Ask the Expert: Plone
Event details
Your Plone experts are Andrew Burkhalter of ONE/Northwest and Joel Burton, founder of PloneBootcamps.com. In his role as a program manager at ONE/Northwest, Andrew helps deploy Plone-based websites that further the missions and goals of Pacific Northwest environmental nonprofits. His organization has completed ~130 Plone sites in a 2 year timeframe. Among his favorites are sightline.org and snowleopard.org.
Joel is the principal founder of plonebootcamps.com, a high-value & low-cost training session for getting up to speed as a Plone developer or user. He is an acknowledged expert in teaching Plone and has hundreds of delighted students from past Plone bootcamps. In addition, Joel is a founding member of the Plone Foundation and a skilled independent consultant having deployed some of the largest and most sophisticated Plone sites.
Event Materials
Following is a transcript of our chat:Holly_NTEN: Great- Welcome to the chat everyone! Let's get a couple of logistics announcements out of the way:
- Again - If you want to change your handle in the chat window, Just type a new name in the "Name" field and click on the "Change" button
- If you want to direct a comment at a particular user, please begin your comment with "@ username"
- Andrew and Joel will attempt to answer all your questions here today, but we will also post the transcript of this chat at http://nten.org/expert/plone
- I encourage you to take a look at http://groups.nten.org - where we have an open source CMS group that can also provide resources and support to you
joelburton: Good morning, everyone. A quick intro about myself: I'm a Plone developer and volunteer on the project. I currently work as a consultant and teach classes on Plone. I have a background of working with nonprofits.
andrewburkhalter: it's worth noting that joelburton also provides *fantastic* Plone training at very reasonable costs :) so, I'm one of 2 website programmers at ONE/Northwest (onenw.org) an organization that serves Pacific Northwest environmental NGOs. We've been quite happy with what Plone offers. With relatively few resources (a few project managers) we've completed work on over >100 Plone based sites, all of which are small to medium in size
joelburton: @ Michael_Ritchey For question on clients with large-scale publishing, I'd look to the universities that have adopted Plone, like Penn State, Univ of Louisville, etc., and the large public sites--Oxfam has something like 80,000 digital assets
andrewburkhalter: @Michael_Ritchey when thinking about scallability Joel gave a talk at our latest Plone conference - digging up that URL now
joelburton: @Michael_Ritchey the site search for Plone is out-of-the-box ready to tens of thousands of articles, but, typically, if you have that many articles, you'll also want to design a more specific search form than just the standard kind of textual search. http://plonebootcamps.com/resources has handouts on "High Performance Plone", which describes caching and setup for large, fast sites
andrewburkhalter: High Performance Plone: http://plonebootcamps.com/resources/high-performance-plone/view
Michael_Ritchey: Thanks, Joel and Andrew!
Darris_Williams: @andrewburkhalter When you say small to medium sites what does that mean?
joelburton: You're welcome, Michael_Ritchey
andrewburkhalter: @Darris_Williams - think in the 25 to 250 hour range, generally for NGOs with 5-15 on staff
Darris_Williams: that helps, thanks
kai: I'm using CMFContentPanels and need to create some viewlets for more content types. I'm not sure how to go about doing this and haven't been able to find any documentation. Any suggestions?
andrewburkhalter: @Darris_Williams, these groups tend to come with difficulties publishing to their website, or want to train other staff so there's no longer a bottleneck on one person
Holly_NTEN: @andrew: Where is the best place to find Plone support and community?
andrewburkhalter: @Darris_Williams, good content editor usability is a key towards making Plone work. @Holly_NTEN, good question
joelburton: (All: CMFContentPanels is an add-on for Plone) kai -- I've never used it, myself, sorry. Have you looked at the product page on plone.org for it for the support link?
andrewburkhalter: @Holly_NTEN we have a very active IRC discussion channel
joelburton: Holly_HTEN: there are 8 books on Plone in 4 languages, which is a good place to start
kai: @ joelburton - yea, they don't have much documentation
joelburton: Holly_HTEN and, of course, active mailing lists hosted at plone.org. We maintain a 24-hour staffed support channel at #plone (which, right now, has ~185 people in int)
andrewburkhalter: @Holly_NTEN it's on irc.freenode.net in #plone, which I would encourage anyone with unanswered questions to join after this session
Holly_NTEN: Great! Any web sites that are particularly useful?
joelburton: @ Holly_HTEN and there are Plone user groups in about 15 cities worldwide, which is, I think, perhaps the best way to meet other Plone users / get help. You can find those on the Support tab at plone.org
andrewburkhalter: @Holly_NTEN for NGOs specifically, we have an NGO focused discussion list
joelburton: plone.org is the overall Plone community site. plone.net is a new site (just a few weeks old at this point) listing sites-in-plone, consultants, service providers, etc. It's not yet complete (there are 1,000+ consultants who do Plone!)
andrewburkhalter: more on our lists and support options at: http://plone.org/support
Holly_NTEN: What other questions do you all have?
andrewburkhalter: did the question on CMFContentPanels get answered?
joelburton: @ kai Sorry I can't help you more directly there; it's just not a product I've personally used. I'd pop into #plone -- there's usually someone using any of the add-ons there
kai: @joelburton okay, thanks - maybe it's something I need outside help with, I believe creating viewlets is similar to creating a page template
joelburton: from what I've understood, yes -- a viewlet is a PageTemplate that you register
Holly_NTEN: Andrew - about how big is the Plone support community?
andrewburkhalter: @kai, if you know who the author is, it's possible we can point you towards them for some advice too
cmcarlson: @cmcarlson Holly_NTEN mentioned the NGO focused discussion list, is this the PloneNGO email list serve?
andrewburkhalter: @Hollly_NTEN, Joel can give some numbers there as far as the size of the Plone economy, etc., as he's just coming off the board
joelburton: @ cmcarlson She is referring to a NTEN list about open source CMFs
Holly_NTEN: right, which can be found at http://groups.nten.org
cmcarlson: @cmcarlson, Thanks Joel, I will check that out and see what it has to offer
joelburton: @ Holly_NTEN There are over 1,000 consultants who work with Plone, ranging from solo practitioners to a 50 person Plone company
cmcarlson: thanks too Holly_NTEN
andrewburkhalter: @cmcarlson, the plone discussion lists are at http://plone.org/support. Scroll down about 1/2 way and you'll see the info on the NGO list
joelburton: The Plone Foundation estimated the "Plone economy" (consulting, training, salaries) to have been $150 million in 2005. Probably about 1/2 of all Plone sites go up without commercial support/dev and about 1/2 use some form of outside consulting/support
cmcarlson: @cmcarlson Would you consider the Bootcamp outside consulting/support?
joelburton: Yes, cmcarlson (all: "the bootcamp" == the trainings I've taught on Plone)
kai: i attended the SF bootcamp this summer and it was *very* good - I highly recommend them
joelburton: Thanks :)
kai: thank you!
Michael_Ritchey: We're having trouble migrating our instance from a server running different versions of Zope and Plone. Documentation says to focus on the data.fs file and the Products folder, but no luck. What book, etc. has the best documentation on this?
andrewburkhalter: @kai, I organized one in Seattle and I agree -- it was excellent
joelburton: There are lots of companies that offer training on Plone -- one of the nice things about our community!
cmcarlson: @c,carlson I sencond Kai's opinion
andrewburkhalter: @Michael_Ritchey, there's a list specifically tailored to setup problems
joelburton: @ Michael_Ritchey In general, migrating the database is easy. It's usually dependence on 3rd party products that can be a sticking point, and, depending on whether they're maintained actively or not, it can be easy or difficult
andrewburkhalter: perhaps you can describe the versions and process in more detail
joelburton: @ Michael_Ritchey _Plone_Live_ is the most up-to-date, excellent general purpose Plone book, which does talk about migrations toward the end. But, in general, migrations tend to be a "reach out" kind problem, where your best bet is to write to plone-users or come into #plone IRC -- *someone else* will have the same question about the same add-on product already answered
cmcarlson: @cmcalrson my supervisor was asking what the major difference is between Joomla (et. al. CMS) and Plone. Is there a quick and easy answer that I can give, without wasting too much time in research?
joelburton: Also, of course, be sure you've read the Release notes on the new version (obvious, yes, but people sometimes miss it) -- there's often tips there about known migration issues
kai: Any "gotchas" to be aware of migrating a windows plone instance to a linux instance?
joelburton: @ cmcarlson In general, Plone aims a bit higher up in deployment size/features/complexity than the other well-known open source CMSes (Joomla, Drupal, etc.)
andrewburkhalter: @cmcarlson what specifically are your core features, perhaps we can speak to what Plone does/doesn't do well in those categories
joelburton: @ cmcarlson I think the biggest technical difference is the focus on the object database and the "smart little objects" that provide their own security, etc. @ kai No, the database is OS independent and so is Python code
cmcarlson: by aiming higher are you specifically speaking of: levels of security, extensibility, useability?
joelburton: @ kai You probably want to delete the access rule at the root of the zope instance, though -- since you'll probably use something like Apache/Squid on Linux for hosting, and want need Zope to do the port 80 stuff directly
andrewburkhalter: @cmcarlson, one of the core differences in terms of aiming higher is in the hosting department, Plone requires a dedicated process and a decent bit of memory to run well
cmcarlson: @cmcarlson, yes smart little objects, someday I will be a smart little object. The security features are a selling point.
joelburton: :)
kai: @joelburton right, okay
cmcarlson: @cmcarlson: I remeber that discussion.
joelburton: I think our security model, workflow, and ability-to-have-untrusted-coders/scripters are core differences between Plone and many other open source CMSes
andrewburkhalter: @cmcarlson so we're talking about low-end hosting for Plone being in the $15-35, rather than the $5-10 range
joelburton: True; Plone is a decently sized stack of software, so you won't find any "$5 WEB HOSTING SPECIALS" to run Plone sites But I wouldn't recommend $5 hosting for any CMS, really, either ;)
cmcarlson: @cmcarlson:andrewburkhalter: still reasonably priced.
andrewburkhalter: @cmcarlson, the tradeoff of course is taht you do get the security/workflow/usability benefits joel refers to
scott: @joelburton: not sure what you mean by "untrusted-coders/scripters"
joelburton: You can let people write scripts or templates for your Plone site while they still are limited in what they can do
cmcarlson: @cmcarlson He might be talking about me...; )
joelburton: So you can have (for example) student interns writing reports about projects without being able to access anything they shouldn't be able to
andrewburkhalter: @cmcarlson agreed for most nonprofits that have the budget to put that emphasis on their web presence
joelburton: I find it's a very nice feature, scott, in larger deployments
cmcarlson: @cmcarlson: This protection against "the untrusted" is a great feature for an org like ours who have many interns/coops who migrate through our offices
Darris_Williams: I've bought a couple books on Plone; Plone Live, Building Websites with Plone and found The Definitive Guide to Plone online in PDF. Will the new book Content Management with Plone provide any additional benefit?
bchoc: To make sure I'm understanding this thread ... Plone has a greater level of granularity regarding control over who can insert what content, when compared to other CMSs?
andrewburkhalter: @Darris, I've read the new book on Content Management with Plone and it's quite good, but has a stated audience of content editors or those posting content to a plone site
joelburton: "Content Management with Plone" isn't a new book, darris_williams, it's been out for ~2 years. It's a good intro book for configurators and scripters. Some of the other books are stronger for more intermediate dev issues.
joelburton: @ bchoc We do have granular permissions for adding/editing content, but I was referring specifically to the ability to have people who are *coding* the system be untrusted, which I think is a feature Plone has that many other open source CMSes don't
joelburton: Of the Plone books, I think "Plone Live" is the best general purpose, "I want to build a Plone site" book
bchoc: Well, I was being broad with the term "content", but I didn't realize the extend of the breadth I needed. That's cool. :-)
Michael_Ritchey: I know the data.fs.old file is created upon packing the db, but can you use it to restore? Some documentation says to backup this .old file rather than your data.fs file if you backup while Plone/Zope is running. But I can't restore with it. Ideas?
joelburton: "The Definitive Guide to Plone" is available online for free, and has been published in 3 other languages
andrewburkhalter: @Micheal, Zope comes with a repozo script that specifically aids in backup
joelburton: Michael_Ritchey: http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/backup-plone. Repozo does live backups, including differential backups and such if you want them
andrewburkhalter: @Michael it's aware of when the .fs is being written to, etc.
joelburton: If all you have is a Data.fs.old, yes, you can restore from that--it's the exact copy of your database before the packing started. But I wouldn't rely on that for your backup strategy. Since repozo has nice features for doing backups by script In general, backing up Plone is trivially easy--since everything is typically in the database file, and you can back it up live. Plone comes with an "Undo" feature that can undo almost anything (except things like email that's already sent out, of course!), but we can't guarantee that will be as useful when the mistake was 5 days ago. Hence, backups are _always_ a good idea (and not just for Plone!)
andrewburkhalter: the undo feature which Joel refers to is really good for that, oops, I deleted the about section of my site moment :)
Michael_Ritchey: Thanks. I knew about repozo, but I'm just a content expert, and don't know how to run it. Since we're just creating a prototype, I've got no engineer support to speak of. We've had a nightmarish time restoring and migrating data.
joelburton: Michael_Ritchey: You can run repozo pretty easily; it's just a python script that ships with plone. I'd take a few mins to learn how to run Python on your server; it's too useful of a feature to not use
Michael_Ritchey: When a friend deleted a huge folder of content, I tried Undo. Major errors. Might have something to do with how many actions were performed between the delete and the Undo.
andrewburkhalter: @Michael, the only times I've had trouble with undo is when other subsequent changes have been made to an item
joelburton: Undo is essentially "time travel" -- if you try to undo something that took place after many other dependent things took place, you might have to undo those things, too. It's a great feature, but it can't be a replacement for backups, of course
Michael_Ritchey: do you know how to come into the #plone support channel on IRC? I think it's the best place to get support on plone for time-critical questions.
joelburton: And we work hard to make sure it's staffed by experts 24x7x365
Michael_Ritchey: Yes, I know about the IRC channel. I guess I'm hesitant to go there because the group is mostly developers.
joelburton: That group isn't mostly developers, Michael_Ritchey
cmcarlson: @cmcarlson The #Plone group is very helpful, tollerant and patient.
joelburton: Tho' the serious developers do spend time there (of course, and we love having them! :) ), it's mostly configurators/integrators asking questions & getting help
joelburton: It's much higher help-to-gossip and knowledgable-to-newbie ratios than some IRC channels for free software/open source. I think it's the best place for many kinds of help with Plone, for people of all levels
gabber192: A Problem. I've got Plone Captcha as artwork, filling the [validators] validators = validate_captcha in PloneFormMailer/skins/PloneFormMailer/formmailer.cpt.metadata How does one get this validation to work. mail sends fine both ways.
andrewburkhalter: looks like we have ~ 15 mins, what other questions are out there?
Josh: are there any good simple e-commerce modules for Plone?
Michael_Ritchey: What work is being done on content versioning? Is there currently a way other than Undo to easily restore an earlier snapshot of a document?
MichelleNOSI: This might have been asked - how easy is it to find nonprofit friendly plone hosting?
andrewburkhalter: @Josh, there are a couple of options to look at
kai: Where's the best place to find a plone integrator or consultant?
Chris_Crownhart: @andrewburkhalter, I'm working with a organization that is interested in the Salesforce intergration. Are you familiar with it enough to share some information?
andrewburkhalter: @Josh, it's too bad. aaronvanderlip of netCorps just left, but he developed something called SimpleCartItem, which is quite solid for the low end there's also a more comprehensive framework-level PloneMall
joelburton: @ Michael_Ritchy I'd look at CMFEditions, which provides friendly versioning with a great API for writing more interesting cases
Sarah Davies: I work with NPower, we provide Plone hosting, integrating and consulting in 12 cities nationwide!
andrewburkhalter: @aaronvanderlip, mind sharing the scope of SimpleCartItem?
joelburton: @ kai I'd send an email to your local Plone users group; for you, that would be PloneLounge of SF
kai: @Sarah which cities?
joelburton: plone.net is also becoming the central directory for plone talent, but we *just* launched that site about 10 days ago, so not everyone is there yet, of course
andrewburkhalter: @MichelleNOSI, I would also check out Six Feet Up, Webfaction, and High Speed Rails. NPower is great of course too :)
aaronvanderlip: SimpleCartItem is very low end as you mentioned, it is basically a simple front end that hold information for your payment gateway, you need to have a gateway that will accept a simple HTTP request, such as PayPal or 2C0,
joelburton: ... all of which are excellent Plone-knowledgable hosting places with strong nonprofit audiences
aaronvanderlip: SCI is fine for a couple dozen items and simple shipping inventory needs
Sarah Davies: @kai: Seattle, Portland, LA, Phoenix, Denver, Detriot, Indianapolis, Atlanta, Charlotte, DC, Philadelphia, New York
joelburton: [ Sarah Davies: would you might sending me an intro email; I'd like to follow up: joel@plone.org ]
natea: what is plone and why should i use it?
andrewburkhalter: @Chris_Crownhart, sorry I almost missed your question
Sarah Davies: @joel, sure! check out our website too - www.npower.org
andrewburkhalter: we're working on a Plone/Salesforce integration product
cmcarlson: Sarah Davies: we are working on the LPZUG (Louisville Plone Zope User Group)...
andrewburkhalter: it's scope is pretty simple, but by exercising the SF.com API, all new registrants data is added to SF.com as a contact
natea: andrewburkhalter - i think for many of the non-profit orgs that are evaluating Plone as a CMS, we need to do a better job of promoting how well it integrates with CRM and eAdvocacy tools - PyWhatcounts, eminaction, SalesforceConnector, etc.
andrewburkhalter: additionally, a user can manage their remote data out of a Plone site. Great point, @natea
Chris_Crownhart: @andrewburkhalter - Do you know if there are plans to integrate more components between Plone/SF?
natea: perhaps this info could be posted to http://plone.org/for/nonprofits?
andrewburkhalter: @Chris_Crownhart, definitely
Michael_Ritchey: natea, for a nice intro to Plone see http://plone.org/about/movies
joelburton: In fact, chris_crownhart, I've had several SF employees come to classes recently, so I hope there's plenty of SF/salesforce stuff happening inside the company, too
andrewburkhalter: @Chris_Crownhart, we'd like to start converting site commenters, users, etc. via the SF.com API
Chris_Crownhart: @natea - Can you tell us what PyWhatcounts and deminaction are?
natea: there is also the eCampaigning product developed by Fairsay, which looks very promising: http://www.fairsay.com/opensource/ectool/docs
gabber950: Greetings, was wondering about the status of Zope 3 and Plone compatability
andrewburkhalter: @Chris_Crownhart, i'll take PyWhatCounts natea, can take deminaction
natea: Chris_Crownhart: they are tools that integrate Plone with whatcounts.com and democracyinaction.org
andrewburkhalter: PyWhatCounts is a bit of Python glue code that exercises the WhatCounts web API
Darris_Williams: I'm not familiar with the IRC. Is it on Plone.org?
MichelleNOSI: I would love to see plone.org/for/nonprofits have some case studies and content ..
joelburton: @ gabber950 As there are useful new features in Zope 3 we'd like, we've been using them -- you may have noticed, for example, the ability to use view classes, etc., already
Darris_Williams: you can find information about getting on #plone at http://plone.org/support
natea: MichelleNOSI - you might want to join the Plone NGOs mailing list, if you haven't already: http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
joelburton: including a java applet so you can get on IRC without having to install any software
MichelleNOSI: @natea - thanks!
andrewburkhalter: Chris_Crownhart: we used it to allow users of sightline.org to set data in custom fields, so that follow-up mailings could target their audiences' interests more accurately
joelburton: @ gabber950 If you're interested in the details of how to use these zope 3 technologies today, you should take a look at the presentations from the plone conference in october--there were several good presentations on it
MichelleNOSI: NOSI is trying to gather case studies of nonprofits using open source software - so that's a great resource.
andrewburkhalter: @MichelleNOSI, that's a relatively new area of the site that I'm sure will be ramping up over the next few months, it was just conceived at the conference in Seattle in late Oct.
gabber950: Thanks, joelburton.
Holly_NTEN: We're just about out of time. Thanks to Andrew and Joel! And thanks to all of you for your questions!
Darris_Williams: This has been great, thanks!
joelburton: Well, thanks to everyone for their questions!
cmcarlson: Thaks all
andrewburkhalter: thanks all!
aaronvanderlip: well done!
