Phil Cryer wrote:
> On Fri, 2008-08-22 at 09:21 -0600, Binkley, Peter wrote:
>> Note that having said Fedora, you're only half-way there: you still need
>> a front end. Fez is popular, but Muradora was very well spoken of at
>> RIRI last week (http://vre.upei.ca/riri/), and UPEI is doing very
>> interesting work putting Drupal in front of Fedora (they're planning to
>> release code shortly, having been distracted over the summer by an
>> impromptu ILS migration that cost them 5 whole weeks - honestly, you
>> wonder what these people do all day). Muradora's future was in doubt for
>> a while due to reorganization of the development team, but the most
>> recent word is that it will continue to be developed.
> 
> The open-ness of Fedora, and it's lack of a front end, has been a hurdle
> for many to overcome before adoption, but from what I saw at RIRI last
> week, the work the UPEI staff is doing is very nice, leveraging Drupal,
> which is a great app.  Richard Green (Univ of Hull) was big on promoting
> Muradora with examples and current posts from the dev group that they
> are going to continue.  I'd like to see them target Fedora 3.0 and
> release that soon, same to be said about Fez, who have working 3.0 bids
> in svn currently.  
> 
> What I've taken away from RIRI is that Fedora-commons is ready for
> business on the backend, but needs search, acl and front-ends plugged
> in, and will for some time.  One of my ideas is get Solr running with FC
> (something we failed to get accomplished at RIRI) and then build a front
> end that just looks at Solr.  I'm sure there's more to it, but I'm going
> to start looking, thanks for the Open collections link, I already heard
> back from them, they're integrating Solr now, and will be working on a
> fedora-commons plugin next year...

It's worth noting that Fedora Commons and DSpace are now officially 
collaborating.  Chances are that the the DSpace Manakin UI could sit on 
top of Fedora services.  Much of the work that is going on is in 
providing functionality such that Fedora will be an *Institutional* 
repository, not just a web site for presenting a collection of a couple 
hundred digital objects for a unit library.

While I haven't worked with Alfresco I know one of the core developers 
and have done some development using a JCR-170 content repository (the 
standard that Alfresco uses and it's really flexible.