A case of building an internal knowledge base portal about taxes using Plone, Oauth, plone.restapi and eea.facetednavigation.

1. wundertax
Building a
Tax Knowledge Base with Plone
Érico Andrei, CTO
Tokyo - 08/11/2018

2. Introductions

3. Érico Andrei

4. German Taxes, Online
Large customer base
650,000+
sign-ups
150,000+
submitted tax returns
€100,000,000+
total tax refund

5. Taxes,
Germany

6. Elster
• Project from German Tax Authority
• Goal: Digitalize taxes! All taxes.
• Elster children:
• Mein Elster, Elsterformular
• Open API via ERiC library
• A developer forum
• More than 10 years of experience (and
legacy)

7. API, XML and rtfd
• > 700 Mb of good documentation
• XML is King
• API calls, XML based
• XSD for main document structure
• Fields specs:
• XML, but Excel 2004
• One file per tax type, per year

8. A Knowledge Base
step by step

9. wundertax.schemas
• JSON Schemas for Elster information
• From Excel documentation, generate
JSON Schemas:
• Each tax type
• Each year
• Available as a Docker image
• Documentation: Mkdocs
• Developer-friendly

10. Roads not taken
• Kibana + Elastic Search
• Pyramid + Cornice
• Another Rails app
• Guillotina (Still a possibility)

11. wundertax.kb
• Plone 5.1 + plone.restapi
• New content types:
• 7, representing Elster information
• Features:
• OAuth with Google Suite
• Faceted Navigation
• Comments
• Around 70.000 contents

12. Learnings

13. Plone is easy
• Dexterity prototyping TTW
• plone.restapi content import
• OOB features:
• Comments
• Search
• Traversal
• Addons:
• pas.plugins.authomatic
• eea.facetednavigation

14. Plone is hard
•Buildout and Docker
•Importing content, still slow
•Data x Configuration
•Policy package:
•Upgrade steps require lots of code
•Testing could be easier
•Python 2

15. ありがとうございました
erico@wundertax.de
@ericof
+49 176 37755724
Érico Andrei