Plone Conference 2006 Agenda

Plone co-founders Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan will present their by-now-traditional "State of Plone" keynote in which they summarize the recent past, active present and exciting future of Plone.

Computer software is the medium in which architects of community now function, as structural steel was the medium of the 20th century. Software makes and is made by communities; the social rules that determine its making also contribute directly to the rules of 21st century community more generally. In this talk, Eben Moglen explores the larger sociopolitical significance of free software, free content, and the Net as Free World.

Eben Moglen is Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center, Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University Law School, and General Counsel of the Free Software Foundation He was instrumental in helping to create the Plone Foundation, and is currently working on Version 3 of the GPL, an important open source license.

NPower Seattle adopted Plone as a standard platform for creating simple yet scalable websites for the local nonprofit community. During this session we'll share our learnings regarding:

• How to create an effective scope of work
• How to approach a start from scratch website scope
• How to approach a “convert to Plone” website project
• The various technical roles involved in implementing the site
• Tips, tricks and lessons learned
  

Haystack is an add-on product for Plone that allows Plone to discover relationships between pieces of content. It can do this by both linguistic mapping and automated conceptual mapping, providing high-quality relationships with little or no human effort. When deployed properly, therefore, Haystack can be a valuable tool for providing intelligent searches, related-items portlets, and more.

This talk covers the role and benefits of Haystack, as well as how to implement it in existing Plone sites.

KSS is a small Javascript infrastructure that aims to allow Javascript-free AJAX-ification of web applications. We will present an overview of the KSS architecture. You will learn about the development paradigm that KSS proposes and how KSS adds UI dynamicity as a distinct layer above your web application.

Plone 2.5 brings us closer to the promised land of Zope 3. Some of the concepts of Zope 3 may feel alien, but they can give real benefits, today, if applied correctly. Learning how to build application in a pure Zope 3 environment is important and rewarding, and many such applications can be integrated with Plone relatively easily, even now. This talk, however, will be focused on how to apply the patterns of Zope 3 and leverage the new infrastructure that Plone 2.5 brings in the more familiar world of Archetypes-based development. Among the topics covered will be:

• Best-practice code organisation
• Test-driven development practices
  Writing testable documentation with DocTests
• Using adapters to make content types easily extensible and configurable
• Using events and subscribers
• Installation using GenericSetup extension profiles
• Providing local roles on-the-fly with a custom PAS plug-in
• Enabling local workflow policies with CMFPlacefulWorkflow
• Plugging into 'membrane' to provide custom user and group sources

The session will also be an opportunity to discuss best-practice design principles and the impact Zope 3 has on the way in which we approach software development with Plone.

Out of the box, Plone can be difficult for content managers to use, especially if they are infrequent contributors or non-technical users. This frequently leads to problems like wrong choices for content types, content places in wrong places, 'forgotten', abandoned content. This talk looks at tested best practices for making your Plone site easier to use for these content editors, and is appropriate for intranets and public sites. It demonstrates how to disable complex features you may not want, and suggests techniques that will allow your users to understand concepts like where to put content, how to tag it, and how to approve it.

• Brazilian Chamber of Deputies

• Oxfam America

• National Instruments

• Voice Signal

• Yankelovich, Inc

Building and managing websites with content in multiple languages can be challenging and requires new aspects to be considered when planning. We'll provide an overview of the challenges of working with multilingual content and some lessons learned in the process. We’ll also examine how LinguaPlone addresses these issues for Plone. If there is enough time, we'll look at the common task of creating a workflow that ensures translations are in sync.

Plone developers are already productive and innovative. But the new Zope 3 component architecture, which is part of Plone 2.5 and above, makes it even easier and faster to build powerful add-on Products that are both manageable and reusable.

This in-depth tutorial, suitable for folks who have some experience building add-on Products for Plone but are not yet comfortable with Zope 3, will demonstrate how you can taking an existing Plone Product and refactor it to use Zope 3 technology and techniques.

Rocky Burt is an experienced Java/J2EE developer who now focuses on Plone development and the Zope 3 component architecture. Since making the leap to Plone, he has become a Plone framework team member, a core Plone developer, and Zope 3 enthusiast.

Plone 2.5 switched to a new authentication system: GRUF has been replaced with the Pluggable Authentication System (PAS). PAS is a highly modular system, making it possible to support (combinations of) all kinds of different authentication and membership management systems. This tutorial will explain the interfaces PAS offers to implementers and users and demonstrate them by implementing a number of different PAS plugins.

RDF (Resource Description Framework) is a way to describe resources. It provides a basis for using the Semantic Web in Plone that lacks the enhanced querying capabilities that RDFLib can provide. Plone out of the box provides some good indexing/cataloging tools, but for more complex applications and relationships a richer environment for describing them is needed.

Six Feet Up used RDF to re-architecture the archive data of the Rosetta Project, a non-profit organization striving to build a web-based repository of all human languages. The project aimed to remove any hard-coded organization of the data and replace it with a flexible flat structure that can follow multiple arbitrary organizational views. This allowed linguists to go beyond the traditional genetic and geographic ways of grouping languages and easily organize data in new categories.

The talk will make the case that RDF can change developers and integrators' Plone experience. With the ability to now use Zope 3 components inside of Plone via Five we can start using RDFLib as a repository of resource information. I'll go over how to install and use basic Dublin Core information with the RDF tool alongside the catalog tool and how to store content relationships and structure.

This talk aims to show how the new GenericSetup support in CMF 2.0 / Plone 2.5 will make life better both for those who manage Plone sites and for those who build Plone add-ons. The session will illustrate the use of GenericSetup in each of the following use case scenarios: - Developer creates an "extension" profile for her add-on, specifying the "default" policies for installing the add-on into a Plone site. - Integrator creates a "baseline" profile for a Plone site tailored to a particular kind of application (e.g., Plone4VisualArtists). - Site manager uses GenericSetup to manage local changes to her site across upgrades of the underlying software.

Has PHP failed you? Has sieve-like security and the tangled skein of HTML, SQL, and business logic (all within the same file) led to routine defacements, XSS attacks, and management screaming for solutions yesterday? In other words, are you ready to leave spaghetti behind and enjoy the order and elegance of sushi? Find joy in dynamic content-driven websites that embrace polymorphic ideologies, robust security, and effortless extensibility with agile languages and modern object databases. Find Plone.

Sean Kelly is a NASA consultant, screencasting superstar, and master bartender who'll tickle your brain (and your funny-bone) in a rapid-fire talk that'll leave you thirsty for more knowledge, if not a martini.

Open source will continue to drive new products and solutions in the years ahead. Because of that, more investors are backing open source companies and evangelizing their technologies—but what does this mean for open source communities?

Both the VC and open source industries are well known for innovation, and the two can make a powerful combination. A funding round is more than simply an infusion of capital: good venture capitalists combine their knowledge of the open source industry and operating expertise to work with entrepreneurs for growth and success. The resulting expansion not only affects the portfolio company but the community as a whole, including third party integrators, consultants, developers, partners, other open source companies and users. So how exactly does a VC catalyze growth within an open source community? Money is not enough!

This presentation will discuss the intersection of VCs and open source communities, including:

• Which business models make sense for open source products, solutions and services
• How to determine if venture funding is right for you
• What VCs look for in potential investments in open source
• What value do VCs add beyond capital

Plone's rich interface and deep customization provide excellent features for modern web sites. However, without planning and tuning, Plone sites can generate every part of every page, every time, causing slowness. There are excellent built-in features for speeding Plone sites up tremendously, however, with little or no loss of freshness or customization.

This tutorial covers techniques for deploying Plone for performance, optimizing your site with CacheFu, using Zope's cache-in-memory features, and tips and techniques for tying it all together. In this class, you'll learn the tips and tricks professionals use to make their sites 20x, 30x, and even 100x faster than standard out-of-the-box Plone.

Plone and the underlying Zope framework are capable of replacing or improving upon many inferior websites and web applications. Yes, Plone and Zope are extremely successful in certain markets, but they are virtually unknown and entirely unused in others. Plone and the Plone user community could benefit from improved market research and coordinated evangelization efforts to determine and explain:

• Where Plone and Zope are Already Most Successful and Why
• What Factors are Limiting Plone and Zope Adoption and its Use in Important Market Segments
• How to Most Effectively Compare Plone / Zope with other Content Management Systems and Web Application Development Environments

In this paper, data regarding the above issues will be collected and examined. Successful Plone implementations will be analyzed across various metrics to contrast the utility value created by Plone vs. other competitive choices for web-based knowledge systems and learning management systems. Professional marketing consultants will be shown the results of the data gathering efforts and new recommendations will be formulated and discussed.

Plone is bigger than just the core software. Add-on products, found in the ""Products"" section of Plone.org ( http://Plone.org/products), play a vital part in most real-world implementations of Plone. However, users are sometimes frustrated by the difficulties in locating and choosing between add-on products, and by the variations in quality and maturity among the hundreds of products in the Collective.

This session will be a discussion between the people behind Plone's ""Products"" section, core and add-on product developers and - most importantly - you, the audience, on how we can improve Plone's add-on products story, and make it easier for new users to locate and evaluate existing add-on Products.

The growing number of open-source stacks for Web 2.0, such as Django, Rails, and others, all make putting rich interfaces on relational databases child's play, utilizing the active record pattern and AJAX libraries, and without writing any SQL for basic CRUD functionality. Zope and Plone have traditionally been limited in their access to relational databases, typically writing SQL queries against a database adapters as their middle tier.

This talk explores Alchemist, a new implementation of relational integration with Zope and Plone. Utilizing SQLAlchemy and Zope 3 technologies, Alchemist allows for easily constructing relational database applications, with options for introspecting the database structure, automated object mappings, generated views, and validation. The talk will go through creating a simple application using Alchemist, and is intended for integrators and developers.

A mashup (according to Wikipedia) is a website that seamlessly combines content from more than one source into an integrated experience.

The goal of this session is to walk through concepts and code examples from an actual Plone mashup site so that you can incorporate these features into your own sites.

This mashup site was developed for participants of the Identity Mashup Conference sponsored by Harvard Law School (idmashup.org) and served as a central place for attendees to keep a pulse on the latest conference happenings and events, as well as provided a way to connect with other attendees.

To accomplish this, the site makes extensive use of tagging to mash together content within Plone (conference documents, events, attendee profiles) as well as incorporating content from many outside sources through RSS and publisher's APIs. Attendees also posted blog entries and images on their own sites, which were aggregated into Plone in nearly real-time.

The underlying user authentication infrastructure has completely changed with the switch from GRUF to PAS in the latest Plone release. As a result, CMFMember, a widely used tool that allows for more sophisticated member management within Plone 2.1 and earlier, no longer works with Plone 2.5. Have no fear, however. There are a couple of new products, one called membrane and one called remember, that are providing all of the functionality of CMFMember and more. This session will provide an overview of the greater Plone member management landscape, focusing primarily on what -- exactly -- these new products do and how they can be used as a basis for custom applications.

With the growing demand for rich multimedia content such as podcasts and video, it's becoming more important to provide a way to author and deliver this content on your website. Plone out-of-the-box does not handle multimedia content very effectively, but with the addition of the PloneMultimedia package, you can add audio, video and photos to your site and generate podcasts to more efficiently distribute this content to your audience.

This talk will discuss the following:

• features that the PloneMultimedia package provides (MP3 metadata, built-in Flash player)
• success stories (EngageMedia.org, video.vol.at , MediaCoop)
• challenges of handling large media files (uploading and storage)
• syndication of multimedia content as a podcast feed
• community-oriented features (commenting, rating and tagging multimedia content)
• extensive use of Zope 3 component architecture (marker interfaces designate a normal File as an audio or video file and decorate it with additional properties)
• roadmap for PloneMultimedia (storing video on external servers, streaming, transcoding, playlists, etc.)

Session notes at http://2006.plone.org/ploneconf/index.php/Multimedia

The Information Technology department of the city of Newport News, Virginia, will launch its first eGovernment Internet website 'powered by Plone' in the first quarter of 2007. The City will make the municipal website code base available to all in the public and private sector by distributing it under the GNU General Public License shortly after the launch.

This talk will present highlights of the department's journey to open source, an overview of the value added by the customization of Plone to make it a better fit for government in general and local governments in particular, the features planned for future releases, our technical infrastructure and support models, and projected adoption models. Though we're glad to be able to give back to the community in terms of this website product, we also see additional benefits for the group with the possible expansion into the public sector where outsourcing support is the rule rather than the exception.

Getting wiki in Plone with Wicked : Whit will discuss how wicked allows a Plone integrator to fill classic wiki usecases inside of Plone in an elegant fashion. We will cover how to turn your Plone site into a wiki in 20 seconds, extending the Wicked syntax, Wicked in Plone 3.0, and how Wicked uses Zope 3 technologies.

Things enterprises should know, when adopting open-source technologies. This session will examine the essential best practices for enterprises adopting open-source technologies and what's different as compared to the commercial software packages.

The Open Planning Project (TOPP), a high tech non-profit based in New York City, is using Plone in creative ways as we fulfill our mission to build tools that enhance the role of the citizen in shaping society. We draw inspiration from the ideas, processes and success of the Open Source movement, and believe that Open Source principles can be effective in tackling real world problems. As both integrators of existing software and developers of the next generation of Plone products (Wicked, Listen, Remember), we have used Plone in ways that are far beyond traditional content management.

TOPP aims to serve NGOs, community groups, active citizens, and educators by providing web-based collaboration tools that leverage Plone. An easy-to-use integrated on-line environment, OpenPlans (www.openplans.org) offers proven, useful tools -- web space, wikis, email lists, forums, etc. -- free of charge and free of advertising. The underlying software that drives this hosted site is called OpenCore, which is GPLed and available as a free download.

This will be a team talk led by Jackie Arasi (project manager) and Rob Miller/Whit Morriss (technical leads). We will highlight the current and future TOPP offerings, and present our experience with Plone as a case study in choosing what to use, what to improve, and the glue that holds it all together.

Plinkit (Public Library INterface KIT) provides both content and functionality that are exciting and useful to library patrons and staff alike. This talk will cover how Plone is being used as a webhosting and CMS solution for small and medium-sized public libraries throughout Oregon and beyond.

This session will provide a brief overview of the existing accessibility technologies that are incorporated into Plone and case study of an organization that actively leverages those technologies. This session will look at the experience of Mobility International, an organization that provides services to the disabled community, using Plone to further its mission. In this session I will demonstrate how screen readers and other accessibility software interacts with Plone, the experiences of users with disabilities in using Plone both as site visitor and content editors, and strategies for customizing Plone to insure that your site remains accessible. This session is meant to provide real word examples of Plone and accessibility and thus will not be primarily a programming focused session.

Sometimes a single Plone site just isn't enough. This talk will describe how Oxfam use a central Plone Content Management System with four other Plone instances skinned for public internet and private intranet websites. Each of these is merged with other content from flat or CGI-driven websites. Plone Multisite uses workflow to control the visibility of content on the separate site, previewing of content in the target site skin and revision of published content without affecting the visible pages. Google Search Appliance integrated into Plone allows a wide range of related sites to be searched seamlessly.

This session will be a case study of an application for DEWA/UNEP, implemented between 2005-12 and 2006-03. The application presents profiles of environmental policy and legislation of 230 countries. Information is both harvested from online sources, as well as supplied by country contributors. The application was developed iteratively from informal specifications. Plone allowed a quick turnaround time, enabled DEWA staff to assist in the site design, and enabled them to involve contributors via a simple web interface.

The session will consist of three parts. I will start with a light-weight introduction into GIS concepts and terminology so that people not familiar with them will be able to follow the presentation easier. In the second part I will introduce the PrimaGIS stack and the different components. I will keep to the 'python layer' (e.g. not going into C-libraries etc.) to keep it relevant for the audience. In the last part I will demonstrate the use of PrimaGIS.

You can benefit by writing a set of 'buildout' scripts which put together all the right code such as Zope, third-party products, and your own application code in a repeatable way. You can get people up and running quickly with a Zope/Plone environment as they join your development team or as you need to roll out new production systems. The topics to be covered will be: - Understanding the repeatable deployment religion. - Deciding on a buildout technology. - Writing the buildout scripts. - Dealing with changes to a build over time.

Stephan Richter and Jodok Batlogg will talk about building RESTful APIs for Web2.0 services. Plone, like many other Web frameworks, sometimes has trouble talking to other technology stacks. REST provides a very simple and standards-compliant method to communicate any data with other technologies. REST also allows Plone/Zope sites to communicate with each other more easily. REST allows your Plone solutions to scale better. For example, you can "outsource" expensive, high-availability features such as tagging, rating, cataloging, file transcoding, to other servers, and then bring the results back to Plone via REST. In this talk we'll present our approach to building RESTful services in Plone/Zope and show real-life examples of these services in action.

Some users and developers of Plone have been in the trenches for so long that it's difficult to have an objective perspective on where Plone fits in the Content Management world. For much of its life Plone, and other OS CMS tools, have kept ahead of the commercial CMS pack, but there are some features that, if incorporated, would rock the open source CMS world. Let's check them out. While not trying to be a tool bake-off, this presentation will instead present some of the features we should as a community consider building or plugging into Plone. This isn't a full tool evaluation exercise, but attendees will leave with a better understanding not just of how Plone compares to other open source tools, such as Drupal, which it is commonly compared to, but also how it compares to 'Enterprise' (can't write that without a capital 'E') Content Management tools that are quite expensive. We'll explore what these tools deliver that Plone does not, or that Plone can learn from and incorporate.

This talk will cover two case studies of implementing single sign on systems, Pub Cookie in use at Oxfam and Mod Auth Tkt in a project for Blue Fountain Systems.

Case Study 1: Oxfam GB / Oxfam International. Pub Cookie sits in front of Plone CMS, and authorises to Lotus Notes over LDAP. Covering the setup of Apache/Pub Cookie, setup of Plone and the Open LDAP meta back end which enables LDAP proxying / rewriting to communicate to multiple back end LDAP servers (useful for federated / distributed organisations).

Case Study 2: Blue Fountain Systems education project. Mod Auth Tkt used for single sign on in front of Plone CMS, Squirrelmail IMAP client and Ruby on Rails admin app. Covering setup of Apache / Mod Auth Tkt and contrast with Pub Cookie (different trade offs).

This tutorial will teach you how to use UML to design and build Plone sites. Of course, ArchGenXML and ArgoUML are central to my talk, but I also want to go beyond them in both directions, showing how UML can aid in quickly evaluating and fixing design, and how archetypes can quickly be skinned and used in real world environments. I want to showcase Archetypes in this talk, particularly the flexibility and power that they come with. If there is time, I will cover custom widgets and Bling. I want to differentiate some of the more central elements in UML. I will cover the important design differences between generalization, composition and reference. I will cover stereotypes, including the generic boundary, control and entity, as well as the more specific stereotypes for Plone. I will go over use case illustration in UML. I will go over workflow design using state diagrams.

Stefan will present 20 of the most common pitfalls and misconceptions in Plone development. Plone is a complex system, and it takes some time and experience to use it right. Over the years, Stefan has compiled a list of issues that have come up again and again on the Plone-users mailing list and the #Plone IRC channel. This talk will teach you how to avoid mistakes made by countless Plonistas before you, putting you on the fast-track to Plone Zen.

Creating complex user interfaces is hard. Plone gives you a lot for free, but sooner or later you'll have to customize things, and custom CSS won't always be enough--you need your own markup structure. Complex sites also deal with lots of different elements on different pages. All that suggests a more componentized approach to creating UIs than we currently have. This tutorial will introduce a new way of creating user interfaces and demonstrate some of the new skinning technology available in Zope, content providers and viewlets. Using individual components we will create a new, completely functional skin for Plone from scratch. And thanks to those individual components, an AJAX-enabled UI is just a few steps away... Attendants are welcome to bring their laptop and follow the tutorial as we go along. Instructions for prepared sandboxes, etc., will be given in due time.

There is a groundswell of excitement among environmental organizations using Plone. These groups often have strikingly similar goals in terms of creating web libraries and supporting online collaboration. Many of them are doing great things, yet often creating their own islands of information and not capturing the potential benefits of community development and interoperability. This Panel will explore some of the benefits and challenges involved in bringing these efforts together into a collaborative in a way that benefits the wider Plone community as well.

CMFEditions is being integrated into Plone 3.0. This talk will provide an in depth preview of this highly anticipated product and the end-user functionality it offers. In particular the talk will cover the saving and retrieval of versions, versioning policies, retrieval and storage modifiers and their uses, and showing changes between revisions. This will mostly be a non-technical presentation of the functionality being offered (with the exception of the discussion of modifiers and a brief architectural overview, which will be aimed at integrators).

Blogs, if implemented correctly, can provide corporations, non-profits, and communities with a solid marketing communication tool. A well-written blog will give your target audience more insight into your organization and inspire trust. Trust begets a better bottom line (whatever that may be, more subscribers, more clients, etc). Blogology, the science of blogs, has become so complicated and yet so vital to the corporate landscape that not knowing how to implement or utilize a blog (clog, blawg, vlog, edu-blog, milblog, klog) leaves the uneducated at a disadvantage. For the thousands of blogs out there that seem silly and unimportant there are thousands more that shape the way we view the world (as it gets smaller and smaller). The goal for this session is:

• History of Blogging
  
• Why blog?
  
• Perils and Pitfalls of blogging - Splogs, Comment Spam, trackback spam
  
• Comparing Plone tools for blogging (and other media blog types..podcasting)
• Quick tutorial on how to add a blog to Plone and key features
• Case studies of successful blog implementation in Plone

For the past 18 months my entire professional world has revolved around implementation of blogs on Plone. Everything from migration of entries on old Plone environments going as far back as 2003 to creating a 'nested' blogging environment for a client against my recommendations (nested, what do you mean nested? how exactly do you 'nest' a blog?). These were not simple 'put-up-a-blog' and run scenarios and with the increasing requirement for blogs in enterprise situations I've found myself knee deep in blogology and manipulating what we (Plone) have available and making it palatable for the corporate blogosphere.

What if, in addition to (or perhaps even instead of) managing content types, templates, and taxonomies, our CM systems managed stakeholders, goals, audiences, information, and publications. What if instead of simply automating Web site creation, our systems managed the full domain of issues involved in collecting and distributing information? Systems these days are quite good at making the details of CM easier, but are no help at all with the big picture. In fact, they leave most organizations with the mistaken idea that they have confronted their CM problems simply be installing a CMS. In this talk, I'll lay out the contours of the full CM domain of issues and discuss what you can do to confront them with or without software. Bob Boiko is author of the print works "Content Management Bible," "Laughing at the CIO: A Parable and Prescription for IT Leadership," as well as numerous electronic works on information management and systems. He is on the faculty of the University of Washington iSchool, a founder of CM Professionals, and President of Metatorial Services Inc. which provides strategic consulting.

A look at how Oxfam GB came to chose Plone as its content management system. We will look at:

• Oxfam GB's overall vision for the project
• Comparing Plone to the competition
• Behind the scenes of Oxfam evaluation process
• The road to implementation
• Contributions Oxfam made to Plone along the way