Dotmarketing has released dotCMS 1.0, a J2EE/portal based content management system with CRM features. The dotCMS platform is based on the Liferay portal, and is available for free download for both commercial and non-commercial use.

dotCMS is a JSR-168-compatible portal which adds a number of features to Liferay, such as customer management, user tracking and click path reporting, marking list management features, newsletter and email campaign managers, and event/facilities management.

Since dotCMS is based on Liferay, additional portlets are available for install. dotCMS is based on standards such as XML, JSP, Struts, Velocity, and Hibernate, so it should be easy for developers to work within its framework.

What do you think of dotCMS? Also, as dotCMS bundles Liferay, dotCMS represents another portlet project bundled with a portal, reflecting a continuing lack of commoditization of the portlet market. Why do you think this is? Do you think portals will ever gather the fundamental infrastructure needed to allow products like dotCMS to be simply bundled as a set of useful portlets instead of as a full portal?

heres what I got when clicking on any of the demo links:

type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

exception

com.dotmarketing.exception.DotRuntimeException: java.sql.SQLException: Connection is closed.
com.dotmarketing.exception.DotRuntimeException.fillInStackTrace(DotRuntimeException.java:24)
java.lang.Throwable.<init>(Throwable.java:180)
java.lang.Exception.<init>(Exception.java:29)
java.lang.RuntimeException.<init>(RuntimeException.java:32)
com.dotmarketing.exception.DotRuntimeException.<init>(DotRuntimeException.java:14)
com.dotmarketing.db.DotHibernate.handleSessionException(DotHibernate.java:463)
com.dotmarketing.db.DotHibernate.closeSession(DotHibernate.java:167)
com.dotmarketing.filters.HibernateSessionFilter.doFilter(HibernateSessionFilter.java:35)
note The full stack trace of the root cause is available in the Apache Tomcat/5.0.28 logs.

With more people using Liferay as a platform, it might be nice to split off the base liferay portlets into separate wars so they could be deployed or not. This would definitely help improve the platform by:
1) Splitting dependencies from the core platform enforcing a cleaner separation of the portal platform from the base portlets. (There are some strange dependencies on portlets in the base code.)
2) Also this would be a good opportunity to remove the base portlet specific columns (favorite movie, food, etc.) out of tables like User_ and just create a user_attribute subtable that could be accessed for dynamic attributes.

This would really help the spread of Liferay as a platform as Jetspeed-2 seems to be taking much longer than originally anticipated by the Apache folks.

Yup, we're already moving in that direction. We've refactored a lot of our core base the past few months to head in that direction with a lot of help from the community.

Demo doesn't work...

com.dotmarketing.exception.DotRuntimeException: java.sql.SQLException: Connection is closed.

What about a user-friendly error handling?

I constantly get this when accessing the demo:

com.dotmarketing.exception.DotRuntimeException: java.sql.SQLException: Connection is closed.
com.dotmarketing.exception.DotRuntimeException.fillInStackTrace(DotRuntimeException.java:24)
java.lang.Throwable.<init>(Throwable.java:180)
java.lang.Exception.<init>(Exception.java:29)
.
.
.

I hope it's because of too much traffic and not because of the underlying architecture... ;-)

Rias A. Sherzad
sherzad.com

I got the same error. Then I changed my language settings of my browser from Italian to English (US) and it worked fine.

Cesidio

Talk about scalability..

com.dotmarketing.exception.DotRuntimeException: java.sql.SQLException: Connection is closed.

Perhaps they should read up on some connection pooling.

Talk about scalability..com.dotmarketing.exception.DotRuntimeException: java.sql.SQLException: Connection is closed.Perhaps they should read up on some connection pooling.

Liferay comes with hsqldb by default. Last time I checked you couldn't do too much connection pooling with it (or it wasn't recommended, it may have improved though ...). anyway if the default cms comes with that I'd suggest move on another database (Derby maybe). I had constant problems with liferay on hsqldb. when moving to another db it al lworks well. It may be the same reason, liferay has some connection pool defined ... I didn't have time to check to see what the problem was.

Liferay comes with hsqldb by default. Last time I checked you couldn't do too much connection pooling with it (or it wasn't recommended, it may have improved though ...). anyway if the default cms comes with that I'd suggest move on another database (Derby maybe). I had constant problems with liferay on hsqldb. when moving to another db it al lworks well. It may be the same reason, liferay has some connection pool defined ... I didn't have time to check to see what the problem was.
Liferay uses a JNDI datasource (enterprise version), so pooling is provided by the container. I use PostgreSQL and never had problems running out of connections during load tests....

We are using filter/threadvariable based db connection for creating and using Hibernate sessions (so we can lazy init objects) and it seems to have a problem with sendRedirects. Interesting, this wasn't an issue with Orion server. The Tomcat db pool works a little differently.

I got the error when clicking on 'Licensing'.

Woohoo! dotCMS is public domain!

Missed a couple of parameters in the TomCat db Connection Pool - had them in the webapp, but not in the server.xml.

Should be good to go.

Congrats to the dotMarketing team!

We're happy to see other companies enhance the capabilities of Liferay and so continually grow the Liferay ecosystem.

This is great news for the open source community, and great news for Liferay and dotMarketing.

--
Brian Chan
Chief Software Architect
Liferay, LLC
Enterprise. Open Source. For Life.

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