Yesterday i tagged version Beta 1 of jackalope-jackrabbit, our PHP Content Repository (PHPCR) implementation. PHPCR is an API to manage tree-structured data, modelled after the Java Content Repository JCR specification. Time to summarize what jackalope can do today. For people already familiar with Jackalope, I summarize the recent changes at the bottom.
In January, Lukas wrote a collection of things left to do. Later I wrote a tentative release schedule that turned out to be too optimistic. I just updated that document with new dates. Sorry about this.
There are two actually quite cool reasons for the delays. One is that we had two projects at Liip where we had to integrate the CMF into existing projects. It was fun, but we found quite a lot of issues and missing features in Doctrine PHPCR-ODM that we fixed resp. implemented. (The Symfony2 Form component is incredibly powerful, but requires the persistance layer to work very exactly and we did not want any more workarounds and hacks to a achieve functionality.) The other reason is that many other people started using the CMF too. Some found issues that need to be fixed, others even managed to contribute fixes themselves - but which took time to review and comment on. Also, a lot of new features have been built or are currently being built.
Last thursday, i did the webinar about PHPCR and Magnolia CMS. You can download the slides or watch the recorded presentation (you need to register to see it). Thanks to all the attendees, I hope you enjoyed it.
There where some questions that i want to answer here on the blog to have the answers available to everybody.
Liip is a PHP company but we are not agnostic to what happens in other fields. And sometimes we need to integrate with other systems like a Java based CMS. Rather than using something radical like Quercus, a Java implementation of the PHP language or the rather fiddly PHP/Java Bridge, we wanted something less intrusive and more general purpose.
Frontend editing is a hot topic at the moment. With the HTML5 content-editable, there is no longer any excuse to reload a page in edit mode and render forms on server side. And even less to use the iframe mess of traditional WYSIWYG editors. One excellent frontend editing project is create.js. Its main strength is to use RDF annotations in HTML (RDFa) to explain the semantic structure of your content. Then you load create.js and tell it what editors to use for your entities. Storage happens based on backbone.js, the server backend is easy to implement.
Daniel Barsotti and me were reviewing the observation API of PHPCR and decided to just implement getting the observation journal. The journal contains all add, remove and update operations that happened on a PHPCR repository. You can also filter the journal by event type, path, node type and other criteria. This way, PHPCR can become almost a message queue (but just almost, there is no guaranteed delivery of messages).
The Doctrine PHPCR-ODM allows you to easily map your PHP objects onto content repository nodes. Since last week, the PHPCR-ODM leverages the versioning support of PHPCR in the ODM layer. This gives your application a very simple way to work with versioned content.
Over the last weeks, Dan, Brian and myself worked on adding translation capabilities to Doctrine PHPCR-ODM. PHPCR-ODM is an object - document mapper for the php content repository (PHPCR). Thanks to the Liip Ecostar process, we got funding to do this during work time.
Following the Symfony Day Cologne 2011, we will do a hackday on the Symfony Content Management Framework in Cologne, Germany. Interlutions kindly provides room for the hackday. We will start on Saturday October 22nd, at 10 a.m. and hack until they have to throw us out (or we decide to leave of our own accord). We will discuss the progress of the efforts to implement things and update the roadmap, then hack along on the various topics.
