Just passed the Alfresco accreditation

Back in 2009, I was in Milan designing the future Alfresco accreditation tests. Those tests will be offered to anyone, starting from summer 2011.

Because my company Aegif is an Alfresco partner, we have just been subjected to the test! Some of the questions have been written by me (what? unfair?), but all-in-all it was a bit more difficult than I expected. There are 137 questions (some multiple choice, some multiple response) to answer in 60 minutes. Some questions are very specific (which file does what) and some more general (which feature is not available).

Now I can add "Alfresco Recognized Developer" to my titles ;-)
More importantly, my company becomes an "Alfresco Recognized Partner".

Automatically deploy Alfresco WCM content to an FTP server

In Alfresco WCM, deploying means generating "baked" web content from XML content and templates, into a local FSR directory. Here is how to take this further and also deploy the content to your web server via FTP automatically.

1. Make sure you have both Alfresco WCM and an FSR (now called File System Deployment Target) installed and working.
2. Edit the Deployment Server's deployment/default-target.xml file and add a "postCommit" section linking to a postcommit script (example).
3. Create the postcommit script, calling the lftp tool in mirror mode (example).
   

Unfortunately, the default Alfresco Deployment server does not report anything about the script's activity and potential errors. To see or log messages, please download Alfresco's source code, modify ProgramRunnable.java like this, recompile, overwrite alfresco-deployment-3.3.2.jar with the one you just generated, and then restart the server.