Picture yourself at a non-profit with 50,000 active members and hundreds of volunteers. Your website has become dated and convoluted and needs to be replaced. You need the new site to support complex course registrations - multiple activities per course, multiple roles per activity, multiple people per registration, waitlisting, payments - without seeming complex. You need it to be easy for leaders to create new activities, for volunteers to volunteer, for members to sign up and donate, and for everyone to find what they're looking for in your vast portfolio of knowledge. This is the story of The Mountaineers' journey to a new Plone site, which launched May 2014 after more than a year of development by a Jazkarta team consisting of David Glick, Cris Ewing, and Carlos de la Guardia. We'll describe some of the highlights, including: - Handling rosters with collective.workspace - Optimizing membrane-based users - Using Stripe to process payments - Using Celery as a message queue with Plone - Our process for designing content types and getting content imported - Pulling everything together with Solr-powered faceted search

1. The Mountaineers:
Scaling the Heights With
Plone
David Glick and Sally Kleinfeldt
2014 Plone Conference

3. Platform
Team
Chris McCullough, Matt Scholtz
David Glick, Cris Ewing, Carlos de la Guardia, Sally
Kleinfeldt
Darrell Houle
Neal Maher
Jeff Bowman

4. Process

5. Step 1
User Stories

9. Step 2A
Custom Content Type Definition

11. Step 2B
Wireframe Development

13. Step 3
Implement Custom Functionality

14. Step 4
Theming

15. Step 5
Bug Fixing

16. Quick wins

17. Faceted search - eea.facetednavigation

18. Event calendar - ftw.calendar

19. Feedback forms: PloneFormGen

20. Custom development

21. plone.app.widgets

22. Landing
pages

23. Blog

24. Member accounts

25. Memberships

26. Waivers

27. Activity scheduling

28. Registration

29. Course registration

30. Rosters

31. Rosters and sharing

32. Cart and checkout

33. Async processing

34. Import and launch

35. Importing data

36. Deployment

37. Ongoing development

38. Issue management

39. Monitoring: New Relic

40. Optimization: Zope profiler

41. New feature development

42. Final thoughts

43. • We had our doubts at the beginning, but in the end Plone was a good fit
for this site
• Jeff really took off with learning and taking advantage of the built-in
content management features
• However it also gave us a reasonable platform for developing custom
functionality that is tightly integrated with the content, without needing to
reinvent things like local roles
• We did produce some open source code such as collective.workspace, but
there are other aspects of the site, such as the cart and aspects of
membership and registration handling, which could be done in a reusable
way but weren’t
• This was partly due to tight schedule and budget, partly because of very
specific custom requirements, and partly because we use an agile process
and didn’t understand some requirements until later in development
• If some of this looks useful to someone else, we should talk about whether
something can be extracted and open sourced
• It’s often easier to build something in a reusable way the second or third
time once the problem space is better understood

44. Questions?