Case Study: Discovering Plone Content Management System (Part 2)

DISCOVER Magazine, one of the most widely read science mags in the US, had out grown its dated web publishing infrastructure. Times were changing, multi-media was big and in general Web and CMS technology had moved forward significantly.

DISCOVER chose the Plone Web content management system as the platform for managing and delivering their primary website (http://www.discovermagazine.com). The decision was made on the basis of the system's ease-of-use, feature set, strong open source community, outstanding customizability, standards compliance, reputation and delivery performance.

In part one of this two-part series we described both how DISCOVER uses the Plone Web CMS to manage its website, and how the DISCOVER team worked through the process of migrating existing content from its older site into the Plone system.

Here in part two, we will review some of the specific features of Plone and how DISCOVER has taken advantage of them, and then we'll discuss a bit about the website's post-launch performance.

Case Study Highlights

• DISCOVER chose Plone for its ease-of-use, robust feature set, strong open source community, reduced vendor lock-in, outstanding customizability, standards compliance, reputation, economics, and high performance.
• Features such as a powerful, integrated search engine, flexible workflow system, and automatic image resizing were key factors in DISCOVER’s choice of Plone.
• Streaming video, blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and photo galleries are enabled and integrated.
• Integration of social networking sites like Digg and Reddit has resulted in an increase in site traffic of nearly 70%.
• Any site content can be made “Subscriber-only” by DISCOVER editors.
• DISCOVERmagazine.com is a high-traffic site that performs extremely well under heavy load.

Additional Plone Features

One of the reasons DISCOVER chose Plone was the enormous amount of functionality Plone provides out-of-the-box, and the wide assortment of outstanding add-on products such as blogging and polls.

Built-in Search Engine

A relevance-based search engine is built right into Plone. As soon as content is submitted to Plone it is indexed and available in the search engine to anybody with permission to see that content.

The search engine makes it extremely easy for visitors to find the specific content they want, including print or web articles, podcasts, videos, photo galleries and blog entries. Live Search enables the visitor to see search results in real time as keywords are entered into the search field. Advanced Search lets the visitor target search results by author, date, content type (blog post, article, photo gallery, etc.), channel and/or sub-channel.

Customizable Workflow

All content in Plone has a visibility state (private, published, draft, etc.) that defines who can see that content. Plone makes it extremely easy to customize the workflow that related to the state of the content. For example, when an article is entered in the DISCOVER website it starts in a private state. Authorized editors are allowed to change the state of the article to published or to subscriber-only.

Subscriber/Premier Content

Only subscribers to the print magazine are allowed to see content that is in the subscriber-only state. An integration was developed between Plone and DISCOVER's 3rd party subscription management service to enable Plone to know, in real time, if somebody is a valid and active magazine subscriber. Non-subscribers are only able to see a teaser for subscriber-only content, enticing them to become magazine subscribers in order to read the full article.

Throughout the site, website visitors are given the opportunity to subscribe. New subscribers are provided instant access to the subscriber-only content, to the print magazine or to any of several email newsletters.

RSS Web Feeds

RSS feeds are available throughout the DISCOVER website, enabling visitors to be instantly notified of changes and newly published content. In addition to a general RSS feed, each channel, department and blog has its own feed. In its out-of-the-box form Plone automatically generates RSS feeds. This is a key functionality for any modern Web CMS.

Case Study: Discovering Plone Content Management System (Part 2)

\n\nDISCOVER Magazine, one of the most widely read science mags in the US, had out grown its dated web publishing infrastructure. Times were changing, multi-media was big and in general Web and CMS technology had moved forward significantly.\n\nDISCOVER chose the Plone Web content management system as the platform for managing and delivering their primary website (http://www.discovermagazine.com). The decision was made on the basis of the system's ease-of-use, feature set, strong open source community, outstanding customizability, standards compliance, reputation and delivery performance.\n\nIn part one of this two-part series we described both how DISCOVER uses the Plone Web CMS to manage its website, and how the DISCOVER team worked through the process of migrating existing content from its older site into the Plone system.\n\nHere in part two, we will review some of the specific features of Plone and how DISCOVER has taken advantage of them, and then we'll discuss a bit about the website's post-launch performance.

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