Content Management Matters ™

Plone, the sometimes enigmatic open source CMS, has been working hard and planning big changes. The recent wrap up of the 2008 Plone Strategic Planning Summit is proof positive that they are serious about competing in the big world of open source CMS and not getting lost in the mix that is growing rapidly as others pull ahead of the field.

In May 2004, the Plone Foundation was formed as a supporting organization for Plone, an open source web content management solution. They have finally achieved one of their key objectives -- to have the Plone community at large take ownership of the "Plone" word in nearly all areas of the world.

In doing so, the open source community has set the bar just that much higher for what we all consider “open source”.

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.

Plone's uber-trainer and developer extraordinaire, Joel Burton, gave a wonderful presentation today on ways to make Plone run fast. Really, really fast.

The Plone Web content management system has long had a somewhat deserved reputation for being slow. However, that's truly only because Plone is optimized out-of-the-box for development, and people don't always figure out that reconfiguration is needed to get great performance in a deployment situation.

Sites like Novell.com and CIA.gov clearly show that Plone can perform extremely well, if only a bit of care and attention is paid by the developer.

You can download the presentation here.

Veda Williams, a project manager at One/Northwest who manages many a Plone implementation, gave us all here at the Plone Conference some advice on best practices for managing smaller Plone Web content management projects.

I found a lot of her presentation extremely familiar, as it meshed very well with my own experiences, and frankly, it all applies to any tech project, not just Plone.

Calvin Hendryx-Parker from SixFeetUp gave an interesting talk at the Plone Conference, advising strongly to only use Plone for its strengths, and not try to make it do what it's not optimized to do.

Plone does a tremendous number of things extremely well, but not everything. So at what point does it make sense to integrate a 3rd party application? Reinout van Rees blogged about the presentation. The bottom line:

"Our time is valuable. Why waste it by trying to hammer a square peg in a round hole? Pick the right tools for the right job and let Plone do the things it is good at."

Plone fest continues here in Naples. Sally Kleinfeldt from the Nature Conservancy is presently giving a talk about the ways their organization approached Plone development for their custom application development.

Its day two of the Plone Conference 2007 here in Naples, Italy. This morning we're sitting in the Conference Keynote speech which is being delivered in tandom by Alan Runyan and Alex Limi.

Following are my notes covering the state of the Plone union, Plone 3 and more.

Plone's intellectual property is owned by the non-profit Plone Foundation, whose mission it to protect and promote Plone.

The Foundation uses the Plone Conference as a wonderful opportunity to have an "All Member" meeting. Following are my notes...

Reinout van Rees blogged about a Plone Conference 2007 presentation given by Jean-Paul Ladage about an intranet built with Plone for the 6,000 person research department of Phillips. Unlike many Plone websites, this project required large scale personalization.

To quote:

The site has only logged-in users and a few thousand actually log in every day. This is different from most of the Plone sites, where you have a large majority of anonymous users. The users are authenticated against a 200,000 user LDAP database.

Check out the original piece or read more of our conference coverage.

Here in the afternoon sessions of the Plone Conference 2007 Nate Aune from Boston-based Jazkarta is giving a talk on a suite of products that are together called Plone4Artists -- a Plone add-on that provides significant multi-media content management for Plone.

Next up on the conference agenda is my presentation entitled Plone For Media.

While quite the dexterous typer I won't be able to simultaneous blog about it and present. That won't stop us however. A good amount of the material will be coming directly from the case study published last week, here on CMSWire. Check out the article Case Study: Discovering Plone Content Management System (Part 1).

Just because the researchers at Gartner chose to overlook open source offerings in their latest enterprise content management evaluation does not mean that decision makers within your organization should go the same route.

To help fill the not so minor gap left by Gartner, Infoworld recently compared five open source content management products that are worthy of any IT manager's shortlist -- though with Alfresco stacked up against the likes of Drupal, perhaps not the same shortlist.

More tid bits from the Plone Conference -- Maurits Van Rees just blogged about a talk here covering the latest news and progress of a new e-commerce add-on for Plone. We like the honesty of the module's name: GetPaid.

Here at the Plone Conference, I'm taking a few notes at Darci Hanning's 10 Ways to Engage the Plone Community talk.

Darci tells us this talk will not be super valuable to developers. The point is that you don't have to be a programmer to be enormously helpful to Plone. Darci's talk is really for people who use Plone as an integration platform or as a user, and want to help promote and support the Plone project.