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The following is a brief list of new features to be introduced in upcoming BetaCMS versions. This is only a preliminary list with missing features and enhancements that have been identified during BetaCMS deployment in various organizations. The purpose of this preliminary list is to gather further ideas and thoughts about desired functionality and end up with a final set of features that the community and our customers would like to see implemented. The final list will be registered in our JIRA issue tracking system to allow users to vote for the most desired features and so further help us to decide on a road map.

You may send your ideas to "betacms at betaconcept dot com"

In the meanwhile we are looking for human resources to assist us in making BetaCMS better. If you would like to work on any of the following areas or if you have some fresh ideas for BetaCMS enhancement send us an email, preferrably including your CV, to the following address: info at betaconcept dot com

Content Engine Enhancements

Enhance default BetaCMS content model (the standard XSD Schemata which are bundled in the default installation package) to match functionality of popular web content management tools like wordpress, joomla, drupal, etc.

BetaCMS allows the modeling of any type of information an organization produces or consumes through the expression power of XSD Schemata. It does not impose a specific modelling of information or a specific metaphor of presenting content like blog, wiki, and other web content management and content publishing engines. However most of users or organizations do not have enough resources to model their content from scratch and usually require a ready made content model to start with and build upon it. The default BetaCMS installation provides an out of the box content model (i.e. a set of XSD Schemata) that cover many common cases of web content modeling. This default model is currently far from beeing complete and could be enhanced with more content types to support forums, polls, invitations, questionnaires, user comments, content ranking, tag popularity statistics, etc.

Integrate Greek Stemmer in Lucene

There is a relevant master thesis and a php / javascript implementation of a heuristics based Greek stemmer. A java implementation of this stemmer will allow BetaCMS to give more accurate results when searching Greek content.

Provide content object inheritance through the  XSD supported Schema definitions

Content object types in BetaCMS are defined as elements in XSD Schemata. XSD Schema supports the definition of Elements which inherit from other Elements (like java subclasses) but this is not yet supported in BetaCMS.

Support Restrictions of All Simple types in XSD Schema

 Currently BetaCMS only supports the definition of "string" restrictions in XSD Schemata (i.e. String enumerations). This functionality should be extended to also support restrictions on numbers (Integer, Long) and Dates.

Enhance support of defined cardinality in XSD Schema

The cardinality of content object values can be defined in XSD Schemata but not all possible options are currently supported. For "minOccurs" only "0" and "1" are allowed and for maxOccurs only  "1" and "unlimited" are allowed. This should be extended to support any combination of values.

Investigate the possibility to  expose the BetaCMS repository as a WEBDAV  disk or samba share

This kind of functionality will be quite useful for integration of BetaCMS with desktop environments but the kind of information that will be exposed should be first of all specified since BetaCMS  stores structured or semi-structrured content and not just binary documents.

Investigate the possibility to store binary content on Amazon S3 or other available cloud store Services

Enhance the engine with Clustering capability and investigate the possibility to deploy BetaCMS on Cloud Computing Infrastructures (multiple instances that serve the same repository or multiple repositories split on many instances)

Add algorithms for content mining, autotagging, and automatic metadata / content extraction from binary formats like office documents, images, videos, pdfs, etc.

Implement a finer grain of security control over content introducing declerative security rules with the drools engine.

BetaCMS already provides a fine grain RBAC security model allowing to define user and role access up to the level of individual content objects. We would like to further enhance the existing security model to allow control of individual content object properties and support ABAC where any user or environment attribute (i.e. user position, user department, day time, access location, etc.) may be utilized to control access to content.

Provide a suite of command line administration tools for  BetaCMS repositories

A set of groovy scripts currently exists but need to be enhanced and properly packaged

Content Management / Collaboration Web Console Enhancements

Redesign the web interface of Web Console to be visually more pleasing and enhance UI consistency and coherence. Provide the possibility for theming and Branding

Provide single sign on features and support GET URLs for main Web Console Functions (With an emphasis on Content Editing and Content Tagging)

This will allow easy integration with Web Applications that get content from BetaCMS but also need to provide content editing inside the web pages (i.e. without requiring to explicitly login in to the administration console in order to add new content or edit existing content)

Add capability to simultaneously edit multiple content object forms in different browser windows (Keep conversation state for each browser tab or window)

Enhance Web Content Management Functionality

Collect all the required functionality for managing web content in a dedicated console subsection and provide easy management of all relevant content types (portal sections, scheduled content areas, dynamic content areas, page templates, style sheets, page layouts, page components, etc.)

Enhance default page Templates for presentation of the content types that are bundled with the default BetaCMS installation

Develop an Editor for easy definition of new content types and easy editing of existing content types

Content Object Types are defined through XSD Schemata and currently the only way to alter an existing content object type definition or create a new one is to directly work with schema files. While this is not so difficult since it usually involves cutting and pasting from existing schemata, it certainly requires some prior exposure to the XSD Schema grammar and imposes a difficulty for organizations that do not have engineers with some expertise in XML technologies. It would be very convenient if the Administration Console offers a graphical way with trees and forms that allows a content modeler to work with content definitions without being exposed to the XSD grammar.

Substitute custom workflow code with jbpm engine to provide better support for customized and more powerful workflows for content creation

Provide better management of content object versions and visual tools for comparing content versions

BetaCMS engine supports keeping multiple versions for each content object but the Administration Console does provide much functionality for handling version except the ability to save different versions of each content object. Some support in inspecting and comparing content versions should be definitely included.

Enhance Export / Import functionality when exporting / importing multiple content objects and the possibility to supply XSLT transformations during import or export. For example directly export content in xml format that is appropriate for input in Adobe InDesign.

Enhance Excel Export functionality and possibly add Excel Import functionality

Enhance functionality of User Page / Dashboard

Add capability to directly edit / save binary files from/to BetaCMS from OpenOffice and Microsoft Office.

Enhance Script Engine Console Functionality (Save script in BetaCMS, provide support for other languages besides groovy)

Add plugin functionality

Administration Console is a very powerful web application which allows an organization to perform most of the required content management and content sharing tasks. However in the various deployments so far we realised that despite the wealth of features and enhancements we might introduce, every organization has different requirements and a slightly different way to interpret their content. It is considered of major importance to allow the easy enhancement of Administration Console with plugins. This will allow each organization to get the functionality that is required and in the same time allow the Administration Console the maintain its abstract and orthgonal view to content management and not get biased towards one or another domain of content management. Plugins should be designed in a way that allows each plugin to reuse the main Console tools (i.e. taxonomy / user / content type browser toolbars) and enhance key parts of content management (i.e. different content editing forms, different validation rules, different default values for content object properties, pre and post actions when various events are triggered,  etc.)

General Enhancements

Provide a wiki and a forum at betacms.org to allow building a community around BetaCMS. Allocate human resources which will handle communication with the community on a daily basis.

Provide better support for installing BetaCMS on Windows Machines

Provide more packaging options and enhance installation support

Create a demo site along with screencasts which introduce the basic BetaCMS features without the need to install the package

Finalize work on Amazon Machine Instance with preinstalled BetaCMS