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Graham Perrin

Plone and its competition: choosing a CMS - Martin Aspeli - 0 views

  • Plone and its competition: choosing a CMS
  • Martin Aspeli
  • Jul 06, 2009
  • ...79 more annotations...
  • evaluate a whole slew
  • eye-opening
  • quite Plone-oriented
  • vendors' marketing materials decidedly do not help
  • if you're paying someone by the day to come up with a recommendation
  • Vendor Subway Map
  • features they have in their product arsenal
  • Plone sits on the intersection of the "Web content management", "Social software & collaboration" and "Enterprise portal" lines
  • cost (both licensing and likely implementation costs), fit with your existing IT architecture, and usability/end-user experience become a lot more important
  • focus on getting a list of requirements for your end solution
  • Vendor demos have a tendency to gloss over the warts
  • The word "CMS" - Content Management System - is quite overloaded
  • Plone is really a Web CMS
  • vendors sometimes focus mainly on content production
  • Other vendors include a dedicated presentation server
  • Some systems, like Plone, accommodate both in a single server
  • away from tight integration
  • towards federation of services on heterogeneous platforms
  • The "federated" view of IT is more realistic as an option these days
  • better support for standards
  • more use of higher level "glue"
  • Deliverance
  • plone.org, for example, "deliverates" Plone and Trac
  • federated architecture that presents a unified user experience
  • In the Java world, there are more formal standards (notably JSR168 and it's successor JSR186)
  • in theory
  • built once and deployed onto different portal containers
  • An intranet or public website should largely present
  • a stable, well-thought-out information architecture
  • a richer, more bespoke, less application-like user experience
  • a shift away from this one-platform-to-rule-them-all mentality
  • some of the "platform" arguments are red herrings
  • External Editor
  • training your in-house staff
  • pick a solution that is supportable
  • specialist vendor
  • Most modern systems are so complex that you can't just expect your IT staff to be able to support them without at last some investment in training
  • Bake vs. fry
  • Assets vs. content
  • In Plone, there is a structured hierarchy
  • content tree
  • mirrors how files are managed on the desktop
  • Folders and taxonomy
  • Plone is comparatively weak
  • Pages and fragments
  • Managing code and content
  • Zope and Plone communities have done a lot of work to move development out onto the filesystem
  • The contenders Below is a list of systems I think are worth looking at and learning from.
  • Usability is king
  • Even Open Text/RedDot, which says in every "datasheet" that Gartner calls its usability "legendary", is confusing to use at times, and many of the other systems - especially the older ones - are downright shocking
  • just to install the system and click
  • most enlightening evaluation
  • If I can't figure it out easily, it's not good enough
  • What Plone can learn All in all, this evaluation exercise has confirmed my belief that Plone can hold its head high in the web content management world.
  • support for the "bake" model
  • file representation of all content
  • upload content easily
  • browse the site via WebDav
  • IT support staff need to be able to feed and water the servers your CMS runs on
  • Morello has an interesting take
  • integration with Microsoft Office and the desktop
  • dragged from the desktop and dropped into the CMS
  • Open Text/RedDot has a nice model
  • RESTful web services
  • integration with other systems much easier
  • group workspaces
  • already decent add-on products
  • dashboard
  • first thing users see
  • content notification
  • "star" content they care about
  • content re-use
  • support for taxonomy
  • multi-site support
  • through-the-web content types and templates
  • page composition
  • Deco system
  • Conclusion
  • Plone UserVoice forum
Graham Perrin

Review of Veda Williams' Plone 3 Theming - ACLARK.NET, LLC - 0 views

  • Veda Williams'
  • Review
  • Plone 3 Theming
  • ...14 more annotations...
  • If you are interested in Plone and how Plone theming works
  • chapter by chapter review
  • I would have liked to have seen the PyPI features of plone.org mentioned
  • still hard to create Plone themes
  • tool for releasing themes (and any package) to both plone.org/products and pypi.python.org at the same time
  • http://pypi.python.org/pypi/jarn.mkrelease
  • Chapter 15 This chapter (by Alexander Limi) introduces people to "new style" theming
  • a while before it is fully digested
  • http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.xdv
  • great stuff but potentially confusing
  • XSLT transform "on the fly" (in memory)
  • but the recommended deployment strategy is to use NGINX or Apache with Laurence's patches
  • plone.org uses it
  • non-trivial to say the least
Graham Perrin

No, really, you can (just) use Buildout to install Plone. « Alex Clark's Plon... - 0 views

  • Buildout to install Plone
  • Alex Clark
  • a follow up to my Getting Excited about Plone as Eggs post
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • “mostly trivial” to write a buildout.cfg to install Plone
  • a working Plone, but not necessarily a repeatable buildout
  • If you are completely new to buildout
  • install buildout first
  • Distribute
  • curl -O http://python-distribute.org/distribute_setup.py
  • python distribute_setup.py
  • easy_install zc.buildout
  • mkdir plone
  • cd plone
  • buildout init
  • bin/instance console
  • January 7, 2010
Graham Perrin

On Plone documentation - Martin Aspeli - 1 views

  • I think it's a mistake to try and solve all the problems with "Plone documentation" in the same way
    • Graham Perrin
       
      +1
  • rely more on technology
  • What is current good practice?
    • Graham Perrin
       
      My initial reaction to this: get started | essential actions | refinements and current best practice …
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • a corpus small enough that it can be effectively reviewed
  • highlighted and easy to find
  • this is where they should be stumbling
    • Graham Perrin
       
      Can we elaborate on this point?
  • Barriers to entry should be low
  • version the document pertains to
    • Graham Perrin
       
      +1
    • Graham Perrin
       
      Re http://dev.plone.org/plone/ticket/7831 some simple triggers might draw attention to documentation that becomes outdated (or at least deserves review) at product update time.
  • concerned about how easy it is to add an article
  • highlight the "good" bits of documentation
  • reviewed at least each time we make a new Plone release
  • Open the flood-gates
  • If someone wants to contribute documentation, by all means let them!
  • allow comments
  • ratings of the type "was this helpful to you"
    • Graham Perrin
       
      I do often rate things (positively more often than negatively). However: I rarely observe other people's ratings.
  • What's the right way to configure caching?
    • Graham Perrin
       
      Advice may be diverse.
  • group documentation by audience, rather than by type
    • Graham Perrin
       
      I'm never wholly convinced about audience-based documentation.
    • Graham Perrin
       
      Can we group documentation by layer - through the Plone (TTP), Zope management interface (ZMI), file system et cetera?
  • Accept that how-to documentation won't be perfect
  • Add ratings
  • improve commenting
  • this is out of date
    • Graham Perrin
       
      Maybe "This is valid for version n.n of product x" plus "For more recent advice please visit …".
  • We should allow people to make requests for new documentation, and expose the wish list in a way that lets people vote for their favourite requests
    • Graham Perrin
       
      First improvements to a document might be: (1) a link to Trac, so that any documentation-related issue can be tracked; and (2) an in-document summary of relative tickets.
  • We have a Trac
Graham Perrin

who wants to be release manager for Deliverance? - 0 views

  • Deliverance Discussion
  • who wants to be release manager for Deliverance?
  • Nov 29, 2009
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • The situation right now is dismal
  • private fork of the code if they want to make any modifications
  • getting a stable, maintained release of this 0.3 incarnation out the door
  • right now the bottleneck is on the maintenance side
  • it would be really nice to see deliverance moving to some dcvs
  • Deliverance tries to solve a problem that very few people have: styling an existing site without having to touch it
  • Plone where you would need hundreds of hours of work of skilled people to do a full styling
  • if you use Deliverance you still need to theme your Plone site
  • a lot of interest in Deliverance
  • XDV, since that is easier to deploy in non-Python environments
  • Deliverance + a proxy is obviously possible
  • legacy systems
  • "shrink-wrapped" solutions that they can't style
  • All my Plone projects these days use Deliverance or XDV
  • turn off most Plone stylesheets
  • custom stylesheet to augment the designer's styles
  • include the Plone authoring stylesheets more or less intact
  • new to Plone
  • teaching theming
  • new to Plone theming
  • comprehension and productivity
  • With Deliverance/XDV, I can get people who understand HTML + CSS to be productive with Plone
  • a *huge* win
  • hard to set it all up
  • soluble
  • stable 0.3 release out is of utmost importance
  • revisit the option of moving it to a different repository later
  • it only takes a very little bit of stop energy to get someone to go away
  • I hereby bestow upon Ethan the title of Maintainer
  • release now, and figure out code location etc later
  • DVCS's genuinely useful for including people in a development process
  • get git working with the major IDEs
  • I'd be looking at fewer man pages with hg than with git
Graham Perrin

Jon Stahl's Journal » Blog Archive » Plone 4: three times faster than Drupal,... - 0 views

  • Plone 4 is faster out of the box than some of the most common PHP platforms
  • three times faster than Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress
  • Plone 4
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • For read-only operations, once the objects have made it into ZODB’s object cache no database queries need be made
  • Jon Stahl
  • Plone 4 is about to
  • enter beta testing prior to a final release
  • performance
  • out of the box
  • over three times faster
  • what does all this mean?  Well, honestly, not much
  • realistic sample content
  • very, very proud of Plone’s raw speed
  • suspect MAMP not to be very efficient
  • Jan 19th, 2010
  • the difference is down to Plone’s use of the ZODB
  • Contrast this to the PHP/MySQL systems which must perform several selects in order to render the page
  • to fetch new objects it’s slower
  • ZODB fetches are serial
  • Archetypes persistent object design is far from optimal (page data is split over several persistent objects, slowing down load time)
  • addressed as part of Dexterity
  • fundamental architectural difference
  • CMSes that use the RDBMS and some kind of ORM or manual SQL (like Drupal, Joomla)
  • those that use an OODBMS such as Plone
  • ‘out of the box’ speed, since that is something a lot of people historically have not liked about Plone
  • less tuning needed to start with
  • even when caching is not applicable we still get the performance boost
  • our installer sets up ZEO with clients for you, so this is “out-of-the-box”
  • counter the (incorrect) perception out there that “Plone is slow”
Graham Perrin

Overriding the Title tag in Plone 3 - : CORE SOFTWARE GROUP :: Colorado based solution ... - 0 views

  • Overriding the Title tag in Plone 3
  • Mike Cullerton
  • Jan 26, 2010
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • The default title for a Plone 3 site has the page title on the left and portal title on the right, separated by an em dash
  • create a class to render your title
  • override the plone.htmlhead.title viewlet
  • Override the viewlet in your own [theme]/browser/configure.zcml
  • add the location of your new class
Graham Perrin

Relating content automatically in Plone - Vox - 0 views

  • list of related content automatically
  • Relating content automatically in Plone
  • automatically
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • 02-ene-08
  • a proof-of-concept product called Haystack
  • Benjamin Saller
  • haystack_tool included a couple of methods
  • summarize text
  • list of "topics" extracted from the content
  • portlets to demonstrate its functionality
  • low quality of the "topics"
  • didn't understood the meaning of words
  • linguistic mapping and automated conceptual mapping, providing high-quality relationships with little or no human effort
  • Term Extraction
  • python implementation
  • Implementing this in Plone
  • or use Content Rules
  • trigger a script in a workflow transition
  • fill the Subject field
  • additional field to store
  • better  quality
  • list of pending stuff to test (with a little help of Matt Bowen, of course)
  • Great idea
  • python text summariser which doesn't require Yahoo's web service
  • http://pypi.python.org/pypi/topia.termextract
  • several ways to relate content, both based on keywords and based on explicit relationships, in stock Plone
  • This article is about automatic text summaries based on linguistic analysis
Graham Perrin

Request For Comments: My Plone/Apache Stack « jjmojojjmojo: In Effect - 2 views

Graham Perrin

Table: Plone themes | CSS, viewlets, templates - 0 views

Graham Perrin

Bug #415270 in collective.buildout: "Less memory hungry settings for plone.recipe.zope2... - 0 views

  • Less memory hungry
  • plone.recipe.zope2instance
  • Less memory hungry settings for plone.recipe.zope2instance
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • zodb cache site of 5000 objects
  • too much for servers of 512 MB - 768 MB memory (Plone 3.x)
  • suggest smaller cache
  • cache megabyte limiter
  • release notes
  •  
    Interesting. I'll experiment with my Plone 3.3.4 ZEO cluster on a G4 PowerPC Xserve, where physical RAM is limited to 2 GB …
Graham Perrin

How to unit test security declarations in Plone and Zope | Twinapex Blog - 0 views

  • How to unit test security declarations in Plone and Zope
  • October 3, 2008
  • a fool proof example
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • great mystery
  • how to properly unit test your content type and workflow security declarations
  • something better
  • no one seem to know
  • RestrictedPython package Read me got revamped
  • a clue how to one could hit Unauthorized exceptions in unit testing
  •  
    How to unit test security declarations in Plone and Zope
Graham Perrin

Plone 4 architecture - 38 views

  •  
    PDF
  •  
    One of the PNGs at http://www.wuala.com/Zope%20&%20Plone/Plone/2010/01/08/a is based on Martin Aspeli's PDF.
Graham Perrin

Of babies and bathwater (or: Why I love the Zope Component Architecture) - Martin Aspeli - 0 views

  • Of babies and bathwater (or: Why I love the Zope Component Architecture)
  • Martin Aspeli
  • Dec 01, 2009
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • In defence of one of the great Python frameworks of the past decade
  • ZCA rocks. It's an incredibly advanced and powerful way to build software
  • ZCA adds complexity. It demands that you swallow its core concepts up front (interfaces, adapters, utilities, events) and get to know them pretty well
  • people can do crazy things, usually doing as much harm as good
  • elegant frameworks like BFG or Pylons
  • That doesn't mean the ZCA is right for all situations
  • learning to use the ZCA effectively is a bit like learning a new programming language on top of Python. You need to "get" those concepts
  • For the ZCA itself, there is clearly an opportunity right now to evolve
  • My personal wish-list
  • advice for projects, such as Plone, that use the ZCA for extensibility and inversion-of-control
  • Don't let the ZCA be the first API that people see
  • don't assume everyone has yet reached ZCA mastery
  • ZCA as a building block
  • BFG does this very well
    • Graham Perrin
  • We're trying to do something similar with Dexterity and the ecosystem of tools around it
  • The same will hopefully be true for other technologies as we move towards Plone 5
  • improved integrator learning curve
Graham Perrin

Using Hudson CI for Plone projects - Martin Aspeli - 0 views

  • Nov 07, 2009
  • Martin Aspeli
  • Hudson Continuous Integration
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • provides a test runner that can output the types of XML test reports that Hudson expects
  • collective.xmltestreport
  • pretty easy to set it all up
  • Using Hudson CI for Plone projects
Graham Perrin

Is Plone too hard? - Martin Aspeli - 0 views

  • Is Plone too hard?
  • Feb 03, 2008
  • Themes are not themes, they are customisation
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • ZMI is not alway ideal
  • but it's powerful and quick as hell
  • The usual answer here is to use grep
  • can't find anything
  • Plone's performance is fine if you know how to set it up. We should make that easier by giving CacheFu an overhaul
  • Restarts suck. Slow restarts suck more
  • Each of these areas (and other ones) will need a "champion"
  • imagine we had an all-powerful introspection tool
Graham Perrin

..: hannosch :..: Plone LOC statistics - 0 views

Graham Perrin

..: hannosch :..: News from Plone trunk - 0 views

  • News from Plone trunk
  • November 2008
  • moved our entire stack towards eggs
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