Open source alternative to Sharepoint lists

Question

Sharepoint's lists functionality is powerful. Because I don't want all the other functionality of Sharepoint, I have been looking for an alternative (preferrable open source) without much success.

Basically I want to have a platform or web application that:

1. allows us to define custom datatypes (for different kinds of customer products)
2. has the possibility to create views or forms to present to the user for reading, creating or updating the information of the items of a given datatype
3. a ui to setup this configuration is not required but would be nice to have

In an ideal scenario there is an API to get the data out afterwards for further processing.

Answer 1

I have heard of Alfresco (but have not used it) which is a free open source content management system. To address each of your mentioned needed features: 1. It has the ability to add custom content types via XML (http://wiki.alfresco.com/wiki/Step-By-Step:_Creating_A_Custom_Model). 2. I didn't see a lot of support of individual views but generic views can be setup when creating your model 3. Alfresco has provided installation guides for various installation configurations. They require a login to download the guides (http://www.alfresco.com/products/docs/) 4. REST support.

List of Features from 10K view. I would check out all of the features before validating it fits your needs. (http://www.alfresco.com/products/dm/features/)