Daisy, the Java Open Source Content Management Framework is moving a long as it has announced a second public release. The Daisy 1.1 release adds features such as: document archival and deletion, enhanced email subscriptions on change events, role and login switching, and document/query styling.

Press Release

Only a month after the initial public launch during the Cocoon GetTogether, the 1.1 version of Daisy ships with a new i18n subsystem in-place, and no less than 6 language translations: English, Dutch, German, French, Polish and Russian. Many of these translations were contributed by members of the rapidly growing community around Daisy, who enjoy the clean design and ease of customization of the Apache Cocoon-based Wiki-on-steroids-like frontend application. Daisy has been created with the software developer in mind, who wants a framework combining easy-of-first-use with lots of power and flexibility under the hood. To that end, the first enquiries as to how to integrate the Daisy repository with existing applications are being made on the Daisy mailing list, and Daisy's clean, stateless HTTP/XML repository interface will make such efforts a breeze.

Daisy 1.1 and the Daisy Wiki application ship with many new features, most notably:

- separate ACL permissions for modifying the publication status of a document
- document archival and deletion
- enhanced (email) subscriptions on change events, and an easy way to subscribe to individual pages
- easier role and login switching
- documenttype- and query-specific styling

Furthermore, all known bugs have been squashed and work has been started to make Daisy's repository database-independent, with (again) contributions from the community to start work on providing PostgreSQL support. Also foreseen for the next release is more user interface candy when configuring a site navigation hierarchy (but not at the cost of customizability), and other new features based on community and market demand.

Outerthought, an experienced Open Source Java & XML solutions provider, and the main driver behind Daisy's continuing development, is thrilled with Daisy taking off rapidly. "With our considerable experience in community-driven software projects - most notable in the Apache Cocoon framework itself, we knew that Open Source can never come as an afterthought - it must be an integral part of the vision driving a project. The Daisy project, code and resources have been built from the ground up with the goal of enabling a thriving community around Daisy. This is now starting to pay itself back, while Outerthought is committing itself to long-term maintenance and support of Daisy." Schaubroeck, an e-government solutions provider for many Belgian local administrations has been funding Daisy's development until now. "We are confident that this is going to change rapidly with the growing amount of interest in Daisy."

Daisy Home page

Great Job
However, wouldn't CMS application make more sense if they were portlets rather than standalone.

How is Daisy different from Open CMS?

Open CMS is a more matured Content management system and extensively used by lot many companies in Europe.

On the other hand, will Daisy support JSR 170(content repository for Java technology API) in the future?

Also, is there any workflow concept in Daisy?

Rajender

Gawd!!!

It is amazing how much garbage gets in the way of something like a CMS and other applications. Sure you may use some design patterns or some infrastructure to build the thing, but buzzwords truly do not make a project worth developing or using.

Does it have a workflow concept? Man, I am tired of people talking about what should be done and how certain disciplines should be maintained and never actually implement it. This talk is done at such a high level in such a vague way that 3 people could be having a conversation about it and not be thinking about the same thing.

And who really cares about JSRs? They take forever to become a standard and by the time they do they are so bloated you may as well written something from scatch on a simplified design.

(rant ended)

I played with it a little bit and must admit it is worth a try if you need a powerful wiki implemented in Java. I appreciated the documentation as well.

I´ve been using OpenCMS for a while but found it much more complicated than a typical CMS would have to be (perhaps I´m too simplistic...). Magnolia is also a good option but was not that fast (maybe because it uses a huge number of small files, not a DB), even worse, it lacks some nice features Daisy has.

BTW, before someone else cries against "reinventing the wheel" keep in mind that old mantra: "competition is a Good Thing".

my $0.02

Thanks, Brennan and Antonio. I think you understand where we are aiming at.

Re: portlets - I believe this really depends on what market one tries to position himself in. Daisy caters more for developers, so corporate features such as portal integration out-of-the-box have not been our focus when doing the first two releases. That said, I believe Daisy is well-designed hence it could be integrated with other stuff easily.

Re: JSR170 - JSR170 is something we didn't tackle upsofar due to lack of customer demand. It is an interesting initiative but still very young, and we'd like to see repository interchangeability using JCR before going into that alley.

Re: OpenCMS - I think Daisy & OpenCMS are very different. AFAICT, OpenCMS has no clear separation between repository and user application, and its UI is based on JSPs. Daisy's UI is based on Cocoon and a few XSLTs, which makes customizability rather easy. Plus OpenCMS has this classic hierachical model for structuring content, while as Daisy uses metadata and searches for locating and classifying content.

Was it worth the effort creating two CMS frameworks under the Apache Cocoon unmbrella both of them released under the same license (Daisy and Lenya: http://lenya.apache.org/)? Was it not possible to merge both of them into one single initiative?

Stephane

@Stephane: though Outerthought is active in Cocoon development, Daisy doesn't sit under the ASF (Cocoon) umbrella, even if it shares the same license with Lenya. Daisy and Lenya are wildly different, both from an architectural and a technological viewpoint. Besides, Daisy only depends on Cocoon for its front-end Daisy Wiki application - the backend repository server is totally independent.

cocoondev.org, the site/infrastructure we host Daisy development on, also hosts many other Cocoon-related, but non-ASF projects: http://new.cocoondev.org/main/

Hope this helps,

Steven.