A Generic Field Picker Plugin for Hippo CMS

Recently, I released a new forge plugin which provides a generic document field picker so that developers can easily inject their own domain-specific external document browsing functionality.

In Hippo CMS UI, this External Document Picker Base plugin is installed. Then you can configure field(s) in document template bootstrap XML files (a.k.a Hippo CMS "namespace"). So, when you are editing a document in CMS UI, you will see those configured fields displayed by this plugin.
Each field must be configured with a custom domain-specific ExternalSearchServiceFacade implementation class name. Then this plugin component instantiates your ExternalSearchServiceFacade class and invokes it whenever it needs to select/display your domain-specific custom POJOs.

Here is the project homepage:

• https://onehippo-forge.github.io/external-document-picker/

After adding its dependency in your project, the only thing you should do is to implement your domain specific external document service facade (see the javadoc for the detail on the facade interface) and configure its FQCN in the field plugin configuration of your namespace bootstrap XML file.See the page below for detail on how to implement/configure the plugin for your custom picker fields:

• https://onehippo-forge.github.io/external-document-picker/field/architecture.html

At the moment, it supports only Hippo 7.9. I'll try to add a new branch for 7.8 if there are needs. 
As of April 15, 2014, it supports both Hippo CMS 7.8.x and 7.9.x. Please see its release notes:

• https://onehippo-forge.github.io/external-document-picker/release-notes.html

Also, as of 2.0.3, it started supporting a generic link picker in CKEditor toolbars as well. Please see the following pages for details:

• https://onehippo-forge.github.io/external-document-picker/richtext-ckeditor/architecture.html
• https://onehippo-forge.github.io/external-document-picker/richtext-ckeditor/dev-howto.html

This is really powerful because you can simply provide a REST Service URL to the plugin with custom configurations, without having to look into the detail of plugin details.

Enjoy!