Recently CIGNEX has successfully rolled out an enterprise level CMS solution for a major insurance company in USA. CIGNEX integrated Drupal front-end and Alfresco back-end to create a high-performance, low-cost, flexible and scalable solution.
Why to use Drupal and Alfresco together is the best-of-both-worlds: You get the speed of development and flexible user interface that Drupal brings plus the strength of a scalable enterprise repository that Alfresco provides.
Alfresco:
Drupal:
Drupal is popular community platform with thousands of pre-built modules as well as a true site (presentation) framework. Frequently used feature are Theme based look and feel, Blogs, Forums, Personalization , Collaborative book, e-commerce, payment gateways.
Interface of Drupal-Alfresco:
Interface between the Alfresco and Drupal is best facilitated by Alfresco’s REST-based web script framework.
With respect to Drupal - Alfresco, you could have your business process path which starts in Drupal and then it will passed through the Alfresco’s content management functionalities and workflows. You might have people contributing content to Alfresco and that finally got published to Drupal site.
Here, even if there are physically different servers, the contents can be deployed to production using the Alfresco Server Receiver or File Server Receiver Deployment.
All UI (plus front end related things) and Community features will reside in Drupal. Once you hit any section of your web site, Drupal will start communication channel as REST based Web Scripts which will be responsible for exposing the requested content. The response from will be used by Drupal for rendering content on live site.
One of the best things about this integration is, it speaks to both, the power of Alfresco's content management and Drupal's popular community features.
By
Kirit Thummar & Vipul Dave
CIGNEX, India Office
