New Hippo Site Toolkit and Hippo CMS increase speed of enterprise site and portal development

Hippo, a leading vendor of open source Content Management Systems (CMS) and Portal technology, has released Hippo CMS version 7.1 and the new Hippo Site Toolkit (HST). HST introduces a quick and low cost way to deliver the power of Hippo CMS 7.1 to the web, offering a fast integration track with a variety of web front-ends and existing applications.

With the new HST, Hippo managed to pair rapid and flexible web development required by today's fast-moving organizations, with control and oversight, manageability and security. HST coupled with Hippo CMS 7.1 effortlessly blends in with the existing IT infrastructure of organizations that need to manage large amounts of content, such as Fortune 500 companies, publishers and governmental bodies.

Under the hood, both products stay close to their roots of The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects they are built on. By developing the HST as a standalone product, the content and business logic are clearly separated from a presentation layer that delivers a flexible, best of breed approach to content management. Each layer is based on Open Standards, such as the Java Content Repository specification (JSR-170), and therefore easily accessible and customizable. To speed up the implementation process, HST and Hippo CMS are designed to work together out-of-the-box with Apache Jetspeed Portal 2.2, within the same security model.

The HST has been developed in close cooperation with Hippo's network of implementation partners and the open source community. Alef Arendsen, principle consultant of JTeam, early committer of Spring and co-founder of SpringSource said, “As an active community member, JTeam has been fortunate to be involved in the development of Hippo Site Toolkit and to oversee a pre-release implementation. We have been impressed with the power and capabilities of the new software. The integration with web frameworks such as Spring MVC enables us to bring our products faster to the market. Hippo is a leader in its field and maintains this leadership through technical innovation and collaboration – this release demonstrates that commitment.”

Arjé Cahn, CTO of Hippo, said, “We understand the challenges users and administrators face in content-heavy organizations with multiple formats and versions. With our powerful combination of HST, Hippo CMS and Apache Jetspeed 2.2, we are giving users and organizations greater control over their content, combined with the tools to create enterprise sites in a fast and cost effective way. Our community of implementation partners has been key in bringing this release to the market. We strive to consistently lead the market with our innovation and focus on developing products that revolutionize content management.”

The key new features in HST/CMS7.1 include:
• 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