Podcasting and
Multimedia with Plone
LinuxTag - June 1, 2007
Berlin, Germany
Nate Aune
www.plone4artists.org

Who is this guy?
• Musician - saxophonist and composer
• Hacker - Open source developer
• Consultant - Web content management (Plone)

Code for beer
Snow Sprint 2004

Play for beer
Grosetto, Italy

Agenda
• What is Plone?
• What is Plone4Artists?
• Overview of features
• Example sites
• Demo
• Questions

What is Plone?
• Open source content management system
• Built on top of Python programming language
• Protected by the Plone Foundation, similar to
the Apache Foundation
• Strong multilingual support, workflow, open
standards, scalable
• Used by Free Software Foundation, Ubuntu
Linux, Creative Commons, Open Source
Development Labs, Nokia, eBay, CIA

opensource.nokia.com

developer.ebay.com

What is Plone4Artists?
• Grassroots project to build an out-of-the-box
portal solution for artist communities
• Built on top of the Plone, an open source CMS
• Publish multimedia content and podcasting
• Assign Creative Commons licenses to content
• Community tools - rating, commenting, profiles
• Easy to install and pre-configured

Why is this important?
• Lack of free and open source tools for
building online communities with video, audio
• Alternatives: MySpace,YouTube, Google Video
= CLOSED
• Need control over server and OPEN access
• Need better tools to aggregate audio, video,
podcasts, events
• Need for microsites to serve and nurture
local communities

Features
• Drag-n-drop addition of content (WebDAV)
• Upload content via Flash upload tool or Java applet
• Extraction of audio/video metadata (ID3)
• Playback of audio and video in browser
• Podcasting and vodcasting (RSS 2.0)

Features cont...
• Transcoding (convert video to Flash)
• Creative Commons licensing
• Artist/band portfolios
• Community: tagging, rating, commenting,
blogs

Example sites
• Community sites
• engagemedia.org
• thedailyreel.com
• bilive.it
• bostonjazz.net
• Demo multimedia products at
www.plone4artists.com

Drag-n-drop via
WebDAV
WebDAV mounted Plone folder Drag-n-drop to Plone

Drag-n-drop photos
Drag-n-drop photos Plone/PIL auto-resizes photos
to WebDAV folder

Drag-n-drop MP3s
Drag-n-drop MP3s to
MP3s appear in audio container
WebDAV folder

Metadata extracted
Song Metadata Plone4ArtistsAudio
(from iTunes) auto-extracts ID3 tags

Embedded Flash MP3 player
Music player extended
http://musicplayer.sourceforge.net

Video in Plone
• Supports all major video formats:
• Quicktime
• Windows Media
• Real
• Flash
• Playback
• Native players installed in browser (vPIP.org)
• Flowplayer for FLV Flash files

Video playback

Creative Commons licenses

Community
contributions
• Tagging
• Rating
• Commenting
• Blogging

Products plone4artists.org/products
All the software products created for the Plone4Artists project.
Plone4ArtistsSite
Auto-configures a Plone4Artists site by installing and configuring all the products. The
full package includes Plone4ArtistsAudio, Plone4ArtistsVideo, Plone4ArtistsCalendar and
ContentLicensing, so you don't have to download those separately.
Plone4ArtistsAudio
Upload a normal File to your Plone site, and Plone4ArtistsAudio will detect it as an MP3
or Ogg file and \"decorate\" it with metadata.
ArtistSite
ArtistSite provides the core content types for building an artist community website: artist,
group, sitemember, recording and audio file.
Plone4ArtistsTheme
Custom skin/theme for the Plone4Artists package.
Plone4ArtistsVideo
Upload a video file to your Plone site and it is automatically detected as a video file, and
an appropriate player is used on the view page. You can also add videos that are hosted
at Google Video, YouTube, blip.tv, etc. and they will be embedded in your Plone site.
PloneFlashUpload

Global Team of
Developers

Russ Ferriday (russf)
Wales

Alec Mitchell (alecm)
Los Angeles

Lennart Regebro
(regebro)
Paris, France

Jonathan Lewis
Tokyo, Japan

Sasha Vinčić (sashav)
Malmo, Sweden

Christof
(reco) Nate Aune
Peter Holzer
NYC (natea)
(hpeter)
Boston
Zurich

Jodok Batlogg
(batlogg)
Dornbirn, Austria

Vincenzo Barone
(wooda)
Naples, Italy

Rocky Burt
(rocky)
Canada

Plone4Artists links
• Plone4Artists
• http://plone4artists.org
• Subversion repository
• http://plone4artists.org/svn/projects
• Mailing list - send an email with ‘subscribe’ as
the subject to
• p4a-users@plone4artists.org
• IRC - irc://irc.freenode.net/plone4artists

Plone4Artists sprint
• http://plone.org/events/sprints/plone4artists
• Intense 5 day hackathon/powwow/jamsession
• Volunteer developers meet in BostonAll are
welcome! Free to participate.
• July 18-22, 2007