As a Nuxeo Solution Architect, I am constantly talking with customers and prospective customers about what is possible with theNuxeo Content Services Platform. Often the outcome of this is new functionality that demonstrates a new way to work with the Nuxeo Platform. We used to call this the nuxeo-presales-prototyping-toolkit. I have always thought of this as a “Labs” type of project to explore new functionality that is not part of a main release (and of course not supported as part of the main release either) but still useful nonetheless.

Welcome to Labs

I am excited to announce that we have repackaged everything into a Nuxeo Labs set of plug-ins obviously called nuxeo-labs. We also took this opportunity to also add some new killer features:

  • An operation to digitally sign a pdf
  • Operations to handle images (watermarking, crop, …)
  • A toolbar button that allows the user to manually crop a picture.

So. What is nuxeo-labs?

The introduction in the readme page on GitHub clearly explains it and I am bit lazy, so let me just copy paste it here:

Nuxeo Solution Architects team produces prototypes for our current and future customers to help them solve a specific problem they have that is not currently a part of the Nuxeo Platform. When something that could be valuable to other users comes out of it, we publish them openly into the nuxeo-labs repository.

Here is how it works: We need a specific feature that is not in the platform, so we code it. Yes: It’s that simple. But we don’t want to keep these innovations only for us and for prototyping. We want to make it available to any Nuxeo user. It is the reason why you find openly available in nuxeo-labs a whole set of cool, interesting and awesome features. For example:

  • Operations to be used with your Automation Chains So for example, we have SignPDF, ImageChangeFormat, ImageCrop, ImageCropInDocument, ImageWatermarkWithText, GenericConverter, GetInfoFromMediaInfo, GetSpecificInformationFromMediaInfo, and (as of “today”) PublishTemplateRendition
  • nuxeo-labs-fancybox, where in Studio, you define a layout, and automation chain and an XML extension and you have a nice dialog to display to the user
  • nuxeo-labs-we-publication is a pretty cool WebEngine module which displays the Sections
  • And a .jar to start Nuxeo in the DAM tab

The only point that must be made crystal clear is that nuxeo-labs, as all “labs projects,” is not officially-supported. I mean it is not part of our support. So if you use it and find a bug(1), don’t loose time filling a JIRA ticket. Ask on answers.nuxeo.com, or contact your ASAT(2) member. Now, what if you installed the previous, now deprecated, nuxeo-presales-prototyping-toolkit? Well, just uninstall it and install nuxeo-labs instead, that’s all. We kept all the IDs of all the operations, so it’s transparent.

Enjoy nuxeo-labs!

(1) A bug? Come on! Who could ever imagine the ASAT(2) can publish code with any bug? (2) Awesome Solutions Architects Team