Startup guide for ektron - content-management-system

What is the best way to start with ektron? Any ebook reference and video links for novice
developer.
I want to teach anatomy of ektron cms.
Many thanks,
Jigar

Here are the webinars I would start off with, in the following order:
Getting Started: Developing with Ektron - this webinar is super basic, but it’s well worth going through for Ektron newbies. Covers the different installers, installation, adding content, and getting the content on the website using either Server Controls or the API. http://www.ektron.com/Webinars/Details/Getting-Started--Developing-with-Ektron/
The Ektron Framework API and Microsoft LINQ – this covers the new Framework API that was introduced in v8.5. The webinar covers the Framework APIs design goals, sample source, etc.
http://ektron.com/Resources/Webinars/Framework-API/
Ektron Content Types - ContentTypes are .NET classes that are mapped to Ektron Smart Forms. SmartForms are simply structured content items (e.g. Book, Contact, Employee, etc).
http://ektron.com/Resources/Webinars/Ektron-Content-Types/
Search Framework API - The Search architecture can be used to deliver content and go beyond simple site search. This webinar provides an introduction to the Search architecture as well as an overview of the Search Framework API. http://www.ektron.com/Webinars/Details/Ektron-8-5-and-the-Search-Framework-API/
Building an Extensible and Maintainable Website on Ektron - This webinar discusses what it takes to build an extensible and maintainable web application, covering the benefits of building a properly layered website and walking you through the process of building a functional website. http://www.ektron.com/Webinars/Details/Building-an-Extensible-and-Maintainable-Website-on-Ektron---Part-1/
The documentation and books I recommend
http://documentation.ektron.com/
http://reference.ektron.com/
http://bit.ly/ektron-developers-guide (Ektron Developers Guide, published by WROX Press)
Ektron has a training department that offers the following courses:
Advanced Developer Training (this is a new training)
Intro Developer Training (this was revamped for the v8.5 release)
Admin Training
Custom Training
Ektron has an active developer forum
http://developer.ektron.com/

I would suggest the following, in order of usefulness-
Ektron Webinars
Starter/demo sites, particularly the developer demo
Code Exchange site, you can download and look at other's code snippets.
Ektron forums, particularly the developer forum

I found the Ektron Developers Guide by Wrox to be very clear and informative
Amazon.com Link

Related

Top Enterprise Level CMS not platform specific

I'm looking for some leads on Enterprise level CMS. The platform doesn't matter. I already have a handle on the majors in the .Net field and need to find some in the php, ruby, python, etc, fields. For .NET I am looking at Sitecore, Ektron, and Kentico. Ideally the CMS should have an open api, integrated search (lucene?), robust permissions, inline editing, content selection based on user segmentation, forums, blogs, ecommerce, and business user generated forms. Thanks.
SDL Tridion does all the things you described.

Download a copy of Adobe CQ5

I would like to take a look at Adobe CQ5 CMS system. Does anybody know if I can download it to my developer computer? I can not find link on web site.
I know Adobe offers CRX as opensource - but my interest is in CQ5 cms.
You can download it. Adobe has re-branded and re-released Communique since acquiring Day Software. CQ5 is now known as ADEP. Read about it in Adobe's ADEP Architecture Guide: http://wwwimages.adobe.com/www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/solutions/customer-experience-solutions/enterprise-platform/pdfs/adep-2011-architecture-considerations-for-new-and-existing-customers-ue.pdf. Here is an excerpt:
The Day CQ and CRX product lines have been incorporated into ADEP. CRX forms the foundation of the Experience Services stack, and CQ has been branded as the new Web Experience Management solution.
Architecturally, these products are unchanged, enabling a smooth upgrade experience in the future.
New customers requiring the web content management capabilities of CQ should purchase and develop
their applications on one of the Web Experience Management solution editions (Basic, Standard, Premium).
The Web Experience Management solution incorporates all the capabilities of CQ 5.4.
Download a trial version of ADEP here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/enterprise-platform/trial-downloads.html
According to my rep you need to engage with Adobe to get a copy. We don't have it in house yet as the do want a training session so that users aren't frustrated with the complexity. I've played around on a test site and also played with it at conventions and it seems like one of the better designed CMS options at the moment.
I am working on CQ5, its a very advanced CMS tool as compared to the others. But its not a open source like other Drupal, Joomla, etc. You have to purchase the developer suite.
Refer to the links for online document support.
CQ5 generally requires a license. However, you CAN get started with the various components. CQ5 is a system built on top of Felix (OSGi console), Jackrabbit(JCR), and a few other pieces, e.g. ExtJS for a lot of front end stuff. If you learn these technologies you won't 'know' CQ5 but you will have a big step up in terms of learning it.
The best thing to do is learn SLING.
http://sling.apache.org/documentation/getting-started/discover-sling-in-15-minutes.html
If you really understand Sling and OSGI, the JCR stuff is pretty trivial. Mastery of these core technologies makes CQ/AEM pretty straightforward.
Adobe CQ5 is a tool being used for creating websites having content-oriented pages. This is a product of Adobe, so you cannot get it free.
Instead, to get a glimpse of it, please refer developer website of Day OR adobe CQ. Also, we have some useful URLs, which can be referred: http://vimeo.com/39504016 (an introduction video) ; http://docs.adobe.com/ ; http://adobecq5interviewquestions.wordpress.com/introduction-to-cq/

social features- chat, forums, online directories

We are building a content based portal. Along with the content, we want to provide some collaborative tools- i.e. chat, forums, online directories etc
We are hoping to leverage open-source software for this, as this isn't really a differentiator and will hopefully be faster/cheaper. I am looking at light integration between the content and these (common login, ability to easily reference content in chat/ forums etc) and am flexible on features being offered- as long as the broad functionality is achieved.
We have hosted on MS Azure- what should our considerations be towards identifying the right product?
Joomla! is one option. You want to ensure that the majority or all of the tools you are looking for are openly available no your chosen platform. It is hard to make a solid recommendation without much detail on the content, but you can check it out here:
http://www.joomla.org/about-joomla.html
It is free and open source, site says
Joomla is used all over the world to power Web sites of all shapes and sizes. For example:
Corporate Web sites or portals
Corporate intranets and extranets
Disclaimer: Have never used Joomla

Choosing a CMS: EPiServer vs Orchard vs SiteCore vs Umbraco

Increasingly, I have noticed the number of Content Management Systems in use. I have some familiarity with SiteCore. I have read some literature on Umbraco. I only just got wind of Orchard the other day. I have only heard positive feedback about EPiServer. I am soon to move into a role that uses it.
Do these differ vastly in features and price? What has led you to choose one (or several) over the others?
EDIT
I did a brief review of so-called free CMSs here: On Free Microsoft Compatible Content Management Systems
Reasons I ditched Orchard when developing a 50k page website:
The Orchard CMS import tool is simply too slow. It would only accept
small batches at a time. Initially, it took eight minutes to import
1000 records. So, working on that principle I expected that it could
take seven hours to import all the records. Unfortunately, I started
to receive performance issues as more records were inserted into the
database. I even started to reduce the batch size, which helped only
temporarily in the early stages. (See Saying no to Orchard)
I can only comment mainly on Sitecore and a bit on Umbraco from my knowledge of others using it:
Sitecore is an enterprise level web CMS with an "enterprise price tag." It's very extensible, has a lot of developer/community support, and is very developer friendly. The structure of content is based on a tree of nodes with parent-children relationships. Sitecore is well known in the WCM community as a leader in content management and is rated very well by companies sch as Forrester Research, etc.
Based on my previous research and conversations with friends, Umbraco is very similar to Sitecore. It has a lower price compared to Sitecore but its not a complete rip off. Umbraco is also built on ASP.NET like Sitecore.
Here's a three-part series on Sitecore vs. Umbraco from a developer.
Of the ones you mention above, I have only used Umbraco and Sitecore to build with and am certified in both. I like the way they allow me to build systems that really work well for my customers. They both have a feel that they simply give you building blocks to create your masterpiece instead of "modules" of functionality plugged in that give you a blog, forum, etc. They make it really easy to share content throughout the site and create really nice admin experiences.
Umbraco's community is really great. They both struggle a little on the documentation side IMO, but Umbraco's videos really help and the community is quick to help. Also, if you're talking cost then its free (Umbraco) vs. quite expensive (Sitecore).
But the reality is that each developer has their own taste and the style of CMS they like to work with. Ultimately, its the team that has to build the site that really matters most when it comes to how each CMS performs for the end user.
In addition to the links above, here are a couple blog posts that may help you get a feel for the different systems:
Orchard & Umbraco - Introduction (part 1 of 4) - Aaron Powell
Sitecore vs. Umbraco Terminology
Good luck!
I mostly work with EPiServer and Sitecore, and I can tell you the difference in short:
Sitecore has broader architecture and more powerfull UI. CMS is deeply configurable and highly extensible, it has clever publishing and caching system, powerful search and page editor. But it doesn't provide much out of box and UI is pretty old, slow and hard to learn. So this will be a long journey until you understand it good and make a good support of all its features for editors.
EPiServer is easy, friendly to users and developers. It provides an essential bunch of features out of box, has easy UI and page editor, good drag-and-drop experience, easy personalization. It is code-first, distributed with NuGet, provides dependency injection for its services, out of box MVC support. But it's not so extensible and configurable, has pure search (without expensive EPiFind module) and generally lower-featured comparing to Sitecore. So it's good for small/middle websites, but can be an obstacle in complex solutions.
Both have similar tree-item concept, rich documentation, pure public module system and hard UI customization. Both expensive and not open source.
As I know, Umbraco is pretty similar to EPiServer and Sitecore, but free and open source. Of course you get less features, more bugs, not much docs and no free support.
Orchard is really different comparing to other three CMS. It is module-based like Wordpress: you use standard or public modules and themes, instead of writing the whole website from scratch. You create your own themes and modules to customize the website and CMS. So entire CMS is highly extensible and provides a lot of free community modules. But in the same time you lose control and learning curve is much longer. Orchard is free and open-source, entirely MVC-based, UI and API are well done, but it can be hard for both developers and editors to understand it.
Wordpress vs Episerver:
http://tedgustaf.com/blog/2011/2/comparison-of-episerver-and-wordpress/
OK so the guy who wrote that is an Episerver consultant but it's interesting and balanced.
All the different web content management systems have different strengths. So which one is best for you depends a lot on what kind of sites you create, what kind of budget you have and what you think matters the most in a CMS.
For example, Orchard and SiteCore are VERY different systems.
I'm a bit biased as I work there, but I believe that Webnodes CMS have several important advantages over the systems you mention.
Keywords: Relations between content, actual classes for the different content types, custom LINQ provider for all data access, expose all content as an OData endpoint etc.
Microsoft used our CMS to demonstrate OData at Mix11. Video from Mix 11

Multi language CMS?

Is there any CMS such as expression engine or wordpress that allows a user to click a button and convert all the text to another language (it would have to be human generated otherwise it has too many mistakes probably).
I'd like to know if there are any good solutions out there that work for real world use, in like business company websites.
Tridion CMS is designed to assist in website translation. They even have translation services to help you through the process of translating your content. It is not a cheap solution but is a viable solution.
As noted above - this is a huge topic and not easily answered briefly. But here are some things to consider...
NO CMS on the market today elegantly interoperates, out of the box, with translation technology for use in real-world translation projects. Reports from clients we've worked with have even raised concerns about the SDL integration.
At best - a handful of CMS's either offer very light-weight features that "appear" to help (side-by-side editing that prevents use of TM) but don't scale or have modest oem connectors to captive translation providers (CQ5<>TDC).
If your needs are modest - these might work fine.
But if you're serious about localization and have a moderate to high volume of content and want to work with any translation provider - you need a proper, rich, scalable integration between your CMS and the TMS (translation management system) used by your Translation firm (LSP).
Regrettably - these are scarce. We do nothing BUT build these connectors and use a neutral platform to provide direct integration all sorts of translation providers and technologies, the full SDL suite included - and still we've only been able to build a few rich CMS plug-in connectors because they are very complicated and require substantial development effort - IF they are going to be useful.
But the CMS choice you make should be driven as much by your broader needs. Localization should only be one facet of the decision process.
I guess the harsh reality is that there is NO CMS that will do what you descibe without smoe modification or a connector.
RK
I would recoomend you to use Kentico CMS.
See the video on Multilingual support in Kentico CMS:
http://devnet.kentico.com/Blogs/Martin-Hejtmanek/March-2010/Webinar-5---Multilingual-support-in-Kentico-CMS.aspx
Kentico CMS offers multilingual functionality including Right-to-Left languages and Eastern languages. Please see some "live" examples:
Site in 10 languages (incl. Chinese) : http://www.chep.com
Site in 7 languages (incl. Japan, Korean): http://www.wayoutback.com
Arabic: http://www.scb.gov.sa/
Hebrew: http://www.medicsfile.co.il/
Chinese: http://www.royalcaribbean-asia.com/?lang=zh-CN
Hindi site: http://www.rajasthantourism.gov.in/
More details on multiple languages support:
http://www.kentico.com/cms-asp-net-features/Content-management/Multiple-languages.aspx
Kentico also offers Translation Management:
http://devnet.kentico.com/docs/devguide/index.html?translation_management_overview.htm
Especially the translation status overview makes it really easy to manage multilingual web sites. If only a part of web site is translated then you can set to combine the rest with the original language without adding the missing pages in it manually.
By default Hippo CMS utilizes Google Translate, but you can plugin your own translation engine / review process. See for more information: http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/hippo-cms-75-launched-introduces-drag-drop-layout-localization-channel-management-010391.php/
If your organization already uses SDL for translation services then using SDL Tridion is a natural choice because of the built-in connector to send Tridion content for translation using a right-click on the GUI item. After translation, it is updated in the CMS and the author is notified.
SDL Bought Tridion a few years ago and has been maturing this solution since then. Today it is available in the current release, Tridion 2011 SP1, and is compatible with both World Server and Translation Management Server.
This is all human translation and any solution that honestly recommends machine translation for final content is not serious about it.
Drupal 8 is the best option available for Multilingual capability... Although you have to wait a little bit for its release, You will get a good result. Also earlier versions of drupal including Drupal 7 supports multilingual functionality.
But Drupal 8 will have more features...With Drupal 8 multilingual functionality, it is possible to translate anything in the system.
The multilingual functionality provides language configuration, assignment and detection functionality. It also provides a user interface to the existing back-end support for automatic software translation. Now it’s more easier to translate contents with the build-in user interfaces.
Plz refer the link for more detailed info Drupal 8- What’s new and Expected Inside
Day Communique (CQ5 - now ADEP), in combination with a third-party translation vendor, can do this job.
In Communique/ADEP, you manage your pages in whatever native language you choose. Once they are done, you kick off a translations workflow. This will go to your translation vendor (of which there are several). The vendor will have a human translate it, and possibly also use software to speed up the translation process. It will come back to you for approval in the workflow, if you wish. Otherwise, it will just be published to your web site.
So yes, from the user's perspective, one click can indeed translate a page in multiple languages, and publish it to multiple web sites. Our company is doing this, only we are doing our own in-house translation.
I have not used this, but I looked into it awhile ago and this looks to be the best solutions I have seen.
http://umbraco.org/blog/2009/3/25/microsoft-translator-and-umbraco
That is not how major businesses do translation. It's good for quick and dirty, general idea translation, but it's not for anyone serious about messaging to multiple languages and cultures. Typically, businesses work with translation vendors and grow translation memories that help to guide content authors to creating a consistent message and to reuse content (keeping translation costs down).
This is a big subject, not a small one. Honestly, I'm kind of flabbergasted at how to answer this question, so I'll stop here.