Customization and Development

Nuxeo Platform provides several solutions to let you customize and extend the platform:

• use Nuxeo Studio to do your configurations and extensions via a Web UI,
• write XML files to configure Nuxeo and deploy new plugins,
• develop your own extensions and plugins.

Choosing the right solution depends on:

• your requirements:
  if you want to customize your Nuxeo application, Nuxeo Studio should do all the work for you. But if you want to develop a very specific service or component, you will have to write code;
• your profile:
  in order to develop extensions to Nuxeo you need to be able to write some Java code.

Using Nuxeo Studio

If you are not used to customizing Nuxeo, you should give a try to Nuxeo Studio, a visual environment to configure your Nuxeo DM, DAM or CMF instance.

Doing XML configuration

Inside the Nuxeo Platform, you can configure a lot of stuff via simple XML files.

We advise you to give first a glance at all the Nuxeo Platform wiki domain, so that you get a global idea of the architecture of the product. In particular, you should have a look at the Component model overview that will explain you how the platform is built.

Then, you will need to know:

• what can be configured inside the platform (what extension points exist);
• what contributions are already deployed in the Nuxeo distribution you use.

If you want to go further and configure other aspects of Nuxeo, you don't need to get the source code, you can simply browse the Platform Explorer Site that let you browse:

• Nuxeo Distributions,
• Services,
• Extension Points.

For each item, you can have access to description, XML definition and samples.
For an example, you can have a look at this Sample Link.

When you are not creating a real Nuxeo Plugin (i.e. a JAR), XML configuration files should:

• be copied in the "config" directory (nuxeo.ear/config or nxserver/config),
• have a filename ending with -config.xml,
• have a unique component identifier.

By default, XML files contributed in the "config" directory are loaded only when the server starts, so you need to restart the server to see your changes.

Java plugins

If you want to go further (or just prefer coding), you can of course use Java to build a new Nuxeo component.

One of the key points is that you don't need Nuxeo source code to do that:

• you don't need to have Nuxeo source code to be able to write a plugin,
• you don't need to rebuild Nuxeo to deploy your plugin.

Nuxeo Java components are deployed the same way as XML components are deployed, you just have to package the JAR correctly, copy it in the right location and restart the server.

In order to start coding you can read the Dev Cookbook.