Cloud Connected

Cloud CMS JavaScript Driver Release 1.0.3 is out!

Jul 4

The Cloud CMS team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of version 1.0.3 of the Cloud CMS JavaScript Driver for jQuery, Dojo, Javascript/HTML5 and Node.js applications.

Download today from http://github.com/gitana/gitana-javascript-driver.

JavaScript Driver for Cloud CMS

The Cloud CMS JavaScript Driver is a JS library that you can drop into your HTML5/JS applications to take advantage of the authoring and delivery APIs of the Cloud CMS server. It makes it easier for developers to utilize the Cloud CMS HTTP/REST APIs by providing native convenience functions via JavaScript.

The Gitana JavaScript Driver is ideal for use within either the browser or server-side JS environments (like Node.js). For a Node.js wrapped module, please check out: http://github.com/gitana/gitana-node-js.

What is Cloud CMS?

Cloud CMS is a cloud platform as a service for managing all of your business content - from formal business content like articles and news items to social content and interaction data coming from your applications. Cloud CMS puts all of your data into an innovative, high performance and scalable repository and gives your business powerful tools for collaboration, branching, merging and working with content with a secure and robust tools.

To learn more about Cloud CMS, please visit: http://www.cloudcms.com

Release Highlights

This release includes a number of highlights, including bug fixes and new features, which are worth mentioning. A few of the more important elements are shown below. For an itemized list of code level changes, please check the commit history.

• Fix to map .each() iteration with nested property changes
• Improved support for automatic application stack and data store caching
• Preference for clientKey syntax (instead of clientId) (so as to be consistent with adjustments to Cloud CMS)
• Support for application deployments, query and lookup via API
• Fixes for missing clone() methods for proper type adherence on promise chaining
• Improved ability to find stacks for contained data store elements
• Added ability to specify parent and file paths on node creation and lookup
• Enhancements to ticket based authentication
• Support for HTML5 local and session based storage of OAuth2 credentials
• Improved support for non-window (server-side) environments (like Node.js)
• Better handling of OAuth2 credentials using refresh token
• Support for Preview URIs (new feature in Cloud CMS)
• Support for Identity Policies (new feature in Cloud CMS)
• Support for partial tree loading (new feature in Cloud CMS)
• Fix for miscalculated Application URIs

We encourage our community to upgrade to this new release of the Cloud CMS JavaScript driver. We encourage everyone to submit issues, pull requests or post questions to our forums at http://www.cloudcms.org.

To learn more about the Cloud CMS JavaScript Driver, please visit our open-source GitHub repository at http://github.com/gitana/gitana-javascript-driver.

Easy Forms with Cloud CMS

Apr 23

One of the many uses of Cloud CMS is as a storage and reporting mechanism for forms. If you’re looking to put a form up onto your web or mobile site, Cloud CMS serves as an excellent option for capturing and storing this information.

Fundamentally, Cloud CMS provides the Alpaca forms engine. Alpaca is an open-source JavaScript library for jQuery. It makes it easy to design and insert forms into your sites.

Cloud CMS built Alpaca and been working with the broader community to improve it and make it more feature complete. Alpaca provides a large library of pre-built controls.

You can easily do things like render a simple form:

Or a more complex form with multiple fields:

Alpaca provides a library of lots of field types - ranging from basic input things (text, checkbox, select, etc) all the way to full-screen text editors and Google Maps interactive fields.

You can also fully customize the layout of your forms as well as take advantage of automatic features like validation:

Once you’ve built your form, you can connect it to Cloud CMS. This lets you load and save data to/from the Cloud CMS servers. When your users submit their forms, the form data is stored in a data list.

A data list lets you see all of the records including all of the properties of the form, when it was submitted, who submitted it and more.

Data list items are regular nodes in the Cloud CMS world and so you can work with them just like any other content. For example, you might set up rules that trigger notifications, send response emails or transform content for repurposing within your business.

Alpaca 1.0.3 Released!

Jan 7

We’re pleased to announce the release of Alpaca Web Forms 1.0.3 for jQuery, jQuery UI and jQuery Mobile.

Alpaca is an open-source project that provides an easy way to render web forms using JSON schema. It consists of a jQuery plugin and provides a nice abstraction so that you can change form layouts, validation logic and presentation with simple changes to JSON.

Alpaca provides the web forms capabilities for Cloud CMS - The Cloud Content Management Platform for the Enterprise.

This release includes a number of bug fixes and new features. These fixes and features are described more fully below.

Easier to Build

Alpaca 1.0.3 includes a new build structure that is lightweight and easier to work with. Everything is now fully-driven by Ant and all of the source files are completely intact without any build or compilation step. This mean that you can quickly test changes to core files by simply launching a web server and mounting the source.

AMD Modules

Alpaca 1.0.3 also includes optional support for AMD (Asynchronous Module Definitions). This makes Alpaca compatible with RequireJS, Curl and other AMD loaders.

Alpaca now features a wrapper around its code that detects the presence of an AMD environment. This is similar to how jQuery and others now do it. If AMD is available, Alpaca will define the “alpaca” module.

Cloud CMS hosts its AMD modules, including Alpaca, online here: https://github.com/cloudcms-components

What’s New

Alpaca 1.0.3 has a number of new features and fixes.

1. Previewing of Form ahead of commit
2. Arrays now support custom labels on Item move, add and remove
3. Multi-select of array data
4. Array name field now properly calculated
5. Improvements to Mobile UI layout and rendering
6. Improved JSON formatting via JSON editor
7. WYSIWYG validation now properly fires
8. Support for read-only arrays
9. Easier programmatic access to buttons on rendered form
10. Addition of DateTime field
11. Improved support for EventListeners
12. More Sample Code
13. Sample Login Form
14. Lazy Loading of Field Values
15. Examples of Form Previews
16. How to use DateTime Control

We encourage our community to check out Alpaca 1.0.3! You can download Alpaca by visiting our web site at http://www.alpacajs.org.

For code-level information on these bug fixes and new features, please visit our GitHub project at https://github.com/gitana/alpaca.