Note : this page comes from an Alexandre Limi's personnal folder on plone.org. Thanks for the presentation Alex :)

"A very disorganised and chaotic presentation that I did in Austria. All disclaimers apply, you had to be there to get the value of it ;) As usual, enter Opera's full screen mode to get the slide presentation, or in Mozilla if they have implemented support for CSS projection mode yet."

Introduction

• Alexander Limi - www.limi.net
• Usability Analyst & Interface Designer
• One of the two Plone founders
• Visiting Austria in connection with the LEADER project

Basis

• Zope Application Server
• Python Language
• Plone Content Management System
• Open source
• GPL license, commercial licenses available

Open Source

• Poster child: Linux
• Social responsibility
• GPL vs. Shared Source
• End result: Control and flexibility

What is Plone used for?

• Community portals
• Intranets
• Public web sites
• Administration
• Project management
• Itself :)

History

• In development for over 2 years
• The biggest and most successful project in the history of Zope
• Started as a two-man project
• Now: over 20 core developers, hundreds of third-party developers

Immediate benefits

• Low threshold - easy to get started!
• Focus on content, not technology
• Fosters coherent design and look
• "Rorschach test"

Built-in types

• Documents
• Images
• News
• Events
• Links
• Any type of file (Flash, PDF, Excel)

More types

• Issue Tracker
• Wiki (collaborative document editing)
• Chat & Instant messaging
• Discussion areas

Metadata

• Dublin Core
• Extensible
• Adds value to objects

Implications of metadata

• Makes you less reliant on initial structure
• Makes it easy to create custom views on your data
• Put this power in the hands of users via Topics

More about metadata

• Governs where content shows up
• Content is relevant in a lot of different contexts
• Easy to build many-to-many relations (Amazon.com)

Process benefits

• Manage your content from anywhere (also mobile phone browsers)
• Live editing
• Facilitates collaboration (local roles)
• User-centric approach

Other benefits

• Limited use of graphics
• Accessibility focus
• Encourages ownership, which leads to content production and fresh content
• Multiple-level undo

Technical benefits

• The world's first standards-compliant templating language
• Fully indexed, powerful search engine
• Modular, easy to expand and customize
• Powerful workflow system

Internationalization

• Developers in 14 countries
• Built from the ground up for multiple languages
• Easy to add new languages (currently 25, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean)

Component Architecture

• Reusable components
• Aggregates development
• Unifies the platform
• Plone + the Collective currently has
  • 80+ developers
  • 60 plug-in modules

Easy deployment

• Semi-autonomous units, projects manage themselves
• OS-agnostic (Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, BSD, Solaris)
• Customization Policies allow easy packaging

Workflow

• Mimicks business processes
• Entity-based workflows
• Action-based workflows
• Everything is workflowable, even Users

Integration

• Plays well with existing systems
• Authentication
  • LDAP
  • SQL
  • Operating systems
• Data storage
  • Built-in object database
  • External database (PostgreSQL, Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase, MySQL)
  • Object-relational mapping

User Interface

• Strong focus on friendly and easy to use interface
• Usability testing
• Single sign-on
• Portlets

User Interface, Technical

• Fully XHTML and CSS compliant
• Lightweight
• "Magic" tricks
  • Every page is automatically printable
  • Every page has a presentation mode

Flexible security architecture

• Roles
• Groups
• Flexible permissions can be assigned to any of these
• Local roles

Users of Plone

• Commercial entities
  • Bertelsmann
  • Lufthansa
• Government entities
  • NASA
  • Govt. of Hawaii
  • Govt. of New Zealand
• Educational entities
  • University of London
• Communities
  • Community Enabler (Australia)

The Plone Network

• Non-profit based in France
• Umbrella organization for Plone companies worldwide
• Offers
  • Support
  • Training
  • Hosting services
  • Development
  • Design services
  • Service-level agreements

Plone Future

• Topic Maps (ISO 13250 and XTM 1.0)
• Archetypes
  • Through-the-web generation of new content types
  • Powerful schema abstraction
• Staging
• Improved Workspaces integration

Resources

• www.plone.org - free download
• www.zope.com

"Plone Just Works."