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Hippo Community Apps

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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 to write about what’s going on at Hippo, in the Apache community and other technical stuff. I hope you’ll enjoy this and my future entries.

The Hippo Community Apps are really handy and cool extensions for (database driven) content that is not managed by Hippo CMS. At least, not yet managed. The Java code already existed to manage newsletters, polls and a guest books, but there was no standard GUI. Last week we’ve done a lot of work to make a good working GUI for the newsletter manager. Within a few days it’s very easy to add the newsletter manager to Hippo CMS. Then you can manage your subscribers, mail groups and send newsletters based on a document from your Hippo repository.

It is really fun to work on this project. Not only because we’re making something good that will be used but also because it gave me the chance to learn new stuff. In the beginning I had to find out what does what but now I’m starting to see the bigger picture which makes it easier to add new functionality or ask for improvements. Sure, I’ve worked with Cocoon forms, flowscript and Java before but not as intensively as in this project. My colleagues wrote most of the Java code and the designer made the graphical design. I’m making the screens, create Cocoon forms and write flowscript so the user input will be handled by the Java code eventually. In the next days we’re going to break (and eventually fix) some of the code to implement necessary changes for a few of our customers. It may take a few days but then we’ll have a really good working GUI to manage your newsletters.