What is Jahia ?
Jahia Community Edition is a feature showcase of Jahia Enterprise, a major release that aims to ease the life of Jahia integrators while improving front-end user interfaces with the latest in Web 2.0 technologies. Jahia Community Edition user interfaces have been fully redesigned and improved by integrating native support for the AJAX Google Web Toolkit (GWT) library and the rich Ext GWT components (http://www.extjs.com/products/gxt/). All our front-end templating technologies have also been rewritten to offer a
cleaner integrator story (clearer separation of content definitions and views; complete refactoring of all the old Jahia taglibs; migration to a full CSS support; better support for skins and themes;…) and our embedded document and portal servers were upgraded to the latest versions of the existing standards (support for JSR170, JSR168 and JSR 286).
Differences between Jahia CE and Jahia EE
Jahia Community Edition for Open Source Applications
These Community Edition Packages are :
- Supported by the Community: Community members may answer questions via Jahia Forum and the Issue Trackers. Jahia Enterprise Edition is the only edition professionally supported by Jahia Solutions Group SA. We provide commercial support with Service Level Agreements (SLA) for issue tracking, problem resolution, patches, fixes and upgrades.
- Newsletters are sent every months and allow you to stay up to date with what is going on in the Jahia Community and provides the latest development insights.
- Based on J2EE and Open Standards
- Licensed under GPL
Our goal is share our latest technical innovations with our community. You may discover some of the features described in an early stage in our newsletter by downloading builds identified by the team. You may also download our lastest Nightly Build. Nightly Builds are not stable by design, and parts may be broken, but they contain our latest product innovations.
Jahia Community Edition includes cutting edge Web Content integration technologies and serves as a research and development technology sharing for the jahia community.
For developpers of FOSS applications under the GPL that want to combine and distribute thos applications with Jahia software, Jahia FOSS software licensed under the GPL is the best option.
Jahia is an open source community. Jahia CE is licensed under the GPL v2 - check out our licenses page for a complete list of all of our components and the licenses they fall under.
Jahia Enterprise Edition for Commercial and supported applications
Jahia Enterprise Edtion also includes production and enterprise ready features and setup (ie: cluster and enterprise environment configuration) as well as access to source code under the terms of the JSEL (Jahia Sustainable Enterprise License).
The Jahia Sustainable Enterprise license allows customers to make a choice: the can either share or not share code enhancements.
What makes Jahia's model unique is that Jahia provides incentives in terms of free maintainance support for contributions to its Enterprise-licensed software. Ultimately, this incentive allows users of Jahia Enterprise Editions to benefit from third party contributions and a constantly growing code-base. This option is the reason why jahia calls its permissive commercial license a sustainable license and its overall licensing scheme " sustainable dual Licensing"
Web Content Management
For Managers
Ready-to-use starter kits
This Jahia Community edition is focusing on a demonstration package targeted to brochure-ware public web sites. Additional “Starter Kits” will be made available during the next months in order to significantly shorten integration time required to go from concept to production. Such Starter Kits will focus on different target needs (Brochure-ware Public Web Sites or Collaborative Intranets) or on vertical industries needs (eGovernment, Education, Insurance, Bank…).
The Jahia installation process was also improved in order to let managers directly test some pre-configured demonstration packages. Integrators can now use this feature to provide “pre-configured test builds” with pre-populated content to their customers, in order to obtain feedback or to validate a final package.
Simplified urls
Jahia Community Edition is now natively packaged with a new url rewriting system. Authors have the choice to use url shortcuts (also known as url keys) or to let the system automatically rewrite Jahia internal urls. This new sub-system will assist in improving indexation by crawling engines and will ease page data analysis in various Web Analytics software products.
Improved system to support multiple renderers or themes
In this new release of Jahia, views (e.g: iPhone, RSS ), themes (several different look and feels for the same template set) and skins (several combinations of design elements for the same "boxlets”) are now natively supported, allowing users to easily switch between views, themes or specific skins according to their devices or layout needs.
Pre-Integrated Support for Google Analytics
Jahia Community Edition offers native integration with the Google Analytics SaaS software. In a few clicks, without having to develop or integrate any lines of code within your template sets, Google Analytics could be turned on. Managers can then access a dedicated toolbar directly available on the web page basis in order to view Google Analytics data. Statistics are available on a per-site or on a per- page basis. Integration with multi-language web sites allows managers to access statistics for each configured language. The analytics integration automatically supports page moving, page renaming or url key modifications, making sure statistics history is preserved. This paradigm is also valid when exporting and importing all the content of a website on a new server environment.
For Editors
Inline editing capabilities
A new inline editing feature allows editors to modify content directly within the page without having to launch any form oriented wizard or open any new popup window. This feature allows editors to rapidly enter content on a page with an experience similar to what they are used to in office tools such as Microsoft Word. For power users this new input system allows for quick typo edition and other kinds of visual page formatting without having to loose the context of the current page view while making their modifications.
Web 2.0 AJAX powered User Interfaces
Due to several community-based contributions previous versions of Jahia were using several distinct AJAX technologies (Zimbra, Prototype; Home-grown AJAX frameworks;…) throughout the whole product. Most of the user interfaces have been now unified and are leveraging the AJAX Google Web Toolkit (GWT) framework and are now powered by the powerful and ready to use Web 2.0 UI components provided by the free open source ExtJS-GWT components.
All the new tailor-made Jahia UI components have been designed with re-use in mind. While Jahia 5 had dozens of different selectors, pickers or wizards all implementing different usability paradigms, all these UI components have been unified and homogenized throughout the product. Such components may now also be used directly within a web page in order to offer advanced dynamic features to end-users (e.g: the creation of a “Media Gallery template” may now easily re-use and leverage the existing Document Manager UI component provided by and used in the back-end authoring system).
The introduction of these new UI components has been combined with a visual revamping of the Jahia authoring interfaces.
Internationalization
The beta release is currently only packaged with 3 language packs (English, French and German). The final edition will support 6 languages with the addition of Italian, Spanish and Portuguese. Additional optional template packs maintained by the Jahia community will be soon available on our Jahia Community Web Site (www.jahia.org).
Improved integration of the default WYSIWYG editor
The embedded Jahia WYSIWYG editor (FCK), which is used by default by editors in order to create and manage unstructured text elements is now more deeply integrated with the WCM. New roles allow site administrators to decide which editors can access a given FCK configuration. Files, images and internal links selectors have also been improved and are now offering strong integration with the back-end WCM or DMS systems.
Customizable Edition Toolbars
Inspired from all existing toolbar desktop systems (Browsers’ toolbars; Applications’ toolbars;…), Jahia Community Edition now comes bundled with a powerful and customizable toolbar system. The following toolbars are available in Jahia 6’s package :
- the default toolbar (allows access to all the various navigation modes and Jahia sub-systems)
- a bookmark and breadcrumb toolbar (a dynamic and multilingual bookmarking system combined with an integrated page history system)
- a cache Toolbar (aimed at developers and webmasters allowing access to advanced cache debugging and other cache flushing features)
- a workflow toolbar (to access shortcuts to widely used workflow features)
- a Google Analytics toolbar (allows access directly to Google Analytics statistics within the context of the current page)
Toolbars can either float on the page or be fixed on the top panel. You can also completely hide them temporarily. Configurations may be customized on a user per user basis. Toolbars are also easily customizable by integrators and will let each customers specify and develop their own custom toolbars according to their own needs or their own EAI constraints (e.g: usage of their own analytics system; various shortcuts to access to their own ERP, CRM or ECM system directly within Jahia;…).
Better integrity and consistency checks
The Jahia built-in consistency checks have been optimized. Each kind of integrity checks (url consistency; WCAG; automated locks for published binary documents;…) may now be turned on or off by the webmaster on a site-per-site basis. Each consistency check may be now configured managed on a role-per-role basis to act as a simple warning which could be bypassed or as a blocking error. Integrity checks have been also integrated in the new edition toolbars: a custom icon in the page context allows editors to rapidly identify erroneous content which requires correction.
Improved workflow value chain
Jahia Community Edition v6.0 now provides a new enhanced workflow value chain which includes : a multi-step and multilingual publishing system, a notification and alerting service, capabilities to queue workflow jobs on a dedicated processing server, dynamic workflow job reports personalized by editor as well as an archive of all previously executed workflow jobs.
This new system lets editors and reviewers easily create workflow batches in order to publish several pages at once. Integrity checks such as accessibility checks, consistency issues due to cross-referenced content objects that are still unpublished, or blocking errors preventing editors from publishing a page due to missing translations for a mandatory language, are already pre-integrated and let reviewers rapidly determine content inter-dependencies.
The in-site editing capabilities provide immediate status views for all content objects which are waiting for validation. The standard workflow processes have been improved to simplify the number of workflow variants and foster collaboration between the different editing roles involved (editors, reviewers, publishers or translators).
This release also provides a brand new AJAX-powered workflow dashboard with detailed workflow information. It improves workflow collaboration throughout the whole workflow value chain by pushing information to the next reviewers (e.g: using email notification and AJAX alerts if the user is already logged,…) and by letting them access the archives of any validation job through an integrated workflow batch reporting system.
Advanced Preview and Advanced Comparison navigation modes
The Advanced Preview mode lets editors choose to preview a page using another user profile without having to logout from their current account and of course under the limits of their current permissions. Such a system also lets them preview the page going back and forward in time as time-sensitive content may be present within certain pages. Editors may then better control who will see what and when.
The Advanced Comparison mode allows editors to visually highlight differences between any two dates, not just between the staging and the published version, as it was the case on Jahia 5. This makes it now easier to view modifications made on a page in any lapse of time on any number of versions.
OpenSearch Support
Jahia Community Edition v6.0 now supports the OpenSearch standard both as a producer (the embedded Jahia search engine is OpenSearch compliant) and as a consumer (end-user could subscribe to other OpenSearch channels). End-users may now use any OpenSearch-compliant browser plug-in in order to make direct quick search in Jahia without needing to first load up the Jahia-powered site. They may also aggregate third party OpenSearch channels and embed them into existing Jahia pages.
For Developers
Fully re-factored front-end template infrastructure
One of the main focus points for Jahia Community Edition was to fully rewrite the front-end templating architecture. Jahia Community Edition still uses the JSP framework but improves several points:
- Content Definitions are now declared in distinct files. This allows a better separation between views (templates) and content object definitions. Jahia 6 now uses the new standardized CND syntax as specified in the JSR170/283 specification (Java Content API). Jahia also now implements the brand new standardized Query Object Model (JSR283 QOM) standard in order to unify search query formats within the product.
- Support for advanced “mixin types” extensions. These are similar to “interfaces” in Java, but apply to content object definitions. Integrators may now easily extend Jahia’s built-in definitions by using new “mixin types”. For example, Jahia 6 comes pre-installed with a series of “mixin types” such as isSearchable, isIndexable; isRSSable, isCommentable;… Additional “mixin types” may of course be added when needed.
- A new template inheritance system. In order to better manage sub-templates, Jahia 6 is introducing a new JSP object-oriented inheritance system. This lets template developers inherit from some core read-only template blocks built by Jahia while overriding and extending them without having to fork the whole product. Such a system will ease template reuse, maintenance and migration.
- A new template deployment system: template sets are now only deployed once on the server and no more on a per virtual site basis. Such an improvement will help customers who are using Jahia as a global site factory and which have created hundreds of distinct virtual sites. Template modifications may now be automatically shared on all virtual sites. Of course it is still possible to have separate templates sets for each virtual site.
- A new fully re-architectured and re-organized Jahia tag library. The whole sets of tags provided by default with the previous editions of Jahia were fully re-factored in order to simplify their usage as well as make them better citizens with other standard Java tag libraries such as JSTL.
- Masking the Jahia back-end complexity. On previous Jahia editions, integrators and template developers had to completely understand the Jahia data model in order to start developing a new template set. They had to deal with correctly modifiying the markup for the various edition modes (e.g: live, preview, compare or edit modes) or to deal with modifying navigation menus, filters and various status views for logged or anonymous users, positioning of action menus, etc… All this complexity is now hidden and is automatically handled by the back-end Jahia system. Integrators may of course still override the default Jahia behavior but they do not need to understand the whole Jahia interface and data model before starting to code.
A whole new default templates set
On previous Jahia editions the default template set provided by Jahia was only aiming to demonstrate some technical capabilities of the system and was mainly used as a “proof of concept”. Jahia Community Edition is now delivering a ready to use and fully supported set of default templates.
This template set was fully rewritten in order to let integrators easily customize the product in a couple of hours.
In order to reach such an objective Jahia Community Edition v6 now offers:
- A new default web design, which may easily be adjusted for most web needs.
- A 100% taglib oriented default template set: all JSP scriptlets and other code handling directly done within the template set have been removed. This change will really ease the life of template developers.
- A 100% CSS oriented set of default templates. Web Designers are now able to generate a new “theme” on top of the existing template set without having to modify any JSP code. They may simply reuse the existing features and only focus on adjusting the look and feel of the site to adjust it to the needed customer brand.
TCK / Test Units templates / Jahiapedia
A new set of "Unit Test" templates allows anyone to quickly show what Jahia is capable of. These templates are cross-referenced with the new Jahiapedia section, which is part of the new Jahia open source-driven community web site (accessible at http://www.jahia.org).
The combination of those new templates sets and the Jahiapedia will help integrators and template developers quickly understand how to develop or extend Jahia templates as well as being able to browse current template implementations. The new TCK templates may be also used as best practices in order to boost Jahia development and integration cycles.
Front-end Cache Simplification
Jahia 5 embedded different front-end HTML caching libraries. Each of them required learning custom tags and needed an in-depth understanding of all pros and cons of each cache sub-system. Jahia 5 could also be used in combination of a homegrown ESI compliant front-end reverse cache proxy. This caching complexity was requiring a complex learning curve for integrators and was causing several configuration issues.
Jahia 6 gets rid of all these problems by natively integrating and supporting a single unified HTML cache system. The ESI technology is now fully integrated within the Jahia server. Such a cache is taking all the advantages of all the previous caching systems and is now automatically managed by the Jahia back-end system. Template developer do not have to consider any more which cache system they should use or how to configure it in their custom templates sets: everything is now automatically handled by the Jahia system.
Advanced Search Form enhancements
More and more customers are customizing the default Jahia advanced search form. Such a form was fully reviewed in order to make it more generic and more customizable. New generic tags let template developers quickly develop and customize new advanced search forms throughout the site. Forms may for instance automatically limit the search to binary files or to WCM published content. The search form tags are integrated with the new AJAX UI components and let users for example use the user interface for browsing category trees (in order to refine search queries by categories) or site trees (in order to refine search queries according to a sub-site). Advanced search options using metadata are also supported. These new features open new possibilities to customize Jahia search options for end-users.
Centralized Notification and Subscription Service
A new centralized and unified notification service is now able to dispatch messages to various users using multiple transports such as emails, inline AJAX alerts, SMS, etc. Notification message templates have also been re-factored so the same layout may be used to send notifications concerning web pages publications, back-end editing or workflow messages. These changes make customizations of such notifications much simpler. Jahia 6 also introduces a new subscription service that let users subscribe to content object modification notifications.
Document Management System
Jahia Community dition v6 replaced Apache Slide, which was previously used for document management purposes, and embraced the new Apache Jackrabbit, which is the reference implementation for the "Java Technology Content Repository API" (JCR API – JSR170).
Thanks to this migration Jahia 6 benefits from a much more powerful DMS back-end infrastructure. Our old Document Manager was also fully rewritten opening the doors to several new features:
- Document Management support with options to categorize files, add metadata, manage permissions, check-in and check-out files as well as all other standard file operations (copy, paste, delete, move,…)
- Integrated search engine with saved search functionality
- Customizable views to ease access to document properties
- Powerful rules engine based on JBoss JRule in order to automate file actions based on events sent by the DMS
- Digital Asset Management (DAM): integrated inline image manipulation features with automated thumbnails generation and a new “media gallery” oriented view of image directories
- Full WebDAV access
- External connectors in order to mount other third party document management systems. Jahia Community Edition v6.0 provides by default a CIFS/SMB (aka Windows Network File Sharing) connector. Additional connectors could be integrated as needed.
- A cross-site shared repository in order to share documents or images with different sites.
- Dedicated public and private spaces for each user.
- Integrity checks integrated and heavily coupled with the WCM. For example, files which are published on a page may be automatically locked.
Portal
Jahia Community Edition v6 offers a Centralized Mashup Repository in order to help webmasters collect, manage, share and reuse mashups in an easy and intuitive manner. Jahia Community Edition v6.0 unifies the management of portlets (JSR168/JSR286), javascript oriented micro-applications (Google gadgets; netvibes widgets; embedded YouTube videos,...) and content oriented boxlets (native Jahia boxes) into one single federated cross-site repository. Such a tool lets authors easily access the repository of mashups in order to help them populate their pages with rich Web 2.0 applications
Finally Jahia Community Edition v6 provides a default "MyPortal" template which offers any logged-in users the ability to customize their enterprise dashboards with RSS feeds, podcasts, events or specific content in relation with their daily business.
Advanced Portal features include:
- Support for portlets instances: a page editor can now reuse an existing portlet instance on another page. He can also manage categories, permissions or metadata on each portlet instance.
- AJAX powered mashup loading: Mashups present on a WCM page may now be loaded in an AJAX manner. This lets the user immediately access the content of the local page while the remotely hosted mashups (a remote RSS feed or a gadget for example) are loaded in the background.
- Introduction of a new Preference API: user preferences, portlets or mashup positions, user customizations of editing toolbars,... are now stored in a new JCR-backed Preference API. New user preferences may be added by any integrators in order to extend personalization.
- New Mashup wizards: Jahia Community Edition v6 supports new pre-configured mashup wizards. Such wizards let power users rapidly create new mashup instances. The beta edition currently only includes some basic wizards such as a RSS wizard or a generic mashup wizard used to access remote web services. Advanced wizards to connect to other well-known SaaS services (e.g. GoogleMaps; Slideshare;…) will be developed in the next months.
- Jahia provides a new iGoogle-inspired “mashup selector”. Such a selector may be added on any “MyPortal” kind of page and will let logged-in users personalize their dashboard in a convenient and easy manner.
