• On CHOW: Does drinking ice water burn calories?
November 23, 2007 6:25 AM PST

Alfresco + Joomla!: A case of community filling its own needs

One of the things that I love about open source is that it's a great way to let innovation and collaboration happen in the absence of lawyers dictating every jot and tittle of an integration. As a case in point, I woke up today to see that someone has integrated Joomla! with Alfresco (and dubbed the result "Joosco").

In a nutshell, Joosco is a front-end for Alfresco, in Joomla!. It works by creating a new entry in a menu in Joomla, called Documents, for example. The users can click on this link to go to a new page where they can browse through spaces and content of the Alfresco Repository. The plugin is used to authenticate users to the Alfresco repository. Alfresco users can now log in to Joomla, and their permissions in Alfresco are used to display only the content they have permission to access.

Alfresco, my company, didn't write that extension. To the best of my knowledge, the core Joomla! team didn't, either. Who did? The community. Why? Because they had that need and so filled it. What enabled it? Open source.

Open source lets code speak for itself. I'm a big fan of Joomla! but don't have the expertise to write this sort of integration. The community does. So it did. Because it can. That's open source.

Matt Asay is general manager of the Americas and vice president of business development at Alfresco, and has nearly a decade of operational experience with commercial open source and regularly speaks and publishes on open-source business strategy. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Recent posts from The Open Road
Mozilla: The right attitude for the web's gatekeeper
SugarCRM: Opening up the source to SaaS
Executive moves: Sonatype and Novell upgrade their open-source execs
The BBC urged to become UK's "open-source media platform"
Microsoft boosts revenue through licensing complexity
Add a Comment (Log in or register) 1 comment
Open source rocks
by webalupagus November 26, 2007 8:47 AM PST
This is exactly why open source is so superior to the proprietary model. Most people don't realize this, as they naysay the recent Android launch by Google. It's this reason alone that will turn Android into the DOS of this century.

Mike Hittle
http://www.zojomedia.com
Reply to this comment
Powered by Jive Software
advertisement

About The Open Road

Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to the Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is general manager of the Americas division and vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.

Add this feed to your online news reader

The Open Road topics

Featured blogs

advertisement

Inside CNET News

Scroll Left Scroll Right