Nate Aune is a musician, hacker, and consultant who created Plone4Artists, a grassroots project to build an open source portal solution for artist communities using Plone CMS. Plone4Artists allows artists to publish multimedia content like audio and video, assign Creative Commons licenses, and includes community features for profiles, comments, ratings, and more. A global team of developers contributes to Plone4Artists to provide free and open tools for online communities lacking closed alternatives like MySpace and YouTube.

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

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

3. Code for beer
Snow Sprint 2004

4. Play for beer
Grosetto, Italy

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

6. 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

7. opensource.nokia.com

8. developer.ebay.com

9. 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

10. 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

11. 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)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

22. 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

23. Video playback

24. Creative Commons licenses

25. Community
contributions
• Tagging
• Rating
• Commenting
• Blogging

26. plone4artists.org/products
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 quot;decoratequot; 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

27. Global Team of
Developers

28. Russ Ferriday (russf)
Wales

29. Alec Mitchell (alecm)
Los Angeles

30. Lennart Regebro
(regebro)
Paris, France

31. Jonathan Lewis
Tokyo, Japan

32. Sasha Vinčić (sashav)
Malmo, Sweden

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

34. Jodok Batlogg
(batlogg)
Dornbirn, Austria

35. Vincenzo Barone
(wooda)
Naples, Italy

37. Rocky Burt
(rocky)
Canada

38. 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

39. 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