It has been released and I decided to list out five things that I think are very important to the release of 2011. Mostly talk has been about the new Content Manager Explorer (and it’s cross browser functionality) but this is just the surface. Underneath there are many changes of which just five is a small snippet of what you can find in the box…
The five:
Scalable Deployer
To meet the demands of a large scale enterprise the deployer is now much more scalable than before allowing organizations to constantly grow their environment to meet the demands placed upon it by a growing content organization. The scalable deployer allows multiple processes to simultaneously process deployments as well as updating the publisher on how much load they can handle to avoid overloading.
Storage Layer
The new Content Delivery storage layer is based upon the Java Persistence API (JPA) and its concrete implementation, Hibernate. With this you are able to expand the single Content Delivery storage layer to encompass multiple different data sources (e.g. product information or user generated content) into one single layer.
Online Marketing Explorer
Drive Customer Impact with the new Online Marketing Explorer. Giving an overview of your marketing activities with a centralized model of campaigns, reporting and actionable insights.
Content Services
Content Services is the new RESTful webservice on Content Delivery based upon the oData and oAuth standards. You now have your published content available through a webservice to any application, mobile app, affiliate, white label site, 3rd party the list goes on…
Event System
The new fully .NET event system is modular. Does not sound like much but you can add one or more separate event systems to the same Content Management environment. Each event system can work alone hooking into different CM activities or can work together as part of coordinated event driven activities.
I would like to add that my personal favorites of SDL Tridion 2011 are its extension points. Especially the deployer ones where we can now truly add or extend existing functionality and make it available through the new RESTful webservice on Content Delivery side without having to bother about it being code/implementation specific. Implement new functionality once this way and you can use it undependent of your choice of delivery platform (.NET, Java, whatever…)
Don’t forget the new broker, erm.. storage/criteria (?) objects.
Just when I’m almost able to proudly explain the R5.3 multiple metadata custom broker queries (a SQL GROUP BY on “OR’d” key/key value pairs), Tridion 2011 introduces criteria classes and stores metadata in separate rows. “Back in my day…”
When you extend the content broker storage – is there any way to edit the data associated with the JPA entities from the CMS UI?
If the content you are referencing with your custom JPA code is content based in Tridion then yes. You could extend Tridion CM to allow editing of another data source, but how possible that is will depend on what you want to do.
You might also want to check out Tridion questions on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/search?q=tridion