Teach yourself Alfresco: Because we’re too busy to explain it
Friday, April 4th, 2008 by Michael
Alfresco is turning out to be a very interesting CMS. It seems to have its roots in managing enterprise documents, and that sort of enterprise feel permeates the design, even when one is using web content management.
So far, learning it has been a rapid roller coaster of being impressed and being frustrated. The product is excellent, and includes a number of things which I like. The version control system and the workflow seems to strike just the right balance between being functional and being simple enough you could use it to impress a mildly technophobic client.
The documentation, though… where do I begin?
The Wiki needs a clear division between, “this is what we’re going to do,” “this is what we’ve done,” and, “this is what you need to do to get things working.” I do not want to read your page about how awesome this product is going to be: I want a long list of JSP tags and a sample page to get me going.
The best tutorial for Alfresco’s web content management so far has been in the product evaluation guide: the last place I would have looked if I hadn’t been directed there by the forum. It was a pretty good tutorial on all the features, but it didn’t cover the aspects of actually writing code, and writing code is what I do.
Normally I’d assume that I was missing something; as Zahid said, “They -have- to have a document explaining how to get things done,” but even a trip to their own forums indicated I was not the only user to have trouble with the documentation.
So now, having used up a huge number of brain cycles reading about advanced topics I’m not ready to use, and document management outside the scope of what we’d normally do, I find myself having to hack apart the example site to figure out how to write templates.
Of course, it’s no surprise that yet another FOSS project should have poor documentation; people are too busy writing and improving the project to document its use. I’m sure in a few months I won’t even notice the lack of developer-oriented docs, but right now? Not impressed.
Tags: Alfresco, Content Management
April 4th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
In the true FOSS spirit, there is but one solution: contribute to the documentation ourselves. Of course, that’s of absolutely no help to us now. =P
I must say I’m impressed, though: I’m impressed with how badly their wiki is organized. Can anybody tell me why the link to their documentation for WCM redirects to an article about their vision for the WCM system? That’s not documentation, that’s marketing. >_<