Our new website

I switched on our new website this morning. It has taken far longer than I anticipated, but these things always do don’t they?

The Open Learning Centre: Home Page

The layout and general idea is my own design, although the colour palette itself came from here which I thought was a brilliant resource. Using the search tool, I had the main colour for our Logo (#D40000) and this site threw up several ideas which were very nice indeed. I liked Rich Choice Lighten the most.

The initial idea for the menu came from Stu Nicholls’ excellent site CSS Play. I tried to use this menu in my original design but it didn’t play well with Joomla! and the accursed IE6 browser – man that is one bad web browser. So I opted for the really great swMenuFree native Joomla! module instead.

The site is running on Joomla! 1.5 and is still a WIP (Work In Progress) but then it probably always will be to be honest. There’s quite a bit of content still to do – mainly around the technology section – adding and describing applications that we feel are important and deserve covering. But now the framework is in place we can add to it fairly easily.

I will be packaging the template up shortly. It’s GPL and will be available for download from the site, probably under the resources section somewhere.

Any comments about it are very welcome. Our old site badly needed a refresh and this is quite a big change, although I definitely think it is more professional looking.

Alfresco, a bit like Quickr but Bettr

Quickr, for those who are lucky enough not to know, is the morphologically challenged relative of Lotus Quickplace. In reality it is Quickplace with two new themes, two new placetypes and two versions of dojo dumped on the filesystem to make things look a bit more “Web 2.0” and some windows-only integration with Microsoft only applications. So why I am I telling you about proprietary software here on “The Open Sourcerer”? Well I have a bit of a background in the IBM/Lotus area and I have been developing corporate themes for Quickplace since sometime in the last millennium. It hasn’t changed much, but there is a very serious Free and Open Source alternative now.

In brief, Quickr is a website creating tool, each site is known as a “place” and within a place you can have folders and rooms. Rooms are like sub-places, they can have their own access control rules and a different style. They can contain rooms as well so you can have a hierarchy of places. It looks quite pretty, and 10 years ago it was 5 years ahead of its time. It has now got a client install, which integrates with some legacy Windows applications, more on that later.

Alfresco is an Open Source Enterprise Content Management System, which runs as a J2EE application on Linux and other platforms (I would stick to Linux+Apache+Tomcat+MySQL for preference). Like Quickr you create areas for storing stuff, in Alfresco they are called “Spaces”. Spaces can contain files, folders and more spaces.

Inheritance of security to sub-spaces/rooms

So in Quickr you create a place, you add members to that place, you create a room within the place, you carefully check the checkbox labeled “inherit members from parent place” as you create it so that all the members of the place can get into the room. Lovely. Now add another member to the place. You would expect them to be able to access the room wouldn’t you?

No. Inheritance is a one shot deal when you create a room, it just copies the access control list from the parent room as it creates the subroom. Now imagine an place in an enterprise with 100+ rooms and managing user access to this lot. It gets messy.

In Alfresco, inheritance works just like it should. You can set a space to inherit from the parent space, and override it at will. Nice, friendly and fit for the enterprise user/administrator.

Access as a file system

The big new feature in Quickr (the pretty skins don’t count as they are only skin deep) is the Quickr Connectors. This Windows only program installs as a Windows Explorer extension and sits alongside the network neighbourhood, it sort of works like a filesystem.

You can’t do linked spreadsheets (OpenOffice.org or Symphony, or the other one) because the files don’t reside at a resolvable UNC path.

Folders are deeply broken. You can create folders, and nested folders, but they look rubbish in most of the web themes which are designed for a single level of folders. If you do use a web theme with a hierarchical folder tree and then use the web interface to move folders between rooms, they break in the connector. Moving them in the web doesn’t update some important UNID field somewhere, I couldn’t figure out which, but I reported it as a bug.

Personal spaces (aka Quickr Entry) were supposed to be a wonderful thing, when you send an email with an attachment from a proprietary email client (Lotus Notes or the other one) it asks you if you want to store the attachment in your Quickr place and send a link instead. This sort of works. With no security. Your place is public, anyone can see stuff you put in it (with a lame security-by-obscurity option which I haven’t figured out how to get to yet). So you want to organise your space, putting stuff in folders etc. well you can’t. Folders aren’t allowed in personal spaces. Tough.

So how does file system access work in Alfresco? Well it will act as a WebDav server or a CIFS server or both. There is no mucking about with locally installed connector clients and Windows Explorer extensions to make it look a little bit like a network filesystem. It is a network filesystem. WebDAV is well supported on Linux and Mac and it works on Windows too. Once you connect to your server via WebDAV it just looks like another bit of your filesystem. You can drag and drop documents into and out of it, double click things to open them etc. Linked spreadsheets work fine, and in fact every application that expects to be storing or accessing data on a regular drive works just fine with your remote content management system. It isn’t just any remote drive though, it is still a content management system, if the business rules for a space where you drop a file dictate version control then that is exactly what happens.

Version control

So lets say you have a document in Quickr created with a form set up for optional version control (which is a bit of a sloppy concept in itself). You are doing some edits and what started as correcting a few typos turns into a major re-factoring session. You now want to save your document as a new version. Tough. Too late. You have to create a new version before you start editing it, otherwise you are just editing and overwriting the existing version. Quickplace always had a published version + working draft system, it now has a sort of revision history stuffed into it. The two models don’t seem to like each other very much.

Version control in Alfresco is somewhat more thought out, it has a very powerful Advanced Versioning Manager, which can track back not just individual files, but directories, it can show you the state of the whole repository at a particular point in time. Very useful for the multiple linked spreadsheets example. It can do way more than this, it is configurable as

So what does work Bettr in Quickr?

Well Quickr has a truly sickening theme/skin engine. It only works in Internet Explorer with ActiveX and you can upload 6 files (stylesheet + 5 HTML files) which it scoops up along with any referenced images. The HTML files basically duplicate each other, or you can upload just one HTML file and have it guess what the others should look like. There is no community site to share and sell Quickr skins that I know of, unlike Joomla! and WordPress etc. However, rubbish as the theme engine is, it is better than Alfresco which doesn’t yet have a skinning capability (you can edit the stylesheet and all the .jsp files, but that isn’t the same as a facility for uploading a package of skin elements so that places can be individually styled.)

Quickr isn’t just for storing files, it has a nice calendar that can show custom forms on it. I haven’t yet seen a calendar view for Alfresco. The Gantt chart view in Quickr isn’t very sophisticated at all, I wouldn’t miss that, but the calendar is useful.

When uploading files though the web interface from some Microsoft Office applications it does an ActiveX/COM control thing that gets the application to save as HTML as well as the native binary format and it uploads both the HTML version and the native format. It then serves up the HTML version to browser clients, which would be a nice trick. If it worked a bit better. It doesn’t do this trick if using the windows explorer integration, so if you use a mixture of the Quickr connector and the web client you get a great big muddle and a mess.

In conclusion

If I had to do a 15 minute sales demo, on Windows, I could easily make Quickr look fantastic, but when comparing Quickr against Alfresco as a serious tool for long term use in a modern business, Quickr falls short and Alfresco is the one I would choose.

Joomla! 1.5 is Out

Well, I know I am a bit late on this but it is worth mentioning anyway.Joomla Logo

Probably the world’s most popular CMS (Content Management System) has just had a major update. The Joomla! 1.5 release has been over 2 years in the making and is a vastly different product (behind the scenes at least) than the 1.0 version which has been so popular since the fork from Mambo.

Visit the Joomla! site to get the low-down on 1.5. I have just got the release and set-it up in house to start testing. Install was a total breeze and the new admin UI feels a whole lot cleaner.

It will be some time before it is as widely used as the 1.0 series, not least due to the huge numbers of extensions and plug-ins which are now only compatible when accessing the new Joomla in legacy mode. Also, there are major changes to the way templates are handled and although the changes are certainly for the better, again, it will take some time for writers to migrate their templates and for the community to start creating lots of new stuff for 1.5 only systems.

Congratulations to the Joomla! team. It is a great product, and I’m sure this release will go a long way to making it even more popular as the CMS of choice.

Untangle, Asterisk PBX and File Server; All-in-One. Part 8

If you’ve been following the story so far you’ll now where I am. If you haven’t, please go back to Part 1 and read from there. Alternatively if you click on the Untangle tag in the tag cloud then you should get all of the posts so far.

Hi all,

I’ve not yet got any further with the Untangle portion, but pretty much everything else is now in place and working 🙂

Last night I built and installed the few remaining applications that are necessary to support my objectives:

  • MySQL (I need this for Joomla! and vtiger)
  • Postgresql (I need this for untangle)
  • Apache
  • PHP (and some associated libraries for added functionality, i.e. HTML-Tidy, mm, libmcrypt, mhash…)

I have also been thinking about what it is actually I am trying to achieve. I find a picture really helps so here’s a block diagram of the applications I want and how they should interface to the outside world…

Functional Block Diagram

This was a good exercise that helped me to understand the flow of traffic and what needs to be prevented from passing through the server. The dotted line from Apache to the Internet is because I’m not sure yet whether I’ll actually provide any sort of public web presence from this box or not. I doubt it somehow but you never know…

If anyone has any comments or suggestions for improvements I’d be happy to hear them. I made the original diagram in OOo draw. Here’s the original file if you want to use it or alter it. As with all other stuff on here, its CC licensed.

Upcoming Free Seminar

A quick plug for our business, The Open Learning Centre, coming up:

On the 20th November in Farnham, Surrey, England. We are running the first of what we hope will be a series of short and hopefully entertaining seminars on Open Source Software aimed mainly for the SME (Small to Medium Enterprise).

The seminar is called “The Way Out is Open!” and we will be using a totally Open Source Software solution to show how a typical business might deal with some of the usual activities surrounding a new product launch. We will demonstrate various popular products such as OpenOffice.org and Joomla! as well as many others.

I appreciate that for the main readership of this blog it will be rather uninteresting, but if you know anyone who could do with being shown the magic of Open Source then send them to this link where they can register to come and see The Open Sourcerers in action: http://www.theopenlearningcentre.com/component/option,com_performs/Itemid,83/.

As I said it is Farnham (not far from Guildford) and will run from 08:30am to 10:30 on the 20th November.

Thanks.

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