Alfresco Share Customization Limitations

Question

We have chosen Alfresco for our project because Alfresco meets most of the functional requirements we need.

Share is a great app, nevertheless it has too much functionality for our scenario, much more than we need in our project. This is the reason of posting this question, we don't know what's the best option: either customize Share creating custom pages, custom dashboard, custom actions and metadata etc. or create a new web application that interacts with the repository.

Roughly, we have these requirements:

• Custom header with custom menu, disabling direct access to Repository (users only can collaborate using Sites)
• Custom dashboard that contains
  1. On the left, list of Sites
  2. On the center, custom dashlets which shows several content in different ways and formats
  3. One of the dashlet would be a "dynamic" dashlet as I explain in my last question
• Custom document details page, with custom actions and custom metadata

I would like to know opinions based on experience, explaining when and why would be a good idea to create a new web app that interacts with the Alfresco repository or when to customize Share according to your needs. I'm highly interested on knowing Share customization limits.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Alfresco Share doesn't really have any limitations, it's already an UI built upon the repository.

I've seen Share modification till the sky and one can't even see it's Share any more.

The things you've described above are just templating and building the rightfully freemarker templates/js to view the piece of information.

If you take a good look at the default templates with their regions and shift around the default regions you'll see that you don't need heavy customizations to achieve a different layout.

The only thing one probably lacks is experience with Share.