Give the dog a Plone

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Give the dog a Plone

• Dominic Hiles
• Kieren 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
• Childrens 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
Optional Web server (e.g. Apache)
Web application
Plone
CMF
Zope
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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 gt reduced total cost of
  ownership
• Allows developer to customise different aspects
  of functionality separately

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Content maintenance

1. 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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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 ownbut 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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Discussion

• Slides available at http//www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/pu
  blications/conf/IWMW2004/plone_slides.ppt
• Contact
• dominic.hiles_at_bristol.ac.uk
• kieren.pitts_at_bristol.ac.uk