Alfresco is the Open Source Alternative for Enterprise Content Management (ECM), providing Document Management, Collaboration, Records Management, Knowledge Management, Web Content Management and Imaging.

Fancy working with Alfresco ECM or contributing to it, but don't want to waste way too much time in googling ?

Then, you are in the right place. Just embrace maven :)

Alfresco still bases its customizations on custom Ant builds and a hardly manageable and extensible SDK. This consideration makes it definitely not of easy penetration in two very important contexts like:

Enterprise processes: being ECM Alfresco should ship enterprise process level lifecycle management for its modules, with features like dependency management, properties filtering, documentation, release, centralized lib version management, etc. Managing Alfresco custom modules with Maven will provide all the mentioned benefits.

open source mainstream community (e.g. Apache) : due to the convention over configuration based approach to customization, developing an extension too often ends up in infinite unstructured wiki/forum documentation lookup. Using maven archetypes and embedded Jetty appserver run you could have an Alfresco application running with just 2 command lines standard commands.

The usage of Maven Alfresco archetypes can solve both this issues and bring back Alfresco development to what it should be, i.e. FUN!

So, have fun! ;)