Josh Toub leads the Alfresco team here at Blue Fish, and he’s just written a new article that can help Alfresco developers improve the maintainability and supportability of their Alfresco solutions.
When a developer customizes Alfresco to add a new webscript or portlet or modify an existing class, the common practice is to create new source code files in the same directory structure as the out-of-the-box Alfresco source files. This can cause maintenance problems because it’s hard to tell which files have been modified and which ones were original. It makes troubleshooting and upgrading much more difficult, and it’s harder to share your code or reuse it in other solutions.
Josh’s article shows how you can configure Alfresco to look in a special place for your custom code so that you can keep it out of the main Alfresco directory structure. Read Painless Alfresco Development: Improving Supportability through Source Code Organization for more information.
