Plone Conference 2004 Program

State of Plone

Plone Founders Alan Runyan (Enfold Systems) and Alexander Limi (Plone Solutions)

Opening keynote talk on the State of Plone and it's past, present and future from its founders.

Archetypes

Benjamin Saller, ObjectRealms

First part is a primer to Archetypes, designed for those who are new to Archetypes-based development or for people who never used AT before. The second part of the tutorial is for developers who are already familiar with Archetypes and who are interested to get deeper into the subject.

Case study: Epson Intranet

Munwar Shariff, CIGNEX

Demo that explains how Epson Electronics America save millions of dollars by implementing its web initiatives using Zope.

Eduplone - Managing Educational Content

Jodok Batlogg, Telesis and Georg Pleger

Information about the Eduplone consortium, educational technology standardization, example applications and Eduplone roadmap

Best-Practices for Plone Development

Joel Burton

You've learned about Page Templates, Archetypes, and have dug through the Collective. How should you actually build your site, though? This tutorial teaches about different parts of the development toolchain, including:

• Using version control for your source code
• Allowing several developers to work together, without stepping on toes.
• Setting up a Zope server for most effective development.
• Using the Zope debugger, both directly, and via IDEs
• Using 'Site Products' to hold the skins and logic for your site in one place
• Techniques for developing on a laptop or workstation and synchronizing with a server.
• Choosing conventions for your project and your team.

Building Large Scale CMS for Companies

Andreas Jung

Focus on a media CMS built with Plone that handles a large number of SGML and XML documents used for the production of print, CD/DVD and electronic products. The talk will show how to build such a large system and how to deal with large amounts of data in the ZODB.

XPI - Surveys and Evaluations in Plone

Martin Samek, IMC University of Krems

Getting Company Information for the Management. This is possible with the Plone based survey product XPI. It is usable at big companies as well as doing evluations in Universities. This Talk/Case Study will show up the advantages and savings which are apossible bye using Plone in such a process.

Leveraging the Standards: Improving the WebDAV experience... NOW!

Sidnei da Silva

Day after day, new tools are created to enable new features and faster development of the most different kinds of applications. Obviously, the main target is the browser interaction. Plone has shown to be specially targeted at this niche, being widely recognized as one of the best Open Source Content Management Systems out there. However, Content Management is not only about being able to control your content. The Web Browser, though a universal tool that is available on the most different platforms, enabling people to reach and control their content from anywere, is not rich enough to match existing tools with years of acceptance and tight desktop integration. This is the domain of Document Management, which increasingly is converging with Content Management. The WebDAV protocol was created for the purpose of integrating web content into desktop authoring environments. WebDAV has been present on Zope since the early days as a supported way of interacting with content, along with FTP and XML-RPC, but has been mostly ignored due to the aforementioned reasons. Providing a reasonable WebDAV experience is not an Herculean task. However it requires some preparation an thinking. Care must be taken as to not break backwards compatibility. All the contracts must be clear and predictable, and more than that, the scope must be clear so that we don't get stranded by overengineering and endless discussions. Over the last couple months, while working for Enfold Systems, I've developed a couple of tools to improve and provide better control over the process of creating and modifying content over WebDAV. In this tutorial I will explain about the goals of each of these tools and how they can be used together to build a better WebDAV experience by using existing standard technologies and libraries, instead of reinventing the wheel.

Designing Your Website Application Architecture for Plone/Zope

Paul Boos, SAIC

This talk will focus on how one can approach capturing actionable business processes, information architecture, and technical infrastructure and included these into the design of an application; there will be some mention of Plone, CMF, and/or Zope products that can help, but the primary focus is ensuring those that are producing applications have a solid foundation for successful, long-term solutions.

Case Study: Plone and Zope in the Brazilian Government

Giuseppe Romagnoli and Eliane Silva, Serpio

In this Case Study, they intend to show how they jumped over the hurdles of adopting free software technology in Brazilian government and how ZOPE and Plone RAD features are improving portal development. They are going to present their experience with the RFP process of selecting a portal software solution and why we had choosen ZOPE/PLONE platform instead of proprietaries technologies. This presentation will also include some important examples of portal ZOPE/PLONE implementations in Brazilian government.

CMFMember

Geoff Davis

CMFMember gives Plone some greatly improved member management features. This tutorial will developers an overview of CMFMember's functionality, then we will walk through the creation of a custom member objects. Participants should have basic familiarity with Archetypes (the Archetypes for Beginners tutorial should do nicely). People wanting even more group management capabilities should be sure to attend Rob Miller's talk on TeamSpaces and the Black Rock City Extranet, which illustrate the power of CMFMember in capable hands.

Plone for Governments

Andy Stein, City of Newport News

Two essential applications of Plone: as a repository of software for local and state government and a generalized and reusable Citizen Portal Engine. The Repository is available at www.gocc.gov for state and local government in US to share and collaborate on software applications. The reusable Engine is being development by a consortium of government agencies and the University of Virginia.

Business of Plone

Paul Everitt, Plone Foundation

Joel Burton, Plone Foundation

How big is the world of Plone? How many businesses are located in which countries? This session, hosted by the Plone Foundation marketing folks, discusses the market of Plone and launches an initiative to collect more data. An update will also be given on Plone Foundation activities.

BOFs, Discussions or Lightning Talks (open to everyone)

Don't Fight the Framework: Best Practices for CMF/Plone Development

Tres Seaver

While Plone makes setting up a default site easy, customizing the site without sufficient knowledge of the underlying CMF / Plone framework can be frustrating, and can lead to sub-optimal results (poor performance, messy / unmaintainable code and templates, etc.) This talk highlights how the framework expects to be customized, and points to patterns for avoiding such outcomes.

Zope 3 Introduction and Tutorial

Jim Fulton

Jim will be providing an overview of the upcoming Zope 3 and it's technology.

From CMF to Zope 3: Lessons Learned, Future Directions

Tres Seaver

Many of the architectural and design patterns first worked out in the Zope Content Management Framework have been incorporated into the Zope 3 component architecture. This talk highlights the lessons learned from this migration, and offers pointers for designing and building Plone / CMF applications to ease forward migration into Zope 3.

Collaboration Management with Archetypes

Rob Miller, the Burning Man project

This talk introduces TeamSpaces, an extension to CMFMember that applies the Archetypes toolkit to the management of teams, team memberships, and any desired set of team- or team member-related data.

Additionally, this talk will demonstrate how CMFMember, TeamSpaces, and other Archetypes-based tools can be combined to create a self-contained, easy to install organization management and collaboration tool. This will include a brief case study of the latest release of the Black Rock City Extranet, a TeamSpaces-based groupware tool used to support the ongoing operations of the Burning Man Project.

Zope 3 Tutorial, continued

Versioning and Staging in Plone

Kapil Thangavelu

When building complex cms sites, a critical component is often the ability to version and stage content. This talk will focus on OccamsStaging, a new software stack for the plone community. OccamsStaging is a revolutionary approach to the problem domain based on storing an entire site within a version repository and reconstructing the site on the fly, as well as autoversioning content. This talk will go into depth about Occams architecture and how to set it up, common use cases and scenarios for staging, as well as comparing Occams to the other software stacks for versioning and staging available for the Plone/CMF platform.

Notifications in Plone

Kapil Thangavelu

An architectural examination of using EventChannel, CMFCoreEvents, and CMFNotifications in a Plone site for user subscribeable notifications, to allow users to subscribe in generic fashion to events in a portal, with user defined periods for delivery, and flexible delivery mechanisms.

Zope 3 Tutorial, continued

Using CPS components with Plone and CMF

Julien Anguenot, Nuxeo

CPS components are based on CMF thus easy to plug into Plone. This talk will cover:

• Architecture differences and things to take care of (i18n, main_template, proxies)
• Presentation of CPS4CMFPlone package including for the moment CPSSchemas/CPSDocument/CPSInstaller + dependencies.
• What's next ? (proxies / repositories / eventservice... ?)
• Open to contributions and discussions to see how to join force.

Five

Martijn Faassen, Infrae

Five is a product that integrates Zope 3 functionality into Zope 2. Five right now allows you to use the following Zope 3 technologies in Zope 2: It is not neccessary to attend the Zope 3 tutorial which happens before, to be able to follow Martijns explainations.

• Zope 3 Interfaces
• Adapters
• Pages (views), including skins and layers
• ZCML
• It is possible to add Zope 3 style views to your own Zope 2 objects, or to existing ones, even normal Folders using this product, and it works with a straight Zope 2.7 installation, as long as Zope 3 has been installed.

GRUF: Internals of user authentication in Plone

Pierre-Julien Grizel, Ingeniweb

Discover internals of GroupUserFolder, the user component inside Plone. Learn how it works internally, how groups appeared into Zope, how to add several authentication sources, how to handle LDAP directories, etc.

Five, Continued

MySite

Raphael Ritz, Humboldt University, Berlin

MySite provides an introduction to product development for Plone for site managers that feel the need to turn into file-system based product development but have no clue where to start. It is assumed, however, that you know what the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) is and how to access it as well as how to install products for Zope/Plone in general. Some basic Python knowledge is definitively a plus but the tutorial should be helpful even without that.

PloneTestCase - The Plone 2 Testing Environment Explained

Stefan Holek, Plone Solutions

If you want to write automated tests for Plone and your Plone-based products, this tutorial is for you. You will learn how to run your tests, how and why the default fixture works, and how to write your own tests derived from the PloneTestCase class.

The tutorial will cover advanced topics like testing security, accessing the file system, rigging the REQUEST, etc. Finally, we will show how to create your own test frameworks based on PTC.

Digital Publishing Tool - Leveraging Flash in a CMS based on Plone

Jodok Batlogg, Telesis

Digital Publishing Tool is a innovative Content Management Solution, which combines the rich features of the powerful back-end Plone with a possibilities of Flash as (authoring) frontend. DPT combines WYSIGWYG editing, Drag and Drop, XML and XUL, Plone and Archetypes to rich media portals. In this talk we'll show the open source backend and a sample client application.

PloneTestCase, continued

PloneCampus, a vertical application for universities

Francesco Ciriaci, Reflab

PloneCampus is a project aiming to realize a web application for didactics management, a collaborative environment for teachers and students and the automation of administrative procedures for Universities. PloneCampus is an open source project by the University of Bari and Reflab.

I18N and LinguaPlone

Geir Bækholt and Helge Tesdal, Plone Solutions

Much of Plone's popularity is due to it having the user interface translated to many languages. LinguaPlone is the new tool for Plone to properly handle multi-language-content websites. This tutorial will teach you how LinguaPlone works, and how to use it to create and manage multilingual content in Plone.

Plone's Form Controller Framework

Geoff Davis

This talk will cover the what, why, and how of CMFFormController, Plone's framework for managing form behaviors. I will walk participants through several examples.

Efficently Serving Static Content Using Zope

Chris McDonough

Zope naturally excels at serving dynamic content, but isn't as effective at serving static content as other web platforms. The talk explores possibilities for making Zope more effective at serving static content.

Plone Skinning and Templating

Alexander Limi, Plone Solutions

In this tutorial, Plone Founder Alexander Limi will take you through radically re-skinning Plone using only CSS. He will start with an existing, well-known web site, and make Plone look exactly like it. Topics covered include the DOM model (with inspection), best-practices for skinning, and a basic XHTML/CSS overview. The skinning will be done real-time, and by the end of the tutorial we will have a fully skinned Plone that looks nothing like Plone at all.

CompositePack, composing archetypes content

Godefroid Chapelle

Based on Shane Hathaway's CompositePage, CompositePack is a product that allows the Plone Manager to build composite pages by manually aggregating Archetype content from his site. The design will be explained. Customizing CompositePack by building and registering layouts and viewlets will be explained and demoed.

Web Quality Certification Management with Plone

Vincenzo di Somma, Reflab

The focus of the talk is on how to leverage Plone, Archetypes and workflows to build a custom intranet application that manages Quality documentation, Project documentation, formal knowledge and part of customer relations.

Developing and Debugging Zope and Plone with BoaConstructor

Riaan Booysen and Joel Burton and Gogo from Bluedynamics

Boa Constructor is a powerful open source development environment for building Python applications, including tools for managing Zope sites and adding and modifying Zope/Plone content, such as PageTemplates or PythonScripts, right within the IDE. It also includes a flexible debugger and object introspection system. In this tutorial, we'll cover how to use Boa Constructor to help build and manage your web site, and will cover how to setup your Zope/Plone site for debugging with Boa. In addition, we'll take a quick look at two other popular debuggers, WingIDE, and Komodo, and compare their features.

Outline:
- Overview of BC, where it is, where it's going
- Developing sites using Boa
- Debugging using Boa Constructor
- Short compare to WingIDE
- Short compare to Komodo
- General tips of debugging Zope/Plone
- Questions

The Railroad Repository Shuttling Large Files ‘Around’ Plone and Zope

Kit Blake, Infrae

Agenda

Railroad Project Context
Accessing the Railroad Server
Dealing with Railroad content
Analysis and future

The Problem

Most CMS's don't appreciate very large files
High performance sites suffer from processor activity
Zope sites typically only have four threads
Storage is local, often not accessible to other machines
Management on a file system level should be convenient

The Office Converter talk was moved to lightning talks

PloneMall - the complete shopping system for Plone

Jens Klein and Fabiano dos Weimar Santos

Workflowing and Security

Andy McKay

Workflow and security are some of Plone's more powerful and complicated features. This tutorial steps through Plone's concepts of workflow and security so that beginners to Plone can get an understanding of how they work. I'll then step through some examples and how particpants can use these in their site. This tutorial is a must for all beginners or developers with complicated workflowing needs.

ArchGenXML

Phil Auersperg, BlueDynamics

Plone Apps at your fingertips. Learn how to create working Plone Products without typing any line of code. Generate them out directly of UML DIagrams and ensure also to have clear documentation and and architecture.

Plone Desktop

Alan Runyan, Enfold Systems

Presentation of State of the Art Content Management. Learn how Plone integrates fully into Windows Desktop and manipulates workflows, properties and content without using your web browser.

BOFs, Discussions and Lightning Talks

Keynote: The Future of Content Management with Zope 3

Jim Fulton, Zope Corporation

Among other topics Jim will present a report of the meeting of all major Zope CMS vendors concerning Zope 3. This meeting/discussion/sprint which happens just before the conference at the BlueDynamics Headquarter in Castle Goldegg with the goal to discuss about the future of CMS features in the upcoming Zope 3 to ensure more compatibility between the different CM Systems like Plone, Silva, CPS and the base Architectures like Archetypes, XML and so on.