Hippo CTO blog - Arjé Cahn

An image is not just *one* image to us. It can come in a wide variety of representations. The image that the user uploads, can be (automatically) scaled to different sizes, translated into different languages, or have different versions for different target audiences. All of these different instances are called 'variants' in Hippo speak. In the content repository, there's one single node that represents all of these variants. This is what we call the 'handle'. The handle is also what the user sees when he or she selects the image in the CMS. The thumbnail that is displayed next to the image's filename, is a variant underneath the handle.

If you access the image itself from within Hippo CMS, you see all the different variants, and you can actually edit the handle and swap out a variant with a different image file if you're not happy with it. By diving into the physical nodestructure within the content repository (I do this in the movie by accessing the 'console'), you can see those different variants.

The structure of an imageset is something that can be tailored to a specific project or website. A website that displays an article that contains a reference to a handle gets to choose which variant to display. So, for example, you could have a website where you want the homepage to always render a thumbnail of the image, and when you click on it, you might want to show a large variant. That's easy! Slightly harder is a situation where you need the image to be translated into 21 different languages, because it's part of the website's navigation. The "About us" button in that case might need a translation workflow process that runs the image through a number of qualified translators and designers. You'll end up with one handle containing 21 different variants (with images that state "Au Sujet de Nous", "Over ons", "关于我们", etc). The whole concept of imagesets in Hippo CMS 7 was designed for processes like this.

In the video, I also demonstrate how references to images (or rather, imageset handles) work in the repository. We're using our famed faceted repository goodness to setup a symbolic link kind of relationship between an article and an image.

If you'd like to comment on this video, please do so on the Vimeo video page.

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 12:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Go get Hippo CMS 7 at http://www.onehippo.org, try out the distro and knock yourself out.

I need to thank so many people, that I wouldn't know where to start. Most of all, I need to thank "The Guys Upstairs" for all their hard coding in the last couple of months. Berry, Frank, Bart, Arthur, Ard and Auke, thank you. It's been a rocky ride but it was worth it. I also need to thank Niels, Rita, Jeroen, Jeroen, another Jeroen, Dennis, Jettro, Jasha, Ate, David, Woonsan, Vivek, Anton, Mathijs, Wouter, Tjeerd, Jeff&Jody, Ruben, Johan, Wander and Mike for their contributions. The "Guys Downstairs" (you know who you are!), folks in the US, the marketing people, our customers, everyone from Jackrabbit, Wicket, Maven, Lucene and everyone else who influenced this incredible new version of Hippo CMS.. Thanks.

Hippo CMS 7 was built on Apache Jackrabbit, Lucene, Wicket and many other Apache projects. Combine these really powerful components, add a little faceted navigation, a touch of plugin framework and 36 person years of development [1] and you have Hippo CMS 7 :-)

Oh, and it's open source. Go get our code from http://svn.onehippo.org/repos/hippo/hippo-ecm/, check out the Hello World example, and start your own plugin project at the Hippo Forge. The first 25 people to build a really neat plugin on the forge will receive one of those funky Hippo T-shirts. What's neat? A Google Maps location picker is neat, and maybe a Flickr image plugin is neat, too :)

If you have questions, or would like to share some feedback, feel free to sign up to our CMS 7 User list. Your comments are very well appreciated! :)

[1] Stats from Ohloh http://www.ohloh.net/p/hippoecm

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots has happened.

And we're nearly there. It took us more than a year of heavy development, but it feels *so good* to play around with this cute little gem! It just feels right. Here's a bit of a sneak preview:

In the meantime, Dennis Byron of IT Business Edge wrote a really nice blogpost about how Hippo "Helps Get Portal Enterprise Software Right". As he says, "the characteristic of using CMS to do multiple things multiple ways is the key to the Hippo approach" - and he's so spot on. Hold your breath for v7.

This came in just days after something else that I think I'll simply interpret as a big compliment.

As they say, imitation is the greatest form of flattery. Draw your own conclusions. Apparently, there are more people in the world that really like Hippo :-).

Expect more from me in the blogosphere the upcoming weeks as we reveal the new kid on the block in open source ECM.

Posted by Arjé Cahn at 11:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)