Technical information about the TMCore EPiServer Module 3.0 Alpha
Installation and Configuration
We have only tested this against the EPiServer CMS RC3 release. We suspect and hope it will work with subsequent RCs and we'll keep this blog up to date regarding compatability as new releases come out.
The existing documentation for installation and usage remains the same, therefore following the installation instructions provided is the correct procedure with the following addition. There is one new configuration property called:
<add key="NP_TM_NPCL_Endpoint" value="http://localhost/npcl-ws/NPCLSchemaService.asmx" />
This does have a default value (shown above) but in case your NPCL web service is somewhere else this is the additional line to add to the appsettings section in web.config.
Known Issues
If the Topic Map tab contents cannot render within the window and a scrollbar is required in Internet Explorer 7, then scrolling results in some weird behaviour in regards to the CSS. You can see updates on this issue on the EPiServer Developer Forum.
Migration from TMCore EPiServer Module 2.x
We haven't done a rigorous test of this, but none of the topic map data structures have been changed and as we have used our own GUID property on EPiServer pages in the 2.0 module pulling across the EPiServer data and the topic map we do not expect any compatibility issues of this type.
Networked Planet Announces release of EPiServer Module 3.0 Alpha for EPiServer CMS 5.0
We are pleased to announce the availaility of TMCore EPiServer Module 3.0 Alpha, compatible with EPiServer CMS v5 RC3.
Networked Planet are committed to ongoing support of new 3rd party product versions, exploiting new features to enable more powerful solutions.
The release can be download from http://www.networkedplanet.com/download/EPiServerModule/EPiServerModule-3.0.zip.
There is some further technical information in the OnTopic blog.
New features
This alpha has enhancements to the topic pickers, improved schema performance and Firefox 2.x support. However, we are currently considering new value added features to add to the product before the final release. Here are some of the things we are considering:
- Topic auto-suggest feature - using analysis of the text to suggest topics to connect to.
- Treating documents in EPiServer CMS as topics and allowing them to be associated with page topics.
- Social book marking extension - allowing end users to create their own topics / tags and use them to organise episerver content
- Faceted Search interface - a powerful control for slicing and dicing through content.
- Forms based query builder - a web control for building topic map queries.
If there are other things you would like us to consider please email contact@networkedplanet.com.
Release plan
We will develop and test a set of features inline with the EPiServer RC's and intend to release TMCore EPiServer Module 3.0 shortly after EPiServer CMS 5.0 final is released
Topic Map Objects Research Paper
While this paper has been presented at TMRA and Extreme we thought it would be good to publish it here as well.
This paper is important as it points at the next level of topic map based productivity tools and utilities. For the topic map market to grow the tool and product creators need to enable developers and information architects to more rapidly build and deploy Topic Maps based applications.
This paper describes a C# framework for mapping TMDM data into domain specific classes. In somes ways it can be considered as a serialisation technology. However, TMObjects goes beyond that to provide update capabilites through the domain specific objects.
We are currently looking into how to improve the performance of the tmobjects read capability and also how the C# binding classes can be generated from NPCL (Networked Planet Constraint Language) structures. All this will lead to development environments that have all the flexibility and power of topic maps but with the comfort and support found with Visual Studio and a domain object model.
The full paper can be found here : Download file
NetworkedPlanet Sponsors TMRA 2007
NetworkedPlanet are proud to be sponsoring this year's International Conference on Topic Maps Research and Applications, TMRA 2007.
TMRA 2007 is a scientific and industrial forum whose main object is connecting the key players in the Topic Maps community. It is also a great opportunity to hear leading researchers and developers talk about what is happening and what will be happening in the realm of Topic Maps.
For more information on the conference please visit the TMRA conference website .
