Day 2 (Plone Conference 2008 Notes)

Plone integration with Salesforce.com

Andrew Burkhalter, ONE/Northwest (Seattle)

• want to engage anonymous visitors to the web site
• project paid for by Salesforce Foundation grant
• lets you submit form data to Salesforce (SF), create account records, contact records, opportunity records, leads, attach documents
• uses SOAP API (see SOQLExplorer for Mac); BeatBox (Python)
• wrote a SF PloneFormGen adapter that lets PFG forms create/edit SF records
• event registration (should tie into SF campaign), "archetypes schema extender"
• select capacity limits or unlimited capacity, for conference calls or classes; allow/disallow waitlists
• can associate PFG form to an RSVP record using standard reference browser via hidden campaign ID field
• SF PAS plugin, can restrict logins by domain e.g. @example.com
• local cache of SF records
• uses ZCatalog to have local search on remote content
• Google Group plonesf
• Go to developer.salesforce.com for free account
• snipurl.com/plonesfdocs

Plone on Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2)

David Bain, alteroo.com (Jamaica)

• use Firefox add-on ElasticFox
• boto: python EC2 tools 
• alestic.com for EC2-ready images 
• EBS: elastic block storage
• estimates that if you run the server for a month it'll cost $80, so it's more expensive than a small virtual server (though you have room to expand)

Cross Training for Plone Deployment 

Andrew Parker (Six Feet Up)

• they are a Plone/Zope hosting shop
• they use BSD
• hardware: max the RAM
• proxy cache: squid, apache, varnish (stable yet?)
• CacheFu
• cacheing rules
• use Firebug to look at headers
• RAM cacheing
• URL rewriting
• use nginx (best proxy, can do SSL, can handle PHP and Perl scripts); uses only 15 MB of memory
• squid -> nginx -> pound -> (3 Zope/Plone instances)
• can do more complex virtual hosts than VirtualHostMonster
• Apache: need to cut down on default installation modules since it will bloat to 300 MB - 500 MB of memory
• using squid, can get to 31 anonymous views per sec, 4.1 views logged in per sec.
• use pound for load balancing (poundctl)
• using squid & pound: 35.8 / 7.3 views per sec. (better)
• use robots.txt
• repozo scripts for backups
• ZODB packing
• log rotation
• max out number of ZEO clients until swapping starts
• Dylan Jay's question about multiple Plone sites per Zope: downside of multiple mount points is a cache per mount point
• use supervisor and mem_mon
• Dylan: buildout recipes for squid and pound
• set ZServer threads to 2
• use ab and jmeter to load test
• haproxy - can kill long running blocking requests
• 4 GB RAM can run 8 sites

Simplifying Plone with a Chainsaw

Martin Aspeli

• grok
• repoze
• pylons framework
• TurboGears framework
• voodoo
• repoze.bfg
• Trac
• web.py
• DIYPloneStyle
• goal is to have no separation between theming and customization
• Deliverance - cross platform theming
• XSLT & Apache
• filesystem roundtrip
• simple schema TTW (Dexterity)
• customization registry

Plone's Anatomy

Calvin Hendryx-Parker

• Plone / CMF / OFS (Object File System) / Persistent / ZODB
• look at CMFCalendar to see how an archetypical Plone 2 product is written
• plone.* namespace stuff can be used in other projects
• plone.app namespace is Plone-specific stuff
• plone.app.layout is what used to be in global_defines.pt
• plone.memoize - @memoize decorators lets system cache something
• omelette product
• put trace in Publisher.py to disambiguate Zope five errors

WebLion - Open Source for Education

Christian Vinten-Johansen, Mike Halm (Penn State)

• want to engage visitors
• try to open up pages to comments
• think of web site as 'ecosystem' with producers, consumers; visitors could be producers a bit
• interop standards to exchange info between universities
• modernizing biz processes - eg. how many steps does a tuition check go through?
• they stress professional development for all end users
• Penn State has 700 clubs
• they use virtual servers
• annual survey of fac/staff/students of what they are looking for
• web as a strategic asset, not a cost centre
• bottom-up approach: allow staff to sell to their administrators
• value proposition for decision makers; another one for staff 
• the whole package or nothing: includes usability, testing, installation, customization
• video: Grok the revolution - Michael Wesch, Kansas State U.
• how many clubs do we have at UW Oshkosh? agreement they must sign

Birds of a Feather session: Plone for Education

Christian Vinten-Johansen, Mike Halm

• Participants: Univ. of Barcelona, Medical Science (Oxford), Mexican national institute for mathematics, enPraxis (Open Courseware spinoff), others
• CNX
• What is Univ. of Barcelona's model?
• Oxford understaffed too
• enPraxis: IMS transport product for course content import/export, WordPress import/export
• BOF product
• use the collective to get our products out there even before they are complete
• use memorandum of understanding as a soft contract: goals, schedule, resources
• meet every six months to see where we are
• get templates from Christian & Mike
• show uwosh.theme to Oxford