Content Delivery in Alfresco 3

Alfresco offers true Web Content Management (WCM) by providing an open source alternative to expensive proprietary systems such as Microsoft SharePoint, Interwoven, and IBM Content Manager. Alfresco WCM is a good fit for the customers who are also looking for cost savings.

This article by Munwar Shariff, co-author of the book Alfresco 3 Web Content Management, introduces you to the content delivery feature of Alfresco. You will understand the concepts behind delivering static content as well as dynamic content to the external production servers.

By the end of this article you will have learned how to:

• Install and configure File System Receiver (FSR)
• Use Alfresco Server Receiver (ASR)

Content in Drupal: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

This is an FAQ based on content management in Drupal. In here we try to answer some basic questions about content in Drupal. We have addressed topics like content types in Drupal, book module, CCK module, among others.

Content Management System: Understanding Extensions

This article introduces the key differences between tags, user-defined tags, and modules, and teaches you to determine which is optimal for any given purpose. This article focuses on understanding the different approaches and deciding which to use to solve any particular problem.

This article by Samuel Goldstein, author of CMS Made Simple Development Cookbook, covers:

• When to use User-Defined Tags
• When to use Tags
• When to use Modules
• How to create a User-Defined Tag
• How to create a Tag
• How to create a Module

Content Rules, Syndication, and Advanced Features of Plone 3 Intranet

Some of Plone's advanced features at user level are worth having their own section. All of them have a direct impact on how our users use the intranet, and most importantly, they are the catalyst to an alive and more dynamic intranet. A dynamic intranet is in constant change and users update its contents frequently.

In this article by Víctor Fernández de Alba, author of the book Plone 3 Intranets, we will cover the following topics:

• Content rules: They will allow us to define a set of actions and tasks triggered when some event happens in our site, or in a folder tree. Both the actions and events are user configurable and help us make our site dynamic.
• Syndication: This is often very important in order to keep our users posted when something changes in our intranet. Not only collections are syndication aware, we can also make any folder in our site export the objects it contains as an RSS feed.
• Versioning: This is another notable Plone feature and very useful in an intranet scenario. In few words, our users will love it.
• WebDAV access: WebDAV access to content, along with external editing, will enable communication between our user's desktop and the intranet, taking our user's productivity to its maximum.
• External editing: This feature will allow us to edit any file content type with the suitable desktop application and save it on the fly.

Continuous Delivery and DevOps FAQs

For a while now, there has been a buzz around the IT industry about something called continuous delivery and DevOps—strictly speaking that should be "some things" as continuous delivery and DevOps are actually two separate things.

You may have heard about them but may not fully understand what they are, why they are valuable and, should you wish to implement them, where to start from.

In this article by Paul Swartout, author of Continuous Delivery and DevOps: A Quickstart guide, we have tried to capture some common questions and provide some answers—an FAQ of sorts.

Control templates, Visual State Manager, and Event Handlers in Silverlight 4

In this article by Frank LaVigne, author of Microsoft Silverlight 4 Business Application Development, we shall use control templates to enhance the look and feel of the navigation widget.

Converting tables into graphs (Advanced)

Another alternative much discussed by the community of developers is transforming the table into a graphic when it is being displayed on small screen devices. This is not an easy task taking into account the size and amount of data that a table can have.

Let's see an alternative solution combining the previous recipes with another plugin for rendering graphics. The main reason for this combination is we use only one plugin per page, thus optimizing our load.

This article by Fernando Monteiro, the author of the book, Instant HTML5 Responsive Table Design How-to explains what happens when we convert the data and display a nice graphic for our users using a properly formatted table.

Cooking XML with OOP

XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a very important format for storing multi‑purpose data. It is also known as universal data format, as you can represent anything and visualize the data properly with the help of a renderer. One of the biggest advantages of XML is that it can be converted from one form of data into another easily with the help of XSLT. Also, XML data is highly readable.

One of the great blessings of PHP5 is its excellent support to manipulate XML. PHP5 comes bundled with new XML extensions for processing XML easily. You have a whole new SimpleXML API to read XML documents in a pure object-oriented way. Also, you have the DOMDocument object to parse and create XML documents. In this article by Hasin Hayder, we will learn these APIs and learn how to successfully process XML with PHP.

Core .NET Recipes

This article by A.P. Rajshekhar, author of .Net Framework 4.5 Expert Programming Cookbook , will cover recipes related to core concepts in .NET, which will include the following:

• Metadata-driven programming: The first six recipes will cover how to use attributes as metadata for specific purposes such as validation and localization.

• Reflection: The Processing custom attributes via reflection recipe will tell you how to use reflection to create metadata processors such as applications or libraries that can understand custom attributes and provide the output based on them.

• Asynchronous file I/O: This is a new feature for file input/output introduced in .NET 4.5. The Using asynchronous file I/O for directory-to-directory copy recipe will cover this feature.

• Dynamic programming: .NET 4.0 introduced the concept of dynamic programming, in which blocks of code marked as dynamic will be executed directly, bypassing the compilation phase. We will look at this in the last recipe, Accessing JSON using dynamic programming.