Open Source Hippo CMS 7.0 Gets Revamped Core

By Irina Guseva (@irina_guseva) Jan 26, 2009

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Hippo CMS 7.0

Hippo, a vendor in open source Enterprise Content Management and Portal technology, has launched version 7.0 of its Content Management System.

In the new release, Hippo CMS boasts easier categorization of content “that is not found in other open source CMS product,” in addition to a completely revamped technology core based on Apache Jackrabbit.

The Apachean Jack-of-All-Rabbits devotion sounds quite familiar, doesn’t it?

Don’t Know Much About Hippo?

Well, you probably should. Hippo is hip and is on our “vendors to watch” list.

Hippo CMS is an enterprise-class open source software product designed for medium to large businesses that have a large quantity of files, documents and web content that needs to be captured, stored, preserved and delivered internally and externally.

Hippo’s European headquarters are in Amsterdam, Netherlands, with over 50 employees. There’s also the U.S. office in San Francisco, California. The company was founded in 1999 and today has a global base of over 150 customers. Hippo’s target markets usually education, publishing, manufacturing, financial services, and governmental agencies.

Hippo CMS Open Architecture

The Hippo architecture introduced in version 6.0 has been further improved. It introduces a high-performance faceted repository based on Apache Lucene and Apache Jackrabbit. The faceted repository introduces “drop and start” dynamic categorization of content, allowing organizations to speed up their implementations.

Hippo CMS architecture consists of three main components:

Hippo Repository
Hippo CMS
Hippo Site Toolkit or Hippo Portal

These components form the basis for solutions based on Hippo CMS, and are customizable. The following open source components can be integrated with Hippo CMS:

Apache Jetspeed (Enterprise portal)
Apache Jackrabbit (Content repository)
Apache Lucene (Search engine)
Apache Wicket (Web framework)

Hippo CMS runs in a Java environment. It has been also used as a service on Linux distributions, Sun Solaris or Windows.

Hippo CMS 7.0 New Features

The new version is said to be “highly extensible,” allowing organizations to choose from many different plugins to match their enterprise content management needs.

Arjé Cahn, CTO of Hippo, said: “Hippo CMS 7.0 is designed to help organizations that need to manage a lot of data. It provides them with an intuitive, flexible and enterprise-class content management system that will meet the unique content management needs of their business, with no data lock-in or excessive costs. The new product was designed with ease of implementation and extensibility in mind.”

The new GUI technology has moved to Apache Wicket enabling a fancy AJAXy GUI with drag&drop and autosave functionality.

Key features of the current release include:

Faceted repository for tagging content in multiple ways to make it easier to order, find and use
JSR 170 support for access to content repositories in a standardized manner
Support for JavaServer Pages (JSP), JavaServer Faces (JSF), Cocoon, Portlets and easier template editing to make the software extensible for developers
Extensibility through plugin architecture and configurations for the ability to extend and modify the CMS
Node granularity to make data more manageable
Indexing of external repositories for easier management of content from various sources and centralized indexing
More CMS tools

Hippo CMS 7.0’s New Apache Jackrabbit-Based Core

Version 7.0 features a completely new technological core based on Apache Jackrabbit, introducing full JSR-170 compliance. Hippo is known for its support of Apache technologies. Nine members of the Hippo team are members for The Apache Software Foundation.