The power of Plone
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."