Phil Cryer wrote:
On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 09:21 -0600, Binkley, Peter wrote:
Note that having said Fedora, you're only half-way there: you still need
a front end. Fez is popular, but Muradora was very well spoken of at
RIRI last week (http://vre.upei.ca/riri/), and UPEI is doing very
interesting work putting Drupal in front of Fedora (they're planning to
release code shortly, having been distracted over the summer by an
impromptu ILS migration that cost them 5 whole weeks - honestly, you
wonder what these people do all day). Muradora's future was in doubt for
a while due to reorganization of the development team, but the most
recent word is that it will continue to be developed.
The open-ness of Fedora, and it's lack of a front end, has been a hurdle
for many to overcome before adoption, but from what I saw at RIRI last
week, the work the UPEI staff is doing is very nice, leveraging Drupal,
which is a great app. Richard Green (Univ of Hull) was big on promoting
Muradora with examples and current posts from the dev group that they
are going to continue. I'd like to see them target Fedora 3.0 and
release that soon, same to be said about Fez, who have working 3.0 bids
in svn currently.
What I've taken away from RIRI is that Fedora-commons is ready for
business on the backend, but needs search, acl and front-ends plugged
in, and will for some time. One of my ideas is get Solr running with FC
(something we failed to get accomplished at RIRI) and then build a front
end that just looks at Solr. I'm sure there's more to it, but I'm going
to start looking, thanks for the Open collections link, I already heard
back from them, they're integrating Solr now, and will be working on a
fedora-commons plugin next year...
It's worth noting that Fedora Commons and DSpace are now officially
collaborating. Chances are that the the DSpace Manakin UI could sit on
top of Fedora services. Much of the work that is going on is in
providing functionality such that Fedora will be an *Institutional*
repository, not just a web site for presenting a collection of a couple
hundred digital objects for a unit library.
While I haven't worked with Alfresco I know one of the core developers
and have done some development using a JCR-170 content repository (the
standard that Alfresco uses and it's really flexible.
