Planet Hippo

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): Adding a date-time picker to Hippo CMS

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:46:32 +0000

One wanted, but until recently missing feature of Hippo CMS was a date and time picker. It was already possible to add a date-time field in the editor and edit the time by hand. To be honest, that was a little cheating.

It sounds so perfectly simple: a calendar with fields for hours and

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): How to add YouTube video in Hippo CMS

Mon, 12 May 2008 08:00:00 +0000

For anyone who has tried to add YouTube's embed code into the Xinha WYSIWYG editor of Hippo CMS: Yes it's possible to add references to YouTube, Google video or any other Flash animation. No, just copy-pasting the HTML snippet from YouTube or Google video will not work, because it is not valid XHTML. I will explain how to enable YouTube support in Hippo CMS.

Customizing the document templates

First extend the standard Hippo CMS. Copy HtmlCleanerConfiguration.xml to your extensions folder. This file can be found in /editor/src/site/editing/cf2/resources.

Add the necessary elements and attributes for Flash within the allowed-elements. You can add elements and attributes that are valid according to the xhtml1-strict (Hippo CMS 6.05) or xhtml1-transitional (Hippo CMS 6.06) specification.
<element name="object"> <attribute name="width"/> <attribute name="height"/> <attribute name="data"/> <attribute name="type"/> </element> <element name="param"> <attribute name="name"/> <attribute name="value"/> </element>

Change the reference to the HtmlCleanerConfiguration in the business logic of the document type.
<convertor type="htmlcleaner" config="extensions://HtmlCleanerConfiguration.xml" use="datamodel"/>

Inserting HTML for Flash

Open the document, toggle to HTML view and paste the embed code from YouTube.

Change the HTML into valid XHTML like this:
<object data="http://www.youtube.com/v/3Rj9oiNZiog&hl=en" height="355" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3Rj9oiNZiog&hl=en"/> <param name="wmode" value="transparent"/> </object>

Toggle back to the WYSIWYG view, save and you're done.

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): ApacheCon Europe 2008 Day 1

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 22:00:40 +0000

The ApacheCon Europe has landed and the first day is already behind us. This morning I arrived at the conference location in Amsterdam for a fu

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Hippo is expanding its borders

Thu, 20 Mar 2008 12:16:36 +0000

Some of you might have seen the news out there on the web, but for those that did not, Hippo has expanded it's borders to the US! Last week it all became final and Hippo bought

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): ApacheCon Europe 2008

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 21:14:01 +0000

I've been too busy lately to actually keep track off the things going on around me. I almost even forgot that the ApacheCon Europe 2008 is only a couple of weeks away. This year I will not be doing any talks, since I thought there was nothing interesting for me to talk about. I enjoyed giving the Cocoon talk together with Jasha last year, so perhaps you'll see me/us speaking again at one of the other ApacheCons.

I have a couple of ideas now for new presentations, but I'm not sure yet if I can put my ideas into actual concepts, before actually sending in a proposal. We'll see! For those of you coming to the ApacheCon in Amsterdam (I really suggest you to come), I hope to see you there. If you have any question about Cocoon or Hippo CMS, be sure too stop me if I'm walking past you. I'm looking forward to some talks.. See you there!

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Exciting things are happening over at Hippo

Wed, 12 Mar 2008 20:38:53 +0000

There is some exciting stuff happening over at Hippo!

More details about this soon..

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): Geek on the highway

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 10:41:29 +0000

For some reason I immediately thought of Arjé's XML in the fast lane.
(traffic jam near Munich)

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Congratulations, XML

Fri, 15 Feb 2008 10:51:32 +0000

Last week, XML turned 10. Hurray!
Incredible that it's just 10 years ago.

Crunching my memory, I think the first time I came across XML was somewhere in the end of 1998, when I was working on a Microsoft technology based CMS. Since people have been harassing me with this horrendous

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Fresh new hearing

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 16:01:10 +0000

They kicked me out of hospital last week.

Exactly ten years after what was supposed to be my last operation, my left ear started troubling me again. I had no other choice than to undergo some major surgery to stabilize the inflammation and to hopefully get some of my old hearing back.

Not a lot of people actually know this, but I'm almost deaf on one ear. Sitting on my left side in a crowded bar is a good guarantee that I won't be able to have any conversation with you. That's why you can see me switching chairs all the time for apparently no reason - it's not because I'm superstitious or something - I just want to be able to hear people.

But now this is all supposed to get soo much better...!

When I woke up from anaesthetics, the doctors (all three of them) were jumping up and down next to my bed like little children. Surgery went much quicker then they had expected, and they had had so much fun playing around with chunks of Titanium in my head, neurological sensors to monitor my facial nerves and so on. Oh big joy. But I can tell you - nothing feels better than seeing happy doctors when you wake up after long hours of surgery!

I'm taking it easy now - trying to recover and let the new ear heal. So bear with me if I'm not responding to your email quick enough.

For those of you who hungry for bloodshed and gore pictures - here's what my head looked like last week :-)

Enjoy,

Arjé

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): The Benevolent Doctator, or how to make your developers write documentation

Tue, 29 Jan 2008 08:59:49 +0000

Software developers are not known for their eagerness to document their code. Yet for an open source company like Hippo it is crucial to have proper documentation in place, so that the world out there can actually understand how the software works and how it should be implemented. Failing documen

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Hippo Site Sample with Cocoon 2.2

Fri, 04 Jan 2008 14:01:40 +0000

It has been there for a while now, but I was not able to find some decent time to write a blog entry about it. A while ago I made a Cocoon 2.2 block out of the Hippo Site Sample. This can become very interesting for developers starting with Hippo in 2008, since Cocoon 2.2 will be coming out very soon.

You can get the site sample block out of the Hippo svn repository.

I've tested it with the following settings:

Maven 2.0.8
Sun JDK 1.5
Cocoon 2.2 trunk
Ubuntu Linux 7.10

Please note that this is very experimental and I still recommend using Cocoon 2.1 for projects that will go in production in the next 6 months.

I've put a page up on the Hippo Wiki that describes all steps.

Have fun!

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Information patterns: Classification follows context

Mon, 31 Dec 2007 08:36:45 +0000

I was at the Amsterdam Zoo, a place that I go to quite frequently to wander around and feel simple and taken care of amidst a bunch of animals sitting properly organized behind their name tags. No surprises in this place. A zoo breathes a fatherly message: Don't Worry – Man Is In Control.

It's still 2007, and we are in the year of the 400th birthday of Carolus Linnaeus, the man who gave us those animal name tags. His work is now known as the Linnaean Order; which he wrote down for the very first time in his book "Systema Naturae" way back in 1735. Born in Sweden, he lived in the Netherlands when he published his famous book. Since communication was slow and photography didn't exist, biologists needed a system to refer to a certain group of plants or animals, and Linnaeus gave them exactly that.

So we were drawn to the zoo today because there was this very special tour scheduled. I was looking forward to the Linnaean Order Tour by amateur biologist Melle. Melle, me and the other geek attendee (my wife) were nervously waiting at the meeting point for the start of this slightly odd, almost autistic tour about the wonders of Ordering Stuff.

As the three of us were waiting for other people to arrive at the meeting point, I joked – grinning from ear to ear - that the rest of our group of fifty was about to arrive any time soon. It's the kind of humor I particularly enjoy, but I felt sorry the moment I said it. I was hoping it would cheer the guy up. And it did, but just a little bit too much. As a result, we faced waiting for another fifteen minutes with a now frantic guide who said he had never had more than five attendees. When he finally figured that the other forty-eight were not going to show up, which he took as a surprise, we started our tour. Fifteen minutes late, and with just the three of us. I shamefully followed our little group.

The guide, however, appeared to have absolutely no problems with my silly little joke. Instead, he started the tour with a kick start, told us he felt sorry for me that my group had left me alone and ran of to the very first Ordered exhibit on our tour.

This running behavior seemed to be his normal way of moving.

Melle did his tour. We ran from one Ordered place to the other, quickly skipping all of the scarily disorganized parts that we ran into along the way. The only times he was at rest, was at places where the chaos had been forced into control by mister Linnaeus himself. In between those places, I had a hard time keeping up with the guy.

What made Linnaeus so special, he said, was that he made a couple of very clear decisions on how to determine the distinctive facets of animal, plant, or mineral. As an example, he mentioned the fact that anything with breasts is a mammal. I was surprised by this very much simplified version of what I had learned as a kid. Animals laying eggs, sitting on them, or carrying their babies inside their wombs - or not -, penguins, crocodiles, kangaroos and all those exceptions. But it all just came down to this very simple yes/no question: does it have breasts?

Of course it didn't. There's so many things that define a species or that separates one group of animal from another. It rarely boils down to just one yes or no question. Biology, or nature as a whole, doesn't like to stick to simple yes and no questions. In reality, you would need dozens of questions like this to be able to determine a species correctly. And the problem is that with every newborn baby, they change a little teeny bit.

But our guide didn't really care. And he was right: because the rules of the game change continuously, you're going to need a set of very simple basic questions to stick to. And that is what Linnaeus did.

I envy Linnaeus because he had the guts to just start somewhere, take some decisions, simplify a whole lot of things, and still finish off with a complete overview of nature. Simplification really is the hardest part of all. Classifying things is not particularly hard to do, but deciding what the classification rules are, is really hard.

You might recognize this from what you do on your computer. How do you categorize all of your documents? How do you order all of the blogs, the websites, e-mails, files, MP3s, contacts, contracts, and all those other digital bits and pieces that you have laying around on your computer? So you set up a folder structure. And you've put every single file in the right folder, in the right sub folder, and gave it an appropriate name, so you will always be able to find it back again. Are you?

No. Or, maybe you are on your own local machine, but it will definitely go wrong when you start sharing documents with other people in a network. That's because you look at your documents from a slightly different context than others do.

I want a storage mechanism that allows me to just dump in all of my information, not thinking about any kind of classification or folder structure, after which the system goes and figures out the similarities between different objects and the correct classification structure automatically bubbles up. And I want to be able to change that classification structure afterwards, whenever I want, without interfering with the content itself.

But that was just a sidenode.

In the meantime, Melle showed us two statutes. Two laying figures represent mythological Dutch water ghosts. I had seen them many times before, but never really cared about them. Melle took me by surprise by telling me that they once were part of the Linnaean order as well: the Paradoxa. Linnaeus spends half a column in his diagram on creatures that do not fit any of the six standard classes: the unicorn, the phoenix, the dragon, the satyr and apparently, water ghosts too. It took until the sixth edition of his "Systema naturae" (1748) before he would remove these creatures. That struck me. Whether it was an error or not to put them in the first place didn't really matter. What is important, is that Linnaeus set up his order with the idea in mind that it would change over time. In fact, the Linnaean order has changed a lot over time not just skipping fantasy figures, but also moving creatures around, adding categories, changing taxonomies, and it will probably never come to a final state. Due to the nature of what it describes - nature - it simply can't.

Correctly categorizing and classifying requires you to be prepared for change as well. Don't expect to do it correctly first time. Not even the second or the third time. The context of things will always change over time. And when that happens, classification should follow.

After about half an hour, we ended our Linnaean tour. It had been really nice, and the enthusiasm of our guide really made it worth the wait and the cold outside. The funny thing was that it was mostly about how the structure that Linnaeus set up so carefully, had changed so much over time. It felt like structure, but then again, it wasn't. And although Melle, our slightly autistic guide, felt safe and secure knowing Linnaeus had ordered everything for him, we went home feeling a little bit confused. Linnaeus had invented a system that everyone could use and refer to, while still allowing it to change whenever that was needed or new insights came to light.

I want that, too!

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): 2007 at Hippo

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:11:29 +0000

My last working day of the year was the Friday before Christmas so my working year at Hippo is over now. A lot has happened in my second year as developer for Hippo. I have built 3 websites on my own thanks to the Hippo Project Wizard. I worked on a few more websites with other colleagues like ou

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): Hippo CMS 6.05.02 released

Thu, 13 Dec 2007 12:23:12 +0000

Hippo is proud to announce the latest release of Hippo CMS. This version contains bugfixes and small improvements. For a full list of changes see the release notes:

http://www.hippocms.org/display/CMS/Hippo+CMS+v6.05.02+Release+notes

Hippo CMS v6.05.02 is available as a binary download:

http://repository.hippocms.org/hippo-cms/v6.x/hippo-cms-v6.05.02.zip
http://repository.hippocms.org/hippo-cms/v6.x/hippo-cms-v6.05.02.tar.gz

The source code is available under the Apache open source license from our public SVN repository:

http://svn.hippocms.org/repos/hippo/hippo-cms/tags/Release-CMS-v6_05_02/

Thanks to everyone who contributed to this release!

The Hippo CMS development team

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): A Simple Plugin Architecture for Wicket

Mon, 03 Dec 2007 18:02:45 +0000

The Wicket meetup last Friday was a blast. The presentation I did together with Wander went reasonably well. We were both a little nervous, and the amount of hippo pictures (real and Lego® ones) on my introduction slides got a bit of a mixed reception (come on guys, it was Friday night!), but we got some nice feedback after all. Anyway, this is the way I like presentations to be: not too technical, and with a bit of fun integrated. Countless slides full of code are not for me!

Here are our slides, judge for yourself:

| View | Upload your own

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): Wicket, Plugins and Hippo CMS 7

Thu, 22 Nov 2007 14:13:50 +0000

It's already some time ago that I first blogged about the new Hippo CMS I saw on the horizon. More than a year later, I am sitting in a new office with 8 people working like crazy on the next step in content managem

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Apache Wicket Meetup

Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:13:50 +0000

Small-scale meetups are good for attracting new people to the Apache community. So after the 6-years-in-a-row (and still running!) Cocoon GetTogether series, we're now running a brand new meetup for the Apache Wicket community. I kind of promised that I would write up a manual for running these kinds of shows during the ApacheCon meet-the-producers meeting. And I will. But first, join us here:

Apache Wicket Meetup: Friday November 30, Amsterdam

As a Java developer working on web applications, you've probably heard about
the latest kid on the block from the Apache community: Apache Wicket.
With proper mark-up/logic separation, a POJO data model, and a refreshing
lack of XML, Apache Wicket makes developing web-apps simple and enjoyable again.
Swap the boilerplate, complex debugging and brittle code for powerful, reusable
components written with plain Java and HTML.
You are invited to join us at the very first Amsterdam Wicket meetup.
The meetup is in an informal setting, with over 40 attendees already, and
will give you some fast-paced insight in what Wicket exactly is and how to use
it.

How to attend

Attending is simple: simply add your name to the wiki page below and you're
all set! http://cwiki.apache.org/WICKET/community-meetups.html

Thanks to our sponsors, the meetup will be free for all!

Location

The Wicket meetup will be held at the Felix Meritis building in Amsterdam: Google
Map of the venue.
Please note that we have a maximum of 100 attendees, so sign up quickly if
you want to be sure of a seat.

Agenda

Date: Friday, November 30
Preliminary agenda:

12:00 Room opens, Wifi connection, power outlets and coffee available.
Walk-in hackaton for whoever likes to join.

15:00 Start of the official Meetup. Opening talk.
15:00-18:00 Wicket Gettings started sessions (beginner to intermediate level)
18:00-19:00 Break for drinks and snacks
19:00-21:00 Technical sessions (intermediate to expert level)
21:00 Wrap-up

The subjects of talks are still under discussion on the mailinglist, but
we've had some excellent submissions for both introductionary talks and deeper
technical discussions. These range from "How to get started with Wicket" up to
"Running Wicket in high availability environments". The afternoon sessions will
be less technical than the evening sessions. The agenda is very much subject to
change. See the Wicket Wiki for the latest version.
This is an Apache community effort, so if you have any ideas, don't hesitate to let us know! Please sign up to the Wicket user mailinglist and share your thoughts.

We've been trying to make this meeting as low-barrier as possible, to give everyone an opportunity to get to know Wicket. If you want to know whether Wicket is your next framework or not, this is the place to be!

See you all in Amsterdam on November 30th !

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): Running Hippo CMS in Leopard

Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:55:00 +0000

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Hippo in the US of A

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 07:46:31 +0000

I could not have been more lucky. During the

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Cocoon GT 2007 Day 2+3

Mon, 22 Oct 2007 22:09:19 +0000

Wow the past weeks have flown by. I made a start with this post on the plane back from Rome to Amsterdam, but I could not find the time to finish it. So here goes:

The last two days happened so fast, I was unable to continue my daily blog writing. Day two of the Hackathon was a day of trying out and playing around more with Cococon 2.2. I continued my quest together with Jasha, while he was working on his presentation in the mean-time, with the webdav block. During the day I also attended a couple of talks on 'What to deprecate in 2.2', 'The future of Cocoon Forms and Dojo' and 'Cocoon Marketing'. These talks were held in small groups of about 12 people and were very interesting. Jeremy initially started the talk about Cocoon Forms, which attracted quite some audience. He proposed to migrate Cocoon Forms to the 1.0 release of Dojo, once it's final release is there.
At the end of the day we all went out for some nice real italian pizza and after that a good strawl around town. We got to see the Trevi fountain and the Pantheon. They are both amazing to see.

On the conference day there were a lot of good talks. Some of them I had heard before and others were completely new. Jasha did his talk about the cocoon project wizard, which received some good response from the audience. At the end of the day it was time to clean up and head home. It were 3 amazing days with lots of italian culture, good Cocoon talks andnew friends. I hope to see everybody at the next GT again. Till next year!

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Investing in open source

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 16:01:49 +0000

I felt sad for Lars - one of my Cocoon buddies - when he told me that his company lost its primary investor. They're now forced to close

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): Hippo CMS 6.05.01 and 6.04.03 maintenance releases

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 13:02:02 +0000

Hippo CMS v6.05.01 released

Hippo is proud to announce the latest release of Hippo CMS, v6.05.01. This version contains bugfixes and small improvements. For a full list of changes see the release notes:

http://www.hippocms.org/display/CMS/Hippo+CMS+v6.05.01+Release+notes

Hippo CMS v6.05.01 is available as a binary download:

http://repository.hippocms.org/hippo-cms/v6.x/hippo-cms-v6.05.01.zip

The source code is available under the Apache license from our public SVN repository:

https://svn.hippocms.org/repos/hippo/hippo-cms/tags/Release-CMS-v6_05_01/

Hippo CMS v6.04.03 released

Also released is a maintenance release in the 6.04.xx branch, v6.04.03. This version contains mainly bugfixes. For a full list of changes see the release notes:

http://www.hippocms.org/display/CMS/Hippo+CMS+v6.04.03+Release+notes

Hippo CMS v6.04.03 is available as a binary download:

http://repository.hippocms.org/hippo-cms/v6.x/hippo-cms-v6.04.03.zip

The source code is available under the Apache license from our public SVN repository:

https://svn.hippocms.org/repos/hippo/hippo-cms/tags/Release-CMS-v6_04_03/

Thanks

Thanks to everyone who contributed to these releases!

The Hippo CMS development team

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): My presentation on CocoonGT

Mon, 08 Oct 2007 07:01:46 +0000

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): Looking back at the Cocoon GetTogether

Fri, 05 Oct 2007 22:01:15 +0000

When I look to the right I see the lights of Rome. The plane just left Fiumicino and is flying back to Amsterdam. From chaos and last minute crisis management back to the over-organized northern Europe. From pizza and pasta back to a cheese sandwich. However I wasn't in Rome just for fun, althoug

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Cocoon GT 2007 Day 1

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:16:55 +0000

The first day of the Cocoon GetTogether 2007 Hackathon has just ended and I have to say the it's great to be in Rome. We've been really lucky with the beautiful weather here. It's about 26 degrees Celsius,lots of sunshine and a perfect blue sky and it appears to stay that way for the next couple of days. The past 1,5 day have been great. Italy is such a wonderful country.

Our journey started on tuesday when Arthur, Jasha and I left the Hippo office around 4pm and took a cab to Schiphol airport, where we met Arje. The check-in went pretty smooth and after a while we boarded the plane. During the flight to Rome we had a great view of the Italian Alps, because of the great weather, which ended in some beautiful images.

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): What happens in Rome...

Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:01:27 +0000

The weather is lovely, the women are pretty, the food and wine are great and the espresso is keeping me awake. But these were (not) the real reasons I am in Rome. After 5 Cocoon GetTogether in the lower countries the Italians decided to organize one. They found a great place for the hackaton: the zoo! We're here surrounded by wild animals, palm trees and families with kids. Once in a while the families decide they want to see what the Homo Sapiens Computerus does in the zoo with a computer. Then we look back and they run away, scared of the pale skins.

Yesterday I spent most of the time meeting people, explaining Hippo CMS, the project wizard and pimping my demo a bit. I still have to practice my demo more to make it look really cool tomorrow. I guess it will be hard to present something "new" for Cocoon 2.1 since the talk of the town is 2.2. Jeroen is trying to get a WebDAV connection with Hippo Repository for C22. At the moment his computer downloads a lot of dependencies but he didn't succeed YET in getting it run. Ah well there are worse places to try this than in the shade of a palm tree.

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): My first steps with Cocoon 2.2

Fri, 28 Sep 2007 19:33:13 +0000

Better late than never is maybe the best description of what I did this morning. Cocoon 2.2 is about to be released but apart from Andrew Savory's presentation on the ApacheCon I had never seen it running. I finally finished my running projects so I had some time to play with Cocoon 2.2.

Cocoon 2.2 seems to be better documented than the previous versions so there was actually an online tutorial how to make your first application. Maven 2 appeared to be on my system already so I had to remove the old beta version which was from 2005 or so. Luckily this was not rocket science. Then I created a Java project in Eclipse and created my own block in that folder. I shouldn't have done that because I ended up with a double folder structure. Shift-delete, re-create my own block and import that in Eclipse, much better :) I tried to create it from 1.0.0-RC2 because I saw there was a tag for it not knowing Reinhard was working hard releasing all the artifacts today. I had to do it with 1.0.0-RC1 but that worked too.

1 hour and 2 cups of coffee later I had my first Cocoon 2.2 application running, NOT! The maven Jetty plugin cost me a lot more time. For some unknown reason it couldn't find the right version of some jars so Jetty wouldn't start. I have no experience with Maven 2 at all so I didn't know where to look. Jeroen was so kind to help me with settings but in the end I had to manual install those jars in my repository. Took some time but finally I had a "Hello World!" on my screen. Getting Cocoon 2.1 run for the first time is much easier but the 2.2 blocks setup is better to maintain in the real world.

Then it was time for the next step: connect it with Hippo Repository through WebDAV. I added the WebDAV block to the dependencies and recompiled my project. I don't know what I did wrong but I found no WebDAV configuration at all. I checked out the whole 2.2 trunk to find a working sample but by the time I had checked out and compiled that, playtime was over and I had to do other work (and eat a "broodje knakworst"). To be continued during the Cocoon GT hackaton...

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Cocoon GT 2007 update

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:01:26 +0000

It seems the Cocoon GetTogether 2007 program is available at the Cocoon GT website. I knew Jasha was going to submit a proposal and it seems it has been accepted. "Create your

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Cocoon GT 2007

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 15:01:26 +0000

Well the Cocoon GetTogether 2007 is coming up. It's only a bit more then two weeks from now. Have you registered? I know I just did! Be sure to register on time, because the space is limited. I think Rome will be a great place for a GT. I've never been to Rome myself, so I think it's going to be a great experience and I'm definitely going to bring my camera.

I can't wait to meet up with all my fellow Cocooners, have some laughs, drink some beers, eat some great food and see what's hot in the world of Cocoon. For the hackathon there are some plans to do some Cocoon 2.2 integration with Apache Wicket. I've noticed there are a lot of people spending time on Wicket, so it's a framework to take into account.

Of course there will be a Hippo team present. You can probably spot us by the blue t-shirt with the big red Hippo's on the back. Have you used the CMS before or you're perhaps thinking about it, just walk bye and come and have a chat!

See you in Rome!

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Hippos on a plane

Fri, 21 Sep 2007 10:01:17 +0000

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): Hippo Community Apps released!

Mon, 17 Sep 2007 15:01:30 +0000

Today we released a new version of the Hippo Community Apps. A lot of work has been done in the rewrite of the Newsletter manager and its user interface. This makes the Hippo Community Apps an open source plug in for Hippo CMS to manage mailings and polls. The Hippo Community Apps also contain a Java API for Guest books.

The major change in the maling functionality is sending one newsletter to multiple mail groups. Each group contains subscribers that are interested in a particular subject.

In this version you can define multiple templates for your newsletters. You can send a newsletter in the look and feel of your public website and create an other mailing in the look and feel of your company intranet with links and images resolving to the correct environment. Content and looks are separated which means you only have to create the newsletter document once in the CMS and use it to create several mailings and display it on your website.

The new version contains an import tool for subscribers. Export all your employees or customers from your local database to a CSV file and import them into the newsletter manager. They are immediately subscribed to the mail group of your choice.

Hippo Community Apps is more than just a tool to manage your mailings. It also contains a graphical user interface to manage polls for your website or intranet.

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Cocoon GetTogether 2007: When in Rome....

Fri, 14 Sep 2007 14:01:15 +0000

After two years of backing the Cocoon GetTogether in Amsterdam, that cold rainy place in Northern Europe, I'm more than happy to let Lady Coco go to her new foster parents. The Cocoon community is moving back to its Mediterranean roots: Rome!

For the sixth time (it's becoming a serious tradition by now) I and the other Hippo brains will be there. And even if you have only the slightest interest in Apache Cocoon, you should be there, too!

Since I like the Cocoon GT so much, and want everyone to come on over, I'm hereby adding *all three* Cocoon GetTogether banners to my blog. So here you go.

;-)

See you all in Rome!

UPDATE: Obviously, the real reason for us coming to Italy is that some genius has translated Hippo CMS into Italian now. Nice job, Marco :-)

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Hippo CMS in Italian

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 15:01:35 +0000

The great thing of having an Open Source CMS is getting feedback and contributions from the community. Last night I had such a moment when Marco Casavecchia Morganti send me an email that he had translated Hippo CMS entirely to Italian. He wondered if we were interested in the Italian translations? Sure we are! As a matter of fact I committed the translations today into the trunk and 6.05 branch of the CMS. So the 6.05.01 release will also have an Italian translation pack.

Thanks again Marco for you contribution!

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Developers update: Defining facets in Hippo Repository 2.0

Tue, 11 Sep 2007 09:30:14 +0000

By (not) organizing the hierarchy of the content repository upfront, but by allowing it to grow dynamically based on meta data, I hope we can adhere to David Neuscheler's Rule #1, which was inspired by Stefano's "Data first vs Structure first" blogposting.

In the core of Hippo Repository 2, we're building a faceted representation of physical folders in Jackrabbit. Those virtual trees are again exposed as 'normal' JCR nodes, and can be used to represent all kinds of data in all kinds of different structures purely defined by their meta information.

Since this a bit of an abstract concept, I've recorded a little demo movie of how this works using the Hippo Repository 2.0 Showcase. Please be warned that this is a developers-only screening :)

Still a work in progress, we're aiming for a first release this November. Yes, we're still in Beta :). But not Web 2.0 style - we actually *like* getting feedback from people during development. Don't hesitate to checkout the code, read the Getting Started docs, and give us some feedback.

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): Cocoon 2.2 at the GetTogether

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 11:01:47 +0000

Cocoon 2.2 is about to be released and I'm going to try to build a website with it. It shouldn't be rocket science, but I'm curious to see how hard or how easy it will be. At Hippo we spent a lot of effort in creating a Project Wizard so if I start a new project I don't have to think about the initial set up. It's time we don't want to spend but it also makes you kind of lazy. I noticed it first when I started at Hippo. Arjé gave me some exercises with the Cocoon core. For the exercises extra blocks were needed and my colleagues had to dig into their memory how to add them. When we build a website we only have to add the block to the build process and we're done. Getting a "Hello World" from Cocoon 2.2 won't be hard, but how easy will it be to connect to Hippo Repository and do DASL queries?
I'll find out soon and hope to talk about it on the CocoonGT in Rome.

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): Hippo CMS 6.05.00 Released

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 14:12:41 +0000

Hippo is proud to announce the new release of Hippo CMS.

The latest version is available as a binary package at:
http://repository.hippocms.org/hippo-cms/v6.x/hippo-cms-v6.05.00.zip

The source code is available from the Subversion repository:
https://svn.hippocms.org/repos/hippo/hippo-cms/tags/Release-CMS-v6_05_00/

This release contains major improvements. Highlights are:

Event cached GUI for improved performance and user experience
Based on latest stable Cocoon 2.1.10
Weblogic compatibility
Simplified configuration
Support for server configuration in external location
Support for new Hippo Community Apps add-on
Many bugfixes

A detailed list of changes can be found at:
http://www.hippocms.org/display/CMS/Hippo+CMS+v6.05.00+Release+notes

An upgrade guide from version 6.04 to 6.05 is available at:
http://www.hippocms.org/display/CMS/Hippo+CMS+v6.04+to+v6.05+upgrade+path

Many thanks to those who contributed to this release!

The Hippo CMS development team

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Hippo is hiring... Java pros!

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 16:01:40 +0000

Hippo is looking for kick ass Java developers to join our product development team. If you happen to know anyone that would fit the profile, I'd really appreciate it if you could get us in touch..

BTW, we're also looking for consultants, web developers and open source community builders.. In short, we need lots of people :-)

Job Title: Senior Java Developers (product development)

Hippo is looking for experienced Java programmers who would like to work in a dynamic and open environment that emphasizes individual initiative and is deeply involved in the Apache open source community.

We're expanding our Java development teams, and are looking for developers to work on our CMS, Portal and Repository products.

Profile:

* Academic qualification in IT
* Relevant work experience
* Good knowledge of Java
* Experience in developing server applications
* Affinity with open source, Apache in particular

Knowledge of the following items is desirable:

* Apache Cocoon, Jackrabbit or Jetspeed
* Content management systems
* Portal development

Hippo is the developer of the open source enterprise content management system Hippo ECM, a native XML content management platform, and Hippo Portal, an open source portal container.

The level of knowledge within Hippo is high, oriented specifically towards XML and Java. Staff are encouraged to investigate new technologies. In particular, emerging technologies from within the open source community and the W3C are followed closely. Where possible, Hippo participates in open source projects. Researching and developing new applications before the market is even demanding them, is a challenge we face every day.

Hippo develops software for a market that is changing on a daily basis. It is therefore important that we respond quickly to new developments, but all the while keeping an eye on the continuity of the existing products. As well as creativity, all staff are therefore expected to have a well-developed feeling for their own responsibility.

The company’s distinguishing characteristics are the short communication lines, a customer-friendly attitude and the use of the newest technologies, with personal creativity and an eye for detail being highly valued.

For more information, visit our website:
* www.hippo.nl

Or visit our community site:
* www.hippocms.org

Got questions? Don't hesitate to mail me directly at arje (@) apache dot org.

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Hippo ECM platform: a pluggable, scalable, Java content management platform. Part II.

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 11:01:47 +0000

Yesterday we discussed our development schedule for the upcoming half year. In the next couple of months we will be working on Hippo ECM release 1.0, which contains Hippo CMS 7 and Hippo Repository version 2. Also included in this package will be Hippo Portal release 1 and Hippo DMS release 1. The result will be a complete package for content management in the enterprise. The last two components, Portal and DMS have been anticipated by Hippo for a long period of time already, but have never been released as separate software products. Combined with the fact that the numbering of our current version of the CMS and Repository is out of sync with each other, we decided to add clarity by combining all the different tools into one clear package called Hippo ECM.

Towards a new architecture

Hippo ECM will be focusing on providing the developer with a stable toolkit of open source enterprise content management components. Individual components of the Hippo ECM toolset will be available to developers setting up their own custom-built applications. But combined all components give the developer the power and flexibility of Hippo's XML querying background and a highly flexible and extensible content management user interface.

This extensibility is very important to us. Over the years we have noticed that our core public consists of developers using our components to create their own bespoke applications. And not so accidentally this happens to match perfectly with our own vision on open source: a diverse set of reusable components that allow developers to integrate with and develop upon, while at the same time providing a rich and user-friendly interface to the end user. There is no one CMS that provides a solution to all different users for all their different requirements. And we wouldn't want to claim that we do so. But we can get a long way, by cleanly separating concerns and providing a flexible plug-in architecture. And this is exactly what we are trying to perceive with our new release of Hippo ECM.

Plug-ins

For the very first release of Hippo ECM, we will stick to a very bare CMS system that provides no more than just the very very basic functionalities one can expect from a content management system. Pretty much all functionalities will be implemented as plug-ins that can be loaded into the skeleton system. Also, all different components will be extendable in such a way that developers can take an existing component and add their own functionalities on top of it. Developers will be able to share and co-develop their own components in the Hippo Forge, a community with SVN and communication functionalities for the development of Hippo plugins. On all the different layers in Hippo ECM, a plug-in architecture will be implemented. The user interface will allow widgets to be deployed that communicate with back-end plug-ins that have been added to the Hippo Repository. In this way, custom defined workflow actions can be added on repository level that require specific user input and behavior on the UI level, without having to change anything to the core CMS system. Apache Wicket has proven to be an excellent Web framework to develop component based web applications with full Ajax support, and we'll be happy to use it for our upcoming release.

Workflow

Workflow functionalities are handled from within the Repository solely, and only their presentation part will be handled from within the CMS user interface. When accessed from within a different application than Hippo CMS, the Repository will take into account document state and permissions, so no illegal actions can be undertaken. Where possible, workflow actions will be exposed through the JCR API.

Hippo Portal

For Hippo Portal, extensibility comes naturally since it has been developed as a portlet specification compliant environment (JSR-168). Portlets have been designed to separate presentation from back-end application logic, allowing developers to work together on an aggregated view of several underlaying applications without having to take into account their individual behaviors. We will be working with the JSR-286 group to define the portlet 2.0 specifications. Also, we will work with the Apache Wicket community to improve portlet support from within the Wicket Java Web application framework. Apart from the fact that Wicket is a strong framework for developing portlets, this will also allow running individual CMS components (as Wicket apps) within a larger Portal environment.

Hippo DMS

When it comes to document management, the plug-in architecture adds the possibility of allowing different content sources and workflows to be plugged in. In the future, Hippo Repository should be able to function as a layer on top of several back-end repositories, only referring to objects in an external repository from within its own global index. This allows existing legacy repositories or databases to be kept in place, only adding the need for an indexing trigger to be called whenever a change is performed. The global index will be able to define relationships between -- for example -- Word documents, e-mails, and regular XML content in the repository.

Up next

However, the most interesting part of the new Hippo Repository, and therefor the core of Hippo ECM, will arguably be its built-in faceted navigation support with virtual directory structures. But that's part of the next blog entry!

Stay tuned.

Arjé

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): It's A Kind Of Magic*

Mon, 20 Aug 2007 16:26:21 +0000

Developing Cocoon based web sites in a Hippo CMS environment just became a lot easier with the help of a little magic: the Hippo Cocoon Project Wizard. This wizard will get you up

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): Wii @ Hippo

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 20:01:08 +0000

Being an employee at Hippo usually means working hard on projects. Being an employee at Hippo also means having fun from time to time. Not only during lunch time when we have good food and funny discussions or on Friday afternoon when the the cold bottles of Amstel beer are opened. We have a dart

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Conferences coming up

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 09:59:45 +0000

The vacation period is almost over and the conference season is starting up again. First up is the Cocoon GetTogether 2007. Gianugo recently announced t

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): Cocoon GetTogether 2007

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 22:03:42 +0000

It's official now. The Cocoon GetTogether (GT) will take place on October 3-5 in Rome. Last year I attended my first GT in Amsterdam, the city I sort of grew up. I've been in Rome before and the city is worth seeing again. The first day is for the hackaton.

Jasha Joachimsthal (Hippo): Hippo Community Apps

Mon, 06 Aug 2007 18:26:19 +0000

Writing a blog seems so easy. Just write about what's going on in your life, at work or what you read in the newspaper or on the internet. While making this entry I found out that writing about your work on the company weblog is more difficult than a personal blog. But this is also an opportunity

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Neglect Leads To Problems

Tue, 31 Jul 2007 17:01:24 +0000

Pretty annoying article on the website of a very respectable Dutch IT magazine:

Apache most actively abused for malware

(Source: Computable. Original title: "Apache vaakst misbruikt voor malware")

The article was inspired by a press release from anti-virus and anti-spam vendor Sophos. My FUD sensors go beserk...

Damn liars!

That's Geek Defense: if you're so angry that you're unable to come up with any real arguments, simply blame the Big Corporations and call them liars.

Now I'm a strong believer of open source, especially when it comes to Apache, but I'm not the kind of person to run around calling other people liars just because they're being critical. Criticism is good. After all, it's what makes open source work.

So, after reading the original press release and some of Sophos' security reports I feel a lot better. Sophos is not so evil after all. Actually, they're taking extreme care to be as independent as possible (of course they are). Their general advice - "make sure your Apache installation is up to date" - sounds reasonable and scarily familiar.

While reading along on the Sophos website, I notice that the original press release is not about Apache. It's about the latest hype in security land: malware that attacks webpages that might be hosted on Apache.

But as it happens, the press release is picked up by journalists and interpreted as being entirely about Apache. And in true Web 2.0 reporting style, they mesh-up their articles by using exactly the wrong bits and pieces from the wrong press releases and blog entries all coming from the same company. But let's be honest here: no press release has ever been sent out by a commercial company if they weren't in it for the money. Sophos is not saying anything wrong, it's just dropping some information here and there, waiting to be picked up by journalists that can't wait to write something that will shock their audience.

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Hippo Enterprise Content Platform: a pluggable, scalable, Java content management platform. Part I.

Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:11:56 +0000

We've jumped into our code suits and have been plumbing like crazy on the next release of our CMS platform. In the upcoming series of blogpostings, I'll try to dig into why and how we want to accomplish the goals set forward in our roadmap. If you feel like participating, tune in @ http://www.hippocms.org/display/HREPTWO, or subscribe to our mailinglist at hipporepos-dev-subscribe at lists.hippocms.org.

Part 1: How we got here

The first stable distribution of Hippo CMS version 6 was released in June 2004. With this new release, we introduced a fresh architecture where the CMS and its content repository were separated components running as different server applications. This separation of concerns on setup level has been one of the main drivers for the success of Hippo CMS v6.0. It allowed for complex integrations with external systems while keeping a strong focus on an easy to understand user interface for the end-user.

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): New Hippo CMS releases

Wed, 25 Jul 2007 10:01:39 +0000

I just released Hippo CMS 6.03.08 (a maintenance release fixing minor bugs in the 6.03.xx branch) and a brand new Hippo CMS 6.04.02 (the latest stable version).

Release notes:

http://www.hippocms.org/display/CMS/Hippo+CMS+v6.03.08+Release+notes

http://www.hippocms.org/display/CMS/Hippo+CMS+v6.04.02+Release+notes

In the next few weeks we will focus on stabilizing the trunk so we can work towards a 6.05.00 release. This will contain many major improvements, including:

Significant GUI performance improvements
Upgrade to Cocoon 2.1.10
Improved compatibility with Weblogic

Arje Cahn (Hippo): On predicting the future, selling software and Restating the Obvious

Fri, 13 Jul 2007 13:01:12 +0000

My favorite quote from the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy:

"One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continuously stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in 'It's a nice day', or 'You're very tall', or 'Oh dear

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Hippo CMS on Ohloh.net

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 22:40:29 +0000

Hippo CMS is getting a lot of attention in the Netherlands and around Europe these days, but of course our goal is to make it a world-wide well known product. The only way to achieve that is by promoting it a bit more then letting the product

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Information patterns: The mood board

Wed, 04 Jul 2007 19:59:39 +0000

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Working from New York

Tue, 26 Jun 2007 01:40:20 +0000

My plane touched down on Saturday afternoon, so I've had about 48 hours of New York and I guess that means it's about time I told folks at home what I'm up to...

It's Monday evening, 21:00 hours, and I'm sitting in Bryant Park, together with a thousand others watching the big HBO screen that will soon start showing the 1951 black-and-white movie "The Thing From Another World". Again, I'm impressed by the extremely friendly Americans, but although I'm sure they are, I'm afraid it's not just that, but also my standards that are horribly lowered by the blunt Amsterdam bar staff.

My time has been mostly consumed by writing slides in my room, going out for a cup of Starbucks coffee (with pie! with cake! with chocolate fudge brownie!), and riding up the elevators again to my luxurious temporary office. I've been sick for a week, unable to do any preparations for my presentation at the Enterprise Open Source conference tomorrow afternoon. Got the antibiotics just in time before I hopped onto the plane and arrived pretty healthy in the Big Apple. As a consequence, I'm seeing an awful lot of my screen and a lot less from this wonderful city.

And what a wonderful city this is. Living up to their right for their Pursuit of Happiness, the New Yorkers want every little bit of life to be as comfortable as can be. And because there's so many of them stacked in office buildings 100 stories high, every street block appears to be a little village on its own. As a result, nearly every block houses one or two Starbucks shops, several deli's, barbers, and everything else you could possibly need. And it's all so *huge*. Especially the cars; and the coffees.

My trip to Chinatown, yesterday afternoon, was incredible. I was afraid it would be crowded with tourists (as is Amsterdam Chinatown), but instead it's crowded by, guess what, Chinese. I had a pretty heavy beef noodle soup along with some pork chops (a specialty of the house that I couldn't refuse), which arrived in about 2 minutes, and cost me a total of 6 dollars (roughly 4 euro's). I wasn't hungry for the rest of the day, but apparently that is no reason to not keep thinking about food all the time judging by the permanent proximity of food. Although it's not as bad as in Austin, Texas, where you're supposed to be drinking soda's continuously as well. Over here, I don't see as much soda drinkers, most merely stick to the coffee. And somehow you can get away with drinking such incredible amounts of coffee, as I seem to have been able to do. Normally, I can't take more than 4 regular Hippo cups a day before I go shaking all over, ending my day completely unable to concentrate. Four of those cups is roughly about the size of 1 'grande' Starbucks coffee. Drinking coffee over here feels more like drinking warm chocolate: a cappuccino tastes like milk with a faint spur of coffee. But they stimulate you to raise your intake to such large quantities that eventually, you will take in some caffeine.

So far for the coffee. My next experience was Central Park, last night, where I was pleasantly surprised by the friendliness of the enormous amount of people in it. Apart from all the other niceties of the park, I really enjoyed the baseball fields where groups of young people, men and women, black and white, were playing their games. It was such a relaxed environment, with so many different people. Some were really good at it, and some were pretty horrible, but that didn't matter. They all had a fun time. And the nice thing about baseball is that you don't have to be an incredible athlete - if you're doing your best, you risk no more than a hundred meters sprint or so.

This day ends with The Thing ("Captain, it's alive!") in Bryant Park, a green open area in the middle of Manhattan, where a huge crowd is now enjoying the screening along with the food and drinks they brought along in their brown deli bags. And so am I, but I got to go now and get some rest. My jet lag is still around, and I need to get some sleep for tomorrow. Apart from my talk, Adam Steidley from Bluenog is supposed to take me out somewhere to a bar he 'used to play darts in'. Sounds like a challenge!

Arje Cahn (Hippo): XML in the fast lane

Tue, 19 Jun 2007 14:01:53 +0000

rrrrrrrrrrrrright..
(traffic jam in Brussels)

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Hippo website revamped

Wed, 13 Jun 2007 09:01:26 +0000

The old Hippo website was created a while ago and it badly needed a redesign. Now it's finally there! If you've not been to the Hippo website over the past week, you will probably not have noticed that the entire website has been redesigne

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Information patterns: Keeping tunes apart

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 13:01:32 +0000

At 9:30 in the evening, I go out to stand still for a moment and listen. Just listen.
It's right before sundown and the birds are singing their final songs for the day. They sti

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): Hippo Repository Java Adapter Webapp

Tue, 15 May 2007 15:01:50 +0000

Wander just released a new version of his Hippo Repository Java Adapter, now including an incredibly handy webapp component. The webapp provi

Arje Cahn (Hippo): Open Source in the Netherlands (ApacheCon EU 2007)

Tue, 08 May 2007 17:01:46 +0000

Damn, it feels good. The Apache conference has been a great success, thanks to all visitors and of a bunch of really great people behind the scenes. Hippo has been pushing hard to help out as Gold sponsor, organizing infrastructure, people and communities. I'm so happy.

But hey, somewhere, I feel a little bit disappointed. I had expected *much* more from the Dutch open source community. Where'd you all go?! Looking at the stats, the biggest portion of attendees were from the US, followed by the UK, Germany and after all that, finally, The Netherlands.

For some reason, and this is a feeling I've had for much longer, Dutch open source people seem way too much concerned with their own little Dutchy communities.

Hi there! Playing open source means playing out in the open, out in the world! We have such a small country, why don't we talk to the world instead of to ourselves? We've always played a big role internationally. We've sailed the seven seas, we've inhabited countries, we've been traders for ages... And then there's the internet, opening up literally *all* borders (not just the Schengen ones), and what do we do?

Dutch government invests heavily in open source by developing a pure-Dutch rip off of Sourceforge (what the ??)
Dutch public broadcasters invest in a Dutch only open source content management system that is virtually dead now and no longer supported because only selected (Dutch) members are allowed to contribute to it (and they're all doing something else now - go on, let the newcomers in!)
Dutch initiatives for open source conferences get lots of recognition from the media, but as soon as the guys show up that practically invented the web as we know it (the HTTP protocol, the Apache webserver) - all important factors in making open source into a worldwide success.. We run away scared to our little teeny Dutch open source initiatives...?

Where's the innovation in all this? Where is our government's money going? Only investing in local initiatives that will stay local forever, does *not* work with open source!

Babies born in The Netherlands practically learn to speak English before they get to speak Dutch. Why the Dutchy thingy? We could be running this show!

Next year, ApacheCon will be back in Amsterdam again and I'll put all my energy into making it a *much* *much* bigger success. We need to get this little country back on the global map!

Suggestions are welcome.

Update 09-05-2007: Due to some mailserver problems, posting comments resulted in an infinite loop on the server... Sorry about that.. I fixed the comment script, please feel free to send one in!

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): Hippo CMS 6.04.01 released!

Tue, 08 May 2007 14:01:13 +0000

Hippo is proud to announce the new release of Hippo CMS.

The latest version is available as a binary package at:
http://repository.hippocms.org/hippo-cms/v6.x/hippo-cms-v6.04.01.zip

The source code is available from the Subversion repository:
https://svn.hippocms.org/repos/hippo/hippo-cms/tags/Release-CMS-v6_04_01/

This release contains many bugfixes and improvements. A detailed list of changes can be found at:
http://www.hippocms.org/display/CMS/Hippo+CMS+v6.04.01+Release+notes

Many thanks to those who contributed to this release!

The Hippo CMS development team

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): Looking back at the ApacheCon EU 2007

Mon, 07 May 2007 14:00:45 +0000

Last week I had to finish up some work just before being able to leave for the ApacheCon EU 2007. I wanted to go there on Wednesday, to see Stefano's No-Nonsense Introduction to "semantic web" Technologies and some Lucene talks, but I got held up until late in the afternoon.

After my arrival at the Moevenpick Hotel I teamed up with Jasha to do some preparations for our presentation on Friday. We moved some slides and made some additions to the demo. I was pleased with the ApacheCon being held at the Moevenpick. The hotel was nice and food was good and plenty of drinks during the day time!

On Thursday there were a couple of interesting session which I wanted to attend. I started out with Apache Performance Tuning Part 1, which seemed interesting in the beginning, but in the end I noticed that my knowledge of Apache isn't as outdated as expected. Later that afternoon I visited "Up to Speed with Java Content Repository API and Jackrabbit" by Alexandru Popescu. I found it to be very interesting, since we're looking into Jackrabbit at the moment at Hippo.

At the end of Thursday the lightning lottery talks took place and as usual this was a big laugh! I always find them very amusing and the speakers have a good sense of humor. Of course the Google sponsored beers helped a lot.

There were two more serious though of which one of them came by Stefano Mazzocchi. It was something he had to tell the 'Cocoon community' as a whole. Stefano invented Butterfly after leaving the message that Cocoon had become too bloated. I agree that Cocoon 2.1 is bloated, but there is a very simple explanation for that: it's lack of dependency management. That's where Cocoon 2.2 does a much better job in combination with Maven 2. I guess I will have to take an even deeper look at Stefano's latest invention, to see what he actually came up with, but it sounds interesting.

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): Hippo Portal demo and source code available!

Tue, 01 May 2007 17:01:37 +0000

Hippo is proud to announce the availability of the Hippo Portal source code under the Apache license. Hippo Portal is a set of Java components enabling easy integration of Hippo CMS and Hippo Repository with an Apache Jetspeed based portal. The source code is available from the public SVN repository:

http://svn.hippoforge.org/repos/hippo/hippo-portal/

A prebuilt demo portal application is also available for download:

http://repository.hippoforge.org/maven/nl.hippo.portal/docs/hippo-portal-1.06.00/install-demo.html

Features of Hippo Portal include:

* Communication between Hippo Portal and Hippo Repository
* Basic data model of a portal user
* Concepts used for building portal sites

More information about Hippo Portal can be found at the technical documentation site and project wiki.

Niels van Kampenhout (Hippo): Hippo CMS 6.04.00 Released

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 10:01:18 +0000

Hippo is proud to announce the new release of Hippo CMS.

The latest version is available as a binary package at:
http://repository.hippocms.org/hippo-cms/v6.x/hippo-cms-v6.04.00.zip

The source

Jeroen Reijn (Hippo): On my way to Brussels

Mon, 02 Apr 2007 06:01:10 +0000

I'm currently on my way from Amsterdam to Brussels together with Berry. Getting up early is not one of my favorite things, but getting there by train is so much more relaxing then by car, which I did last time. I'll be visiting Smals for the next two days.

We'll be helping them out and keeping the big Hippo under control.