Slides used in workshop session A6 on "Give the Dog a Plone" at the IWMW 2004 event held at the University of Birmingham on 27-29 July 2004. See http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/web-focus/events/workshops/webmaster-2004/sessions/hiles-pitt/

1. 1
Give the dog a Plone
Dominic Hiles
Kieren Pitts

2. 2
Introduction
• Who are we?
• What is Plone?
• Implementing the Plone CMS
• Plone pitfalls
• Summary

3. 3
ILRT
• Unique combination of projects, services and
research with national and international
reputation
• 75-80 Staff
• Semantic Web – RDF, XML, RSS and more
• Elearning – Biz/ed, LTSN, LTSS
• Digital Images – TASi, Biomed
• Digital Libraries Portals – SOSIG, Regard,
Subject Portals
• Internet Development (ID)

4. 4
Who are we?
• Dominic Hiles
– Web developer
– Background in information systems design
• Kieren Pitts
– Senior Technical Researcher
– Web development
– Previously a research biologist

5. 5
Internet Development (ID) group
• 10+ staff: usability engineers, designers,
developers (plus other ILRT staff)
• Consultancy unit – academic and public
sectors
• Web sites, eLearning tools, car-share
software, survey software, content
management systems
• Usability reviews, testing, technical reviews

6. 6
Clients (2002-04)
• University of Bristol (40-
50%)
• 48 Universities using CROS
• 5 Universities using BOS
• Bristol City Council, Temple
Quay companies, NHS, Ford
UK, Oxford Universities,
Swansea (234car)
• University of Southampton
(BOPCRIS)
• HESDA
• HEFCE – Good Management
Practice
• UCISA
• SCONUL
• Church of England
• Institute for Fiscal Studies
• Environment Agency
• INASP
• JISC Assist
• Children’s Society
• West Yorkshire Archive
Service
• National Maritime Museum
• CILIP, BIOME, BECTA,
DLTR, LTSN centres and
more…

7. 7
What is Plone?
• A Content Management System (CMS)
• Version 2 released Easter 2004
• Built on Zope…
– An open-source Web application server
– Written in Python (also used in Google!)
• …and CMF
– Content Management Framework
– Arguably, a "bare bones" CMS implementation

8. 8
The Plone Environment
Zope
Plone
CMF
Web application
Optional Web server (e.g. Apache)

9. 9
Plone features
• Open source
• TTW management
• XHTML
• Extensible workflow
system
• Accessible GUI
• Search engine
• WYSIWYG or
external XHTML
editing
• Effective and
expiration dates for
content
• Pluggable user
management
• External RDBMS
Connectivity
• Automated RSS
feeds
• Platform
independent

10. 10
Why Plone?
• Open Source
• Free!
• Feature rich - good fit with user
requirements
• Experience with Zope
• Platform independent

11. 11
The Projects
• LTSN BEST
– Business Education Support Team is the Business,
Management and Accountancy subject centre of the
Higher Education Academy
– A "new" site
• Church of England
– Migrating an existing site
– 2000 static HTML pages
– 350 images, 450 "text" files
– 4 ASP Web applications, serving data from around
20,000 database records, held in 4 different
databases

13. 13

14. 14

15. 15
Real World Plone

16. 16
Skins
• Fundamental Plone concept
• Separate views on the same content
• Advantages
– Avoids compromising site design for site
administration ("My Plone")
– Usable, accessible (WAI AA) administrative interface
already written and extensively researched/tested
=> reduced total cost of ownership
– Allows developer to customise different aspects of
functionality separately

17. 17
Content maintenance
1. Create the business roles – what
should people be able to do to
the content?
2. Create the workflow – provides
the mechanism to underpin these
roles

18. 18
Content maintenance - roles
• What should content maintainers be
able to do with the content?
– Create and edit content?
– Review and Publish content?
– Remove content?
• Where on your site should they able to
do it?
– The whole site…
– ...or just specified areas?

19. 19
Content maintenance – roles (2)
• Managing the roles
– Groups are created and named according
to a folder-dependant role
• e.g. info_editors (editors of the info
folder)
– Users are placed in group(s) according to
their role(s) in a given content area
– Roles can also be created that allow users
to manage other users

20. 20
Content maintenance - workflow
• The process underlying the business
roles
• Can be simple…
– All content is automatically published when saved or
edited
• …or complex
– Content must be reviewed before publishing
– Can be versioned and later retrieved or reverted

21. 21
Private
Pending
Published
Reject
Retract
Submit
Publish
Retract
Publish
Re-edit
(copy)
Versioned
Revert

22. 22
Content migration
• Import of HTML and file objects (e.g.
PDFs, Images)
– Opportunity to migrate HTML to valid XHTML
– Import process can be semi-automated
• Plone can connect to and display data
from most existing RDBMS
• It may be better to import these data
as Plone "objects"
– e.g. "Churches for Sale" database
• Content extractable = exit strategy

23. 23
Content editing
• TTW WYSIWYG editor
– Kupu supplied as standard
– edit-On Pro provides different feature set
• External editor (e.g.
Dreamweaver)
• Editing (X)HTML source
• Upload new (X)HTML source

24. 24
edit-On Pro in action

25. 25
So, it's all rosy - not quite…
• Out the box, there's only one content role
– Plone evolved from a community-orientated portal
– No concept of business "ownership" – content "owned" by
creator
• Designing a collaborative workflow is hard – 40% of
development time for Church of England
• No Versioning or Revisioning
– We wrote our own…but lots now appearing
• No deletion management (cf. Windows Recycle Bin)
– Again, we wrote our own

26. 26
So, it's all rosy (2) ?
• User management
– Devolving user management to non-developers not
possible by default
– Relatively easy to extend Plone to allow this
– 3rd
Party Product (CMFMember) also available to
facilitate this
• Content migration
– Again, no tools "out the box"
– Migration to accessible XHTML invariably requires
some manual work

27. 27
So, it's all rosy (3) ?
• Maintenance
– Our development overlapped Plone 2
release cycle – not good!
– Product testing required with each new
Plone release
– Writing reusable code can cause problems
– Some issues ameliorated by appropriate use
of CVS

28. 28
Summary
• Skins – different views on the same
content
• Roles – control what people can do and
where
• User management – allocate roles
• Workflow - mechanism underpinning
the roles
• Content migration
• Content editing

29. 29
Discussion
Slides available at:
http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/publications/conf/IWMW2004/plone_s
Contact:
dominic.hiles@bristol.ac.uk
kieren.pitts@bristol.ac.uk