Teamsite 6.7.1 comes with some very nice features again.

First of all Linux (Red Hat 4) is now supported as a platform to run Teamsite on.

Further Teamsite on Unix will now run as a non-root user. I'm not yet convinced by this feature. You still need root to install TS and to do the most admin-tasks. So in most enterprises you will still need to be very nice to the system-admin with the root-password.

But the best thing in this release is the workflow modeler. A graphic GUI to design and develop your workflows. All Java-based. If done right this could be a very good thing. Java-developers are easier found then perl-coders and workflow are just easier to design in a graphical mode. If only to keep the managers that always enjoy a good image happy.

The old wft-style workflows can NOT be converted, will be phased out in the long run but for now are still supported.

Teamsite 6.7.0 has been out for quite a while now but I just didn't have time to look at it. Lately I did and I was very impressed with what it called 'Flexible roles'.

The role that a user has is no longer set via the uid-files & chosen the moment the user logs in. Instead roles are set on a per-branch basis. A user can be an author in one branch and be an admin in another. This is very strong because you often want to give say 'create branch/workarea' privileges to a developer but restrict this right to a limited set of branches. Well done, interwoven!

More over one can define custom-roles which are assigned privileges. I not sure what a proper use for this scenario could be but it is certainly a nice-to-have.

Watch the conversion tool, however! After installing TS6.7.0 you need to run a conversion-script that upgrades the backing store to the new structure. This script grabs a os/ts-group and searches for the HIGHEST role within this group. That role is then assigned to the whole group. And thus, any editors/authors within a group that also contains 1 admin will be upgraded to an admin! Watch your steps here!

Let's start my first blog with explaining how this blog is build. Since I quite a lazy fellow I've started to search though the Typo3 standard extensions.



The first I found was timtab, a extension specifically designed for blogs. But it was a very short try. Documentation is zip, zero, except for an empty word-template. The document contains nothing more then just a few general remarks. How can it be that sensible developers spend so much time in coding and then leave the whole stuff without an docs? This renders it completely useless. Sorry.



But I found a very good alternative. The WEC Discussion Forum. It looks like forum software but it can double as a blog as well, is very, very simple to use and, most important, it's well documented.



To install:

1. download & install the 'New front end login box' extension.

2. create a front-end user

3. create a page which contains the login plugin.



Now that we can login:

4. download & install the 'WEC Discussion Forum'

5. create a page with the forum plugin

6. modify it to your needs

7. start blogging



That's all. Works very good. Only minor drawback is the words WEC in the title. They stand for 'Web Empowered Church' and if you go over the docs you'll notice a some small remarks about the religion the creator strongly believes in. Personally I think that free software is not a channel which you should use for this purpose.