Professional Alfresco: Practical Solutions for Enterprise Content Management

Chapter 13. Levels of Customization

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Extending the Alfresco repository

• Extending Alfresco Explorer

• Extending Alfresco Share

The Alfresco product suite provides several out-of-the-box applications that interact with the core Alfresco repository through well-defined interfaces and services. These applications provide interaction with content and business logic from the repository to deliver solutions for Enterprise Content Management (ECM).

The product suite leverages open standards and well-understood service interfaces to provide valuable options for customization and extension. This chapter describes the extension points and focuses on how they are commonly used to build custom integrations and solutions. You will then use some of these hooks in the subsequent chapters to build a custom application on top of Spring Surf and Alfresco Share.

OVERVIEW

The Alfresco repository provides a rich platform for building content applications. It provides scalable storage, extensible services, RESTful interfaces, and a rich content-modeling facility for building your content definitions and content-driven business processes. You can master and maintain these definitions and processes in one single location.

Web applications can use or render the content and access it through any of the many open standards interfaces. This makes it easy and cost-effective for your organization to introduce new applications or scale out existing applications by leveraging a common content infrastructure. ...