Plone in Medical Sciences Division

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Plone in Medical Sciences Division

• (or how not to do it)

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Apologies

• Not overly technical
• A lot done with string and sellotape
• How you set up Plone depends on your situation
• Plone is (has been) flexible enough to use in a
  string and sellotape situation.

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Background - MSD

• One of four academic Divisions in Oxford.
• 20 odd departments (no-one can really give a
  definitive answer on this).
• A number of scientific research centres.
• 23 cross cutting themes and platform
  technologies.
• Bench to bedside basic science to clinical.
• 2.5K actively involved in research research
  income of 130 million.

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Background - Oxford

• Academic freedom subsidiarity enshrined in
  Oxfords strategic plan
• Fragmented diverse
• Divisions a new thing (7 years)
• No authority
• Plenty of independence
• Plenty of scope for creativity

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MSD on the web

• Well over 100 web presences
• About 1/3 have top level domain names
• University Google box found 50,000 pages in
  Medsci collection
• Visitors to www.medsci 20,000 visitors in last
  month not vast (no one notices for a couple of
  days when sys admin forgot to open Port 80)
• No over-arching web-strategy, just a desire to
  improve

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MSD Plone

• Offered if they want it if they dont fine (but
  does affect our ability to aggregate information
  in the future)
• Each top-level domain has its own Plone site
• 2 strategies for micro/sub-sites (more later)
• Everything is evolving as we go e.g. Theme sites
  http//www.neuroscience.ox.ac.uk
• 30 Plone sites really being used another 10
  being played with

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Mount Points

• Each site has a separate mount point
• Can be combined with ZEO
• Set up a zope instance with same Zope and Plone
  plus a clean data.fs. Create a Plone site.
• Mount data.fs to production server.
• Have to be very careful about naming
• Advantages
• Can treat sites separately
• Can grab a particular site for development or
  testing

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Mount point example

• instancerecipe plone.recipe.zope2instance
• zope2-location c\zope\2.9.8\
• zopeuser adminadmin
• http-address 8080
• debug-mode on
• verbose-security on
• zope-conf-additional
• ltzodb_db yoursitegt
• mount-point /yoursite
• ltfilestoragegt
• path buildoutdirectory\var\filestorage
  \yoursite\Data.fs
• lt/filestoragegt
• lt/zodb_dbgt
• yoursite the name you gave the plone site you
  created in the Data.fs

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Servers

• Currently have two moving from one to another
• Phasing out first suspect a memory leak
• Latest is a Virtual Server so can give it more
  RAM when/if required uses ZEO
• Front with Apache and Squid (would like to try
  Varnish but no expertise)
• (cant give details sys admin on holiday)

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Microsites / Subsites

• Some want a small but distinct presence
• Others want a big splash, complete site (note
  this can be important for meeting requirements of
  funding)
• Either
• Use inside out hosting fab and easy
• Or
• INavigationRoot (can assign to a folder within
  ZMI)
• Subclass Navigation tree (easier in Plone 3)
• Use Acquisition for specific templates (probably
  different and more powerful in Plone 3)
• Drop some additional global variables into main
  template (could use a view in Plone 3)

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Inside-out hosting

• Plonesite on 127.0.0.1 becomes www.mainsite.ac.uk/
  subsite
• in Squid
• (r'http//127.0.0.13128/http/www.mainsite.ac.uk/8
  0/subsite(.)',
• r'http//127.0.0.18080/VirtualHostBase/htt
  p/www.mainsite.ac.uk80/Plonesite/VirtualHostRoot/
  _vh_subsite\1', 'P,L'),
• or in Apache
• RewriteRule /subsite() http//127.0.0.18080
  VirtualHostBase/http/www.mainsite. ac.uk80/
  Plonesite/VirtualHostRoot/_vh_subsite1
• This should be all one line but Ive divided it
  so that you can see the logic.

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Migration

• Started with 2.0, almost all sites running under
  2.5, hope to start moving to 3 over this year
• Things Ive learnt
• Separate data.fs really helps
• Be very careful about 3rd party products (check
  whats happening via Trac svn.plone)
• Dont anticipate the Roadmap i.e. Beta versions
  of elements to be integrated into core
• Be prepared to sponsor development
• Aspellis RichDocument tutorial has a good
  section on migrating content types use this
  technique if you want to abandon a product (e.g.
  migrate PloneArticle to ordinary pages)

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Intranets

• Traditional in Oxford for individual sites to
  restrict some content to intranet
• Plone potentially good at this use workflow to
  assign a role intranetViewer and a state -
  Intranet
• However intranetViewer then becomes a fully
  logged in Member lots of rewriting of
  templates and expressions to get around this
  much governed by not isAnon
• Also performance suffers .

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Authorisation by IP

• Not so easy with PAS IPRange Plugin but a bit
  rough around the edges
• NB you can migrate a site without PAS and use the
  old Zope mechanism for IP auth
• AutoRole assigns a role to anonymous viewer on
  IP address nice (avoids templating issues) but
  too scared to use this until Ive tested how it
  would work with Squid!

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Performance

• With Squid / CacheFu OK
• Worthwhile also caching users i.e. LDAP
• More you customise more you get caught out. Add
  views and additional content types to Cache
  setup.
• Additional work required to cache composite page.
• Keep an eye on what you add to portal_css and in
  what order so that you optimise merging.
• Editor experience - pretty terrible one reason
  for upgrading to Plone 3 asap. Jarn have also
  committed some patches for 2.5 to the collective.
• Any other ideas?

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Some ideas from others after the talk

• Use Btree folders (Plone large folders)
• Increase the number of Apache http daemons
• Add a hook to the CSS registry function to sort
  and merge stylesheets as you want.
• Throw more hardware (cheap servers) at it.
• Well try these. Thanks!

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Summary

• Plone adapts well to an environment where
  strategy evolves rather than is imposed.
• Survival of fittest. In our environment Plone is
  constantly being measured against other
  solutions.
• Plenty of good things about Plone.
• Performance is a significant worry.
• Lots of sys admin (needs more time than we have).
• Work involved in keeping up shouldnt be
  underestimated.

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More Information

• Anne.bowtell_at_medsci.ox.ac.uk
• Tjitske.kamphuis_at_medsci.ox.ac.uk