial API specification standard. This integration will enable integrators to create and re-use advanced social applications.
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Upcoming Features?
Some insight about new upcoming features:
Jahia plug-ins: a plug-in architecture and mechanism is being defined and implementation should start soon.
Search: Search is also a big asset and we are working on several new features search improvements such as "did you mean" feature and "assisted typing" (sometimes called "suggested search") in the Admin UI.
In conclusion, thanks to this important and smooth evolution to the full JCR compliance, users now have more options to easily manage and share all their "Content" for their project or inside independent workspaces. All above-mentioned features and extensions will be available in our next Community Edition. In the meantime, nightly builds are available, should you like to discover these new features earlier.
We will give you more information in the following Newsletters but please do not hesitate to contact us at community@jahia.org.
Stay Tuned !
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