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I’ve had a lot of feedback with my article Exactly what is Alfresco?. A recurrent question I’ve received was where to find more info about WCM with Alfresco. You can Download Alfresco Web Content Management 2.1 under Download Alfresco Community Network. There you can find Alfresco 2.1 Web Content Management Product Evaluation Guide which is a very complete guide about the WCM module. Hope this helps.…

A while back (May 24th) I’ve written a post trying to explain what was Alfresco, and some misunderstands about it. At that time Alfresco wasn’t yet a full Web Content Management system. But that is about to change starting at Release 1.4. I think it may worth the shoot… Related Links Alfresco Wiki Release 1.4 Release WCM Preview Alfresco Forum Web Content Management Other Alfresco Enterprise CMS Implementation book…

Update: Alfresco supports Web Content Management since Alfresco 1.4.0.

A lot of people still misunderstand the purpose of Alfresco. Alfresco is not yet a full WCM (Web Content Management) like Joomla or Drupal, but an ECM (Enterprise Content Management).

Alfresco, at its core, is a general purpose content repository with content management services. It can be used to manage all your business documents and transform them in web-ready formats (HTML, PDF) and categorize them linking into overall site navigation and index pages. Alfresco can also be used to capture HTML pages using an included WYSIWYG editor.

All of this is easily configured by an end-user in the Alfresco web app and does not require a programmer. Because Alfresco is a standard JCR (Java Content Repository - basically a next generation CMS (Content Management System) that supports JSR170 Levels I and II), programmers can readily build web pages that call to Alfresco to retrieve content and render on a web page. To make this even easier for web developers building a web app that runs on multiple front-end load-balanced servers against a single database server with the content repository, Alfresco provides a web services interface. Good just gets better.

There is an application surface, the web client, which at the moment is very document-centric. However, this will be changing this year, with WCM features arriving from about June onwards. There are features already there that people are using for managing content that is served to websites (e.g. transformations, content templates), but capabilities like site management are not there today.

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