iwmw 2004: give the dog a plone (a6)
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Give the dog a PloneDominic HilesKieren Pitts
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Introduction• Who are we?• What is Plone?• Implementing the Plone CMS• Plone pitfalls• Summary
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ILRT• Unique combination of projects, services and
research with national and international reputation
• 75-80 Staff• Semantic Web – RDF, XML, RSS and more• Elearning – Biz/ed, LTSN, LTSS• Digital Images – TASi, Biomed• Digital Libraries Portals – SOSIG, Regard,
Subject Portals• Internet Development (ID)
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Who are we?• Dominic Hiles
– Web developer– Background in information systems design
• Kieren Pitts– Senior Technical Researcher– Web development– Previously a research biologist
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Internet Development (ID) group• 10+ staff: usability engineers, designers,
developers (plus other ILRT staff)• Consultancy unit – academic and public
sectors• Web sites, eLearning tools, car-share
software, survey software, content management systems
• Usability reviews, testing, technical reviews
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Clients (2002-04)• University of Bristol (40-50%)• 48 Universities using CROS• 5 Universities using BOS• Bristol City Council, Temple
Quay companies, NHS, Ford UK, Oxford Universities, Swansea (234car)
• University of Southampton (BOPCRIS)
• HESDA• HEFCE – Good Management
Practice• UCISA
• SCONUL• Church of England• Institute for Fiscal Studies• Environment Agency• INASP• JISC Assist• Children’s Society• West Yorkshire Archive
Service• National Maritime Museum• CILIP, BIOME, BECTA, DLTR,
LTSN centres and more…
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What is Plone?• A Content Management System (CMS)• Version 2 released Easter 2004• Built on Zope…
– An open-source Web application server– Written in Python (also used in Google!)
• …and CMF– Content Management Framework– Arguably, a "bare bones" CMS implementation
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The Plone Environment
Zope
PloneCMF
Web application
Optional Web server (e.g. Apache)
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Plone features• Open source• TTW management• XHTML• Extensible workflow
system• Accessible GUI• Search engine• WYSIWYG or external
XHTML editing
• Effective and expiration dates for content
• Pluggable user management
• External RDBMS Connectivity
• Automated RSS feeds• Platform independent
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Why Plone?• Open Source• Free!• Feature rich - good fit with user
requirements• Experience with Zope• Platform independent
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The Projects• LTSN BEST
– Business Education Support Team is the Business, Management and Accountancy subject centre of the Higher Education Academy
– A "new" site• Church of England
– Migrating an existing site– 2000 static HTML pages– 350 images, 450 "text" files– 4 ASP Web applications, serving data from around
20,000 database records, held in 4 different databases
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Real World Plone
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Skins• Fundamental Plone concept• Separate views on the same content• Advantages
– Avoids compromising site design for site administration ("My Plone")
– Usable, accessible (WAI AA) administrative interface already written and extensively researched/tested => reduced total cost of ownership
– Allows developer to customise different aspects of functionality separately
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Content maintenance1. Create the business roles – what
should people be able to do to the content?
2. Create the workflow – provides the mechanism to underpin these roles
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Content maintenance - roles• What should content maintainers be
able to do with the content?– Create and edit content?– Review and Publish content?– Remove content?
• Where on your site should they able to do it?– The whole site…– ...or just specified areas?
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Content maintenance – roles (2)• Managing the roles
– Groups are created and named according to a folder-dependant role• e.g. info_editors (editors of the info folder)
– Users are placed in group(s) according to their role(s) in a given content area
– Roles can also be created that allow users to manage other users
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Content maintenance - workflow• The process underlying the business
roles• Can be simple…
– All content is automatically published when saved or edited
• …or complex– Content must be reviewed before publishing– Can be versioned and later retrieved or reverted
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Private
Pending
Published
Reject
Retract
Submit
Publish
RetractPublish
Re-edit(copy)
Versioned
Revert
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Content migration• Import of HTML and file objects (e.g. PDFs,
Images)– Opportunity to migrate HTML to valid XHTML– Import process can be semi-automated
• Plone can connect to and display data from most existing RDBMS
• It may be better to import these data as Plone "objects"– e.g. "Churches for Sale" database
• Content extractable = exit strategy
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Content editing• TTW WYSIWYG editor
– Kupu supplied as standard– edit-On Pro provides different feature set
• External editor (e.g. Dreamweaver)• Editing (X)HTML source• Upload new (X)HTML source
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edit-On Pro in action
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So, it's all rosy - not quite…• Out the box, there's only one content role
– Plone evolved from a community-orientated portal – No concept of business "ownership" – content "owned" by
creator• Designing a collaborative workflow is hard – 40% of
development time for Church of England• No Versioning or Revisioning
– We wrote our own…but lots now appearing• No deletion management (cf. Windows Recycle Bin)
– Again, we wrote our own
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So, it's all rosy (2) ?• User management
– Devolving user management to non-developers not possible by default
– Relatively easy to extend Plone to allow this– 3rd Party Product (CMFMember) also available to
facilitate this• Content migration
– Again, no tools "out the box"– Migration to accessible XHTML invariably requires
some manual work
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So, it's all rosy (3) ?• Maintenance
– Our development overlapped Plone 2 release cycle – not good!
– Product testing required with each new Plone release
– Writing reusable code can cause problems– Some issues ameliorated by appropriate use
of CVS
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Summary• Skins – different views on the same
content• Roles – control what people can do and
where• User management – allocate roles• Workflow - mechanism underpinning the
roles• Content migration• Content editing
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DiscussionSlides available at:
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/publications/conf/IWMW2004/plone_slides.ppt
Contact:[email protected]@bristol.ac.uk