Disclaimer The opinions expressed herein are my own personal opinions and do not represent my employer's view in any way.
If you have not had a chance to check out the latest iteration of the Web Content Management offering from Oracle you are missing out. From a development point of view this is the most flexible version yet, and from the developer perspective it is certainly the most full of promise. There are at least three features of this release that can via for a compelling reason to upgrade.
Some of you may have heard of the new Ephox based editor. That is pretty neat, but I going to side step that and save it for another post. No, the more compelling storyline and the first of the three most interesting points is the part that wraps the editor. Very nearly everything but the Site Studio Designer is now web based (or more importantly component based). This means we can create components and override/enhance almost anything. Should we? I guess that depends on your level of daring-do. This also means you could swap out Ephox if you didn’t like it for something like FCK Editor.
The second feature I find most interesting is the new data file structure. This is a major leap forward towards true content reusability. Data files can now be used in more than one place on the site. Even if the regions are named differently. In fact, if you wanted you could use the same data file in multiple content regions on the same page.
Finally, one of the big improvements I like most as a developer is really tied to one of the latest Core updates for content server which adds JSON support. Many of you already knew that you can use IsJava=1, or IsSoap=1 in the url to get the underlying data stream for the page to display in various (HDA/XML) formats. Now you can get that data in JSON format as well. This can make AJAX integration with content server simpler and perhaps less expensive. Somewhat tied to this is the new console window. When you are in contributor mode sometime try pressing CTRL-ALT-SHIFT-C all at once and check out the window that pops up. Some nifty stuff in there.