Technology

Hippo CMS 7 is fully based on a modern web architecture, supporting open standards.

Hippo CMS consists of three components:

  • Hippo Repository – where your content is stored
  • Hippo CMS user interface – where your content is managed
  • Presentation layer – where your content is published

These three components run as separate applications, maximizing interoperability and scalability. This gives you the freedom to use your favorite technology to implement the presentation layer. You could use one of our open source toolkits that are available for popular web frameworks, or use your own approach. You could use Jetspeed Portal to integrate your presentation layer with your other web applications.

The Hippo Repository

Hippo Repository is the central component in Hippo CMS. All content is stored in the repository, and all content management functionality is implemented here. The content and the CMS functionalities are exposed through a standard Java Content Repository (JSR-170) interface. Hippo Repository is based on the JCR reference implementation, Apache Jackrabbit.

All your content is stored in the JCR compliant Hippo Repository, and is therefore accessible by any application supporting the JCR interface. Moreover, all content management functionalities provided by Hippo CMS are exposed through the same JCR interface. This means any external application can create, import, export, search, manage, structure, manipulate and publish content, just by using the JCR interface.

In addition, Hippo CMS supports many other open standards for data exchange, including XML, PDF, RSS and XHTML.

To ensure compatibility of future releases, Hippo is actively involved in the specification of next generation open standards, such as JSR-283 (Java Content Repository 2.0).

Hippo CMS interface

Hippo CMS is a web application, essentially providing the user interface through which the content management and administrative functionalities exposed by Hippo Repository can be used in an intuitive and user friendly way. Hippo CMS is fully customizable through a GUI plugin architecture based on the Apache Wicket web application framework.

Hippo Site Toolkit

The Hippo site Toolkit lets you rapidly develop sites and applications based on the Hippo JCR repository. Developers can work with their technology platform of choice. The HST currently supports: Spring MVC, JSP, JSF, Wicket and Ruby and takes care of threading, caching, URL mapping and repository connectivity. Components developed on the HST can be re-used without modification in the Jetspeed Portal.
HST offers a variety of support modules; create and reuse your own and components created by others on the Hippo Forge.

Plug-ins

The Hippo CMS user interface allows you to deploy custom plug-ins that can access all Hippo CMS core functionality. Plug-ins maybe designed to connect and interact with external applications such as DMS solutions, CRM applications; Plug-ins can be also designed to automate repetitive tasks for end user enhancing user experience.

Specifications

  • Seamless Portal integration JSR 168/286, optimized for recently released Apache Jetspeed 2.2. HST website components run transparently in the Portal as native portlets.
  • Faceted browsing of the content structures in the CMS – give users their own views for easy navigation and use
  • Web framework independence, with support for JSP, Wicket and advanced support for Spring MVC and others. WebDAV and XML support
  • Support for JavaServer Pages (JSP), JavaServer Faces (JSF), Cocoon, Portlets and Ruby and easy template editing to make the software extendable for developers
  • JCR (JSR-170) support to access content repositories in a standardized manner
  • Extensibility through plug-in architecture and configurations to allow users to extend and modify the CMS as their content management needs change
  • Indexing external repositories making it easier for content to be culled from various and incompatible sources and stored centrally
  • Meta data storage indexing external content sources and node granularity, making data more manageable
  • High performance built-in search built on Apache Lucene
  • Faceted Security Model AKA Knowledge domains
  • Full dynamic publishing based on high performant Query Language
  • Intelligent Caching (active caching with fine grained validity check), vertically and horizontally scalable with clustering and replication support for solutions with millions of documents or millions of page hits

  • Multi channel publication

    Content reuse
    • Website
    • Intranet
    • Portal (JSR-168 and JSR-286)
    • Print publication
    • Mobile
    • Java applications
    • XML feeds
    • Separation of content and layout
    • Related content discovery based on metadata
    • Image gallery, assets, file management
    • Large content sets

    User friendly

    Out of the box functionality
    • Intuitive web based user interface
    • WYSIWYG editing
    • In context preview
    • Flexible roles and workflow
    • Readable URL's
    • User / Group / Role management
    • Workflow
    • Versioning
    • Multi-tab document editing
    • Content variants
    • Image scaling
    • Metadata
    • Search
    • .. and much more
    Technology

    Integration
    • Java
    • Open standards support
    • JCR repository
      JSR-170, JSR-283*
    • Portlet support
      JSR-168, JSR-286
    • XML import and export
    • LDAP
    • SQL Databases: MySQL, Oracle, MSSQL,  JDBC compliant databases
    • XML syndication
    • Java API (JCR)
    • Portal integration