1.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Building a
Collaborative News Platform
with Plone
Érico Andrei
CTO & Co-Founder of Pendect
ericof@pendect.com | @ericof

2.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Introductions

3.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Érico Andrei
Brazilian, living in Berlin
Open Source
Python Software Foundation Fellow
Plone Foundation Board Member
Past
Microsoft, Simples Consultoria, Rocket Internet, Wundertax

4.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Pendect tl;dr
TL;DR collaborative news platform
Facts > Opinions
launched in March / 2020, still in beta

5.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Pendect
Ashley Winkler
Co-Founder • Design, Product, People
Christoph Janke
Co-Founder • Finances, Marketing, Quality
Érico Andrei
Co-Founder • Technology, Automation, Security

6.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Planning
Pendect

7.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
The idea
Building a TL;DR news platform.
Short cards > long articles
Cards are submitted by our community (Pentributors)
Cards metadata include: tags, people, organizations and locations
Users can follow tags to create a personal feed
For each new Card, we plant a tree

8.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Technical Requirements
Collaborative workflow
Permission control
Metadata and Categorization
SEO friendly, Organic Growth
Leverage external specialized services
Open Source

9.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Pendect
Stack

10.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Plone for Content Management System
Most features out of the box
Adapt instead of build from scratch
Proven record with News Portals
Friendly community with very smart people

11.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
DBpedia for Metadata and Categorization
Wikipedia dataset
Spotlight to detect entities in texts
Docker image to run locally -- but dataset is a bit
outdated
Sparql to DBpedia to retrieve additional info about entities

12.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
And a bit of everything else
Cloudflare, nginx, Varnish, HAProxy, Ansible
Thumbor
Sentry, Mailgun
IFTTT, Zapier
Gravatar
Deepl, ScrappingHub, Archive.org (Wayback machine)

13.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Building
Pendect

14.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Toolset & Add-ons
Development speed thanks to some friends
Python 3 Fstrings, Type Hints, Dataclasses
Black, Isort, Flake8, PyCharm
Not many Plone Add-ons
souper.plone contentrules.slack
collective.sentry collective.z3cform.datagridfield

15.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Content types
Default
Folder, Document, Image, Collection
Category
Uses Collection behavior, but allows sub-objects
Card
Similar to a News Item, but with more categories

16.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Adapting Plone
Browser views
Dashboard → My Feed
Author Page → Pentributor Profile
Image / Scale → Proxy to Thumbor
Content Rules
Actions: Slack, Email, Webhooks
Triggers: Principal added to/removed from group

17.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
New features
Aggregator Pages
Tags, People, Locations, Organizations
Development with souper
Follow Categories, Tags, People, Locations, Organizations
and Pentributors
Voting up, bookmarking

18.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
DEO
External Service
Translation, auto summary, archiving
Bridge to DBpedia Spotlight
Developed with FastAPI  httpx
Each endpoint has its own dependencies
Hosted with DigitalOcean Apps Platform

19.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Lessons learned
Always create upgrade steps and be aware of registry configurations
Plone training materials are the de facto documentation for Plone
Plone theming + Resource Registries  JS development is my nightmare
Plone lacks a simple and working async/delayed solution
Webp images are not for all -- be careful with caching then

20.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Future
Steps

21.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Next few weeks
Contributions
Translation and auto summary to all Pentributors
Card Threads
Similar to Twitter threads, leveraging content relations
Search improvements
Moving to ElasticSearch backend
Move to RelStorage

22.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Out of Beta
Plone as headless CMS
Volto and Mobile applications
Content quality control
Integrate LanguageTool submission forms
Auto-tagging
User management
Move from default User Folder

23.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com

24.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
Thank
you!

25.
Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
@ericof
ericof@pendect.com
pendect.com/pentributors/@ericof
@pendecthq
hello@pendect.com
pendect.com/pentributors
https://speakerdeck.com/ericof/building-a-collaborative-news-platform-with-plone