GX WebManager Community Edition Officially Launched!

Last week, at our customer event in De Fabrique in Utrecht, the Netherlands, we officially launched the GX WebManager Community Edition. As a visitor of this website this is probably old news for you, as it was already available for a few weeks here. It's a free edition of our flagship product, perfectly usable for your websites. Although it might sound like another small step, it's actually a very big deal for us, our customers and all other people around our growing company.

To understand the reasoning behind this, I have to give some more insight in the wishes of our customers. What they are asking for is that we keep up with the constant innovation happening on the Internet. As trends evolve and grow in a very rapid pace, we as a CMS company have to keep up with all those trends, and invest in it. If we just added all those wishes straight into our product, without adapting our architecture accordingly, Webmanager would become a monolithic, very large and unmanageable product, which would reach the end-of-life phase sooner rather than later. So, we decided that we needed some kind of plugin architecture to decouple the fast changing innovations like User Generated Content, Wikis, Ajax etc from the base platform providing stable features like user interface widgets, authorization, storage, integration, bootstrapping etc.

What we built in 2006 and 2007 to reach that goal was the first OSGi based Web Content Management system worldwide, WebManager 9.0. We did have to refactor parts of our existing CMS, but not as much as you might expect, as much of the design goals were already implemented in previous versions.

Combining OSGi with Spring MVC for the controller framework, Apache Jackrabbit for storage and JSP tags for User Interface widgets gives us the concept of WCBs, WebManager Component Bundles. WCBs are small .jar files that you can upload in the WCM management console in WebManager, and start running right away, without restarting WebManager itself. It's a example of the power of OSGi, a technology which I am very enthusiast about, and I think is a hidden gem in the Java world.

The resulting CMS is almost more of a platform then a CMS in the traditional sense, although we provide an out-of-the-box product with a very complete user interface (usability for editors is actually one of our core values, and one of the primary reasons customers choose for our product). We tried to design and built it as open as possible, to make it very easy for developers to use. Ease of development was (and is) one of the primary design goals for the development team. Developers can create their first WCB in about one hour. The result of that focus on ease of development is that in a short time lots of WCBs have been created.

To keep track of all created WCBs, we created WCMExchange.com, a sister website of GXDeveloperWeb. On this exchange, customers, developers, partners etc can look up WCBs, see metadata, and download or buy the WCB right there. At this moment we already have about 150 WCBs registered, with about 70 on public display on WCMExchange.com. For the other 80, the owners decided to make them private, only viewable by selected users.

The last step is giving developers easy access to our technology. For that, we created GXDeveloperWeb.com, which you are reading right now, so that shouldn't be a surprise. To get developers up-to-speed as easy as possible, and let them create WCBs with as little barriers as possible, we have introduced the free Community Edition. It's the same product as our customers are using, and you can use it for free for your website. We removed clustering support, and you can use it for only 1 website per installation, you cannot get formal support from GX, and some other minor restrictions, but even so it's perfectly usable, and I would like to encourage you to use it for your own websites!

To wrap up, the Community Edition is our last step in the circle. Developers can use the Community Edition, get to know the technology and the developers behind the product, interact with the community, and find documentation. Developers can then create WCBs easily. Those WCBs are then registered on WCMExchange.com, and other users, including customers, can use those WCBs for their website, therefor creating a marketplace for WCB developers. This is what we call growing our ecosystem.

The main goal to create this ecosystem is to provide our customers with lots of WCBs, so they can keep up with the fast innovation in their respective marketplaces.

I hope you enjoy our Community Edition and I am personally very interested in your response. Feedback can be sent directly to me, or of course posted on the GXDeveloperWeb forum.

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