Day 1 (Plone Conference 2008 Notes)

by T. Kim Nguyen — last modified Oct 13, 2008 04:19 PM

— filed under: ploneconf2008

Kim's notes

Today we had a very full day of keynotes and sessions. We jotted down many notes and ideas on products we want to explore using. We heard about future directions of Plone as well. It was very interesting putting faces to the names of people we've been seeing online, and all the famous people (at least in the Plone world!) are here.

Session Notes

The 10% Manifesto: methods for organized contribution to strategic development of Plone (Panel)

Geir Baekholt (Jarn), Tarek Ziadé (Ingeniweb), Matt Hamilton (NetSights), Calvin Hendryx-Parker (Six Feet Up), Chris Johnson (ifpeople)

split cost of bigger projects over several clients
dedicate 10% of your time to Plone (fixing bugs, reporting bugs, giving back to the community), e.g. Friday afternoons
contract with clients to open source all work; benefits the clients as well as Plone since a large community may contribute code or bug fixes; Limi's comment: "software as a liability, not an asset"
language barriers for non-English contributors
put code out in the open to begin with, to ensure everyone can see and contribute to your code; e.g. the collective. Also lets you know ahead of time what else is out there that is in the same space as what you are trying to accomplish
put code in the collective namespace
blog about what you are doing or want to do at planet.plone.org

Moving an old-style product to Plone 3

Ricardo Alves (Eurotux)

how to reimplement a Plone 2 product to use Plone 3 techniques
Mixin classes: use interfaces and adapters, define views in configure.zcml
Export from Plone 2.5 Generic Setup
use types.zcml to add portal type
use skins.zcml to add skin layer
convert portlets or just use Classic portlet (use zcml to add to product)
cssregistry.zcml
use zope.deprecation for one or two release cycles and move deprecated skins stuff to another folder
make attributes more like properties using atapi.ATFieldProperty, AnnotationStorage (so they can work with things that need interfaces)
eggify with paster -t plone; see Plone upgrade guide in plone.org/documentation

Real world intranets

Joel Burton

intranets have higher percentage of logged-in users; affects performance adversely
intranets can be used as staging for live sites
use presentation mode
use table of contents
use folder next/previous feature
collections are very nice since end users can run with them; 10% of staff should be able to build collections
add views to collection
dashboard is useful place to add collection portlets, e.g. "overdue for review", "forgotten content" (private but not submitted, created a week or month ago)
new archetype Section (a folder with rich text body) (I'm working on this for UW Oshkosh)
content rules are in his opinion the best feature of Plone 3:

send emails on submit
tell staff when new content created
log deletions
remind to submit (put warning up 1st time adding content) (idea of presenting new techniques to new users only when needed)

collective.contentrules.mail (better email sender)
add workflow to images and files
doesn't think the intranet/extranet workflow is perfect
the "CNN case": being able to edit a published document
keep same workflow for folders and pages to avoid confusion
"Do you want workflow at all?'
Joel's rule of reviewer attention; having to review 2 or 3 things works; 5 things: people put it off; more than that, they become click monkeys
one-state workflow may work; better than no workflow
in simple workflow, change label of Submit state to "Ask for help"
in intranet, use states: private, get help for external, get help for internal, publish externally, publish internally; trusting: allow people to publish directly but ask for help if they need it; reduces the burden on reviewers
use DCWorkflowGraph to show users what the workflow looks like
use PloneFormGen - see plone.org for recipes
plone.contentratings
Poi
less theming is better in intranets
use CSS ".section-xyz" classes
use CSS Manager

For slides, see http://plonebootcamps.com/resources

Things to look into further

Google Moderator
ZEO Raid
Rel (Jarn) for relational databases
GetPaid
software improvement contract (retainer)
Stack Overflow
microsites (INavigationRoot)
Amazon EC2
transmogrifier
repoze - deploying Plone
Deliverance for theming
Deployment workshop by Six Feet Under in Indianapolis at end of November

Lightning Talks

Documenting best practices (Dylan Jay, pretaweb.com, kaizenplone.org)
Atomisator: Tarek Ziadé (Ingeniweb) - process data from various sources, filter, enhance, output
cluemapper.org - Nate Aune (Jazkarta) - enhanced Trac, Dojo AJAX framework (JSON), WSGI support, time tracking and reporting for billing
PyPi replication project - Andreas Jung (zopyx.com) - establish mirror servers so if main site is down it does not prevent people from deploying Plone sites via buildout; see z3c.pypimirror, 5-10 GB disk space, less than 50 GB bandwidth
Matt Sital-Singh (NetSights): de-Ploned CSS - make logged-in view of Plone as close as possible to what anonymous visitors see; hide edit toolbars, show them on demand only
Eric Steele (Penn State) - GloWorm - click on live Plone site to see and edit viewlets - a stroke of genius - this will be part of Plone's future

Contacts

This evening we had dinner with the Penn State team, and we plan to talk some more tomorrow. Brian had already asked Joel Burton if he is interested in coming back to help us, and Joel replied that he is. I also spoke to Calvin Hendryx-Parker at Six Feet Up about site deployment strategies, and he mentioned a microsite product that is about to be released; he later demonstrated it. Six Feet Up has also done deployment consulting re: hardware sizing, so they are another possible source of help (they are the company where the Univ. of Louisville (600+ sites on one server, using the MassDeploy product) fellow had gone to, but he has since gone independent).

NetSights (UK): Matt Hamilton - working on the plone.org redesign (very nice)
Land Securities (UK): Russell Manley - 140 corporate sites (on same server?)
Medical Science, Oxford (UK): Tjitske Kamphuis - 45 sites, two and a half people; looking for ways of supporting current and future requests given few resources
Calvin Hendryx-Parker (Six Feet Up, Indianapolis): talk to Kurt Bendl (U. of Louisville) re: MassDeploy or Martin Aspeli for collective.microsite product; Calvin is interested in helping us; his co. is having a deployment workshop in Indy at end of Nov.; they host many Zope and Plone sites, and they have expertise that is very relevant to us
Kurt Bendl, tool.net (deployed 300+ sites on one ZODB at U. of Louisville, then joined Six Feet Up, and two weeks ago went independent); Kurt is interested in helping us
Dylan Jay, pretaweb.com (Australia) - ran into him at many sessions; he is hosting many (dozens) of Plone sites and has needs similar to
Nate Aune, Jazkarta (Massachusetts) - virtual Plone hosting on Amazon EC2, integration with many other web services such as Salesforce.com; they know hosting too
Chris Calloway, U. of North Carolina Chapel Hill - big gun in the Python world
Rob Lineberger (UNC CH)
Martin Aspeli, Deloitte & Touche UK
Joel Burton
Pham Duy Ha, NextG Solutions (Vietnam)
Mark van Lent, Zest Software (Netherlands)
Hugh Ranalli, Digital Opportunity Trust (Canada)
Josh Kidd (ifPeople, Atlanta)
Christian Vinten-Johansen, Mike Halm, Eric Steele, Eric Rose, Rob Porter (Penn State)
Tjitske Kamphuis & Ann Botwell, Medical Science, Oxford

Giving Back

One lightning talk was by Andreas Jung, a major contributor to Plone and Zope. He has written a replication module for the Python egg (module) repository, and is asking for volunteers to host one of these mirror sites. It would require 5-10 GB of disk and he estimates less than 50 GB of traffic per month. The point of this replication/mirroring is to allow all Plone deployments to continue to be possible even if the primary (currently the ONLY) site, at python.org, were to become unavailable. This mirroring service would be of direct use to the entire Plone community. We have volunteered to run such a server here.