A winning combination: Plone as CMS and your favorite Python web framework as front end

A Winning combination: Plone and your favorite web framework

Plone is the best CMS that is NOT written in PHP

Plone has lots of great features
Easy to use and install
Standards and accessibility compliant
Best security track record of any major CMS
Available in more than 40 languages
Workflow capabilities and rules engine
Versioning, history and reverting content
And, of course...

Python

but...

Plone is complex

Plone can be slow

Caching is not always the answer to traffic

Plone is NOT a general web development framework
But sometimes we forget that...
Or clients push us to add features “We want Plone, only take this out and add a couple of features”
Or we simply don't think we have an option
So, we end up with...

Frankenplone

It doesn't have to be like this. You can work with your favorite tools.

Content Mirror by Kapil Thangavelu

Content Mirror serializes Plone content into a relational database
Out of the Box support for Default Plone Content Types and all built-in Archetypes Fields.
Supports Any 3rd Party / Custom Archetypes Content.
Supports Capturing Containment / Content hierarchy in the serialized database.
Completely Automated Mirroring, zero configuration required beyond installation.
Support for Plone 2.5, 3.0, and 3.1

It's simple

Now we can:
Use Plone only to manage content
Use whatever framework we like to work with the content
Take Plone out of the deployment plans
Stop worrying about how to do something in terms of Plone and instead think about what we want to accomplish
Simplify, simplify

And we can serve Plone content fast!

How does it work?
Integrates into Plone's event stream and subscribes to content lifecycle events (object added, edited, deleted).
Transform Plone content schemas into relational tables, using SQLAlchemy.
All objects get a default content schema, including files and relations.
Each Plone content type gets its own table.

Installation
Download: http://code.google.com/p/contentmirror/downloads/list
Install
Configure database
Configure custom content types
Generate tables
Bulk load pre-existing content

Configure the database with ZCML <configure xmlns="http://namespaces.zope.org/zope" xmlns:db="http://namespaces.objectrealms.net/rdb" xmlns:ore="http://namespaces.objectrealms.net/mirror">  <db:engine url="postgres://localhost/plone" name="mirror-db" echo="True"/>  <db:bind engine="mirror-db" metadata="ore.contentmirror.schema.metadata" /> </configure>

Configure custom content types For each custom content type installed on the site: <ore:mirror content= "Products.ATContentTypes.content.document.ATDocument" />

Generate tables and upload content dropdb plone createdb plone --encoding=UTF-8 # generate table definitions and create tables bin/instance run parts/productdistros/ContentMirror/ddl.py postgres > mirror.sql psql plone < /home/andy/plone/zinstance/mirror.sql # optionally, load existing content bin/instance run parts/productdistros/ContentMirror/bulk.py Plone

That's it. We're ready to rock & roll

The changes are sent synchronously to the database plone# select content_id, id, title from content where id = 'front-page'; content_id | id | title ------------+------------+---------------- 8 | front-page | Content Mirror sent this (1 row)

What kind of sites can take advantage of this strategy?
Sites with a small number of content managers and a large number of users.
Which can clearly separate content management and presentation.
Magazines
Newspapers
Government
Non-profits

Repoze.BFG front end class WebSite(UserDict): implements(IWebSite,ILocation) __acl__ = [ (Allow, Everyone, 'view') ] def __init__(self, website_id): UserDict.__init__(self) self.__name__ = None self.__parent__ = None self.website_id = website_id session = Session() website = session.query( PloneContent ).with_polymorphic( PloneWebSite ).filter( PloneContent.id==website_id ).first() self.title = website.title

Plango, by Andy McKay from django.db import models from django.contrib.contenttypes.models import ContentType from utils import normalize_name class Content(models.Model): class Meta: db_table = u'content' content_id = models.IntegerField(primary_key=True, editable=False) id = models.CharField(max_length=256, editable=False) uid = models.CharField(unique=True, max_length=36, editable=False) portal_type = models.CharField(max_length=64, editable=False) status = models.CharField(max_length=64, editable=False, null=False) type = models.CharField(max_length=64, editable=False) container = models.ForeignKey('self', related_name="parent", editable=False)

Anyone?
Turbogears
Pylons
Werkzeug
Anything goes!

Content Mirror is easily extended
How about?
Reporting against the content
Audits of changes
Export to formats like JSON
Other storage backends
Content mirror Uses the Zope Component Architecture
We can easily plug in something other than a relational database

By the way, don't worry about the Component Architecture. We have studied the Zope CA so you don't have to.

A Google App Engine frontend
Take advantage of Google's infrastructure
Use their user authentication facilities
Let them worry about scaling
Of course, kinds of sites are limited, due to GAE's strict quotas
More like a toy, but shows what can be possible using Content Mirror with Plone

GAE front end application import os import wsgiref.handlers from google.appengine.ext import webapp from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template from google.appengine.ext import db from google.appengine.ext.db import polymodel from google.appengine.api import users class PloneContent(polymodel.PolyModel): id = db.StringProperty() uid = db.StringProperty() portal_type = db.StringProperty() status = db.StringProperty() type = db.StringProperty()

Plone content in GAE

All discussed front ends will be made available during the sprints. Keep an eye on: http://contentmirror.googlecode.com/

Case study The Library of Congress in Chile

Create multiple sites in one instance

Select content from a shared store

Define a unique site layout and style

Deploy sites using repoze.bfg

Let Plone be a part of the Python universe

Thank you! Carlos de la Guardia email: [email_address] twitter: cguardia blog: http://blog.delaguardia.com.mx

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A winning combination: Plone as CMS and your favorite Python web framework as front end

by carlos.delaguardia on Mar 29, 2009

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