09 January 2009, 2:31

I am very interested in finding out the possibility of making Alfresco as the file repository backend for Mahara. I am in process of implementing Alfresco as the Instructional Content System for the university. Any leads on this (or, developers documents) will be appricated. Thanks

09 January 2009, 5:25

Hi Max,

just heard about alfresco at an workshop with Petr Skolak. Sounds great

greetings Heinz

09 January 2009, 7:46

I agree that the integration of Alfresco with Mahara would be a great thing. Actually I'm working for some time to a complex platform and what was missing was just the heart. The heart for a number of reasons can be Mahara. Only that it is not really a programmer go slow. I need others. However, are available to investigate the issue.

09 January 2009, 8:55

Hi Fiorentino,

which features of Alfresco  are you looking for to be integrated in Mahara? Petr explained that Moodle 2.0 will integrate it as a repository. I think that you are looking for the outstanding web content management and document management possibilities?

Any ideas/discussions about a mahara plugin to support these things will be great!

greetings fromo the black forest
Heinz

09 January 2009, 7:59

Hi. I don't know anything about Alfresco, but I'm guessing you would probably have to look at either customising the file artefact plugin or writing a new plugin.

Sadly, we have no developer documentation for artefact plugins at this time - the source is the only documentation.

If you are interested in having a serious go at Alfresco integration, you might like to discuss your plans some more with us, as it sounds like a cool feature to make it into Mahara and we can help suggest the best way to implement things

09 January 2009, 11:20

I thought to create a group to assess the appropriateness of this integration. Let's see first how many are involved and what are the reasons.

http://mahara.org/group/view.php?id=26

09 January 2009, 18:51

You might want to make a forum in that group so we can make topics discussing specific things about it

09 January 2009, 14:15

I am 'relative' familiar with Alfresco development (but, for sure not qualified as an expert developer )   and am currently in process of integrating Alfersco within our learning enviroment as the potential instructional content system. One of my 'personal' projects is also to denote some time on linking Alf with Google Apps (through Google Data APIs); so, I think it is cool if Mahara can be linked to Alfresco; therefore, users will only have one central personal digital content repository. 

I am hoping to get some information on Mahara's file repository implemention (without digging into the code yet); so, I can analyze on how much work will involve before deciding to move toward to it.

By the way, I really like the design of Mahara. Great work!

09 January 2009, 18:57

Currently, the file repository stores the files in dataroot (in artefact/file/), and metadata about them in the artefact and artefact_file_files table (in Mahara, a lot of things are artefacts and thus have things like 'title' and 'description', which are shared in the artefact table, while artefact_file_files contains data specific to files like mimetype and file size).

I suggest you have a trawl through those database tables and look in dataroot to see what happens when you add and remove files and images. Following the code will help you, it's all in htdocs/artefact/file/.

Presumably, what you could do is refactor things so that where the files are actually stored is pluggable, while the metadata continues to reside in the database. That would mean that Mahara can still present the files in the file area, but actually store them elsewhere using a plugin.

I hope that's a good enough start. Feel free to ask more specific questions, of course. Maybe we could take them to the Alfresco group - once it has a forum

07 April 2009, 8:21

I am new to Alfresco and Mahara. I have the book for Alfresco development and I hope to find the time to start to learm something. However I am sure that Alfresco can be accessed via web services, plus it has a PHP API. I saw one group trying to integrate Joomla.