Plone Konferenz: Day 2

Posted by fulvio at Feb 24, 2012 03:20 PM |
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Slept in, missed first talk.

 

Robert Rottermann
Web-Mashups mit Plone und Diazo

 

www.useragentstring.com

UAProf : User Agent Profile  :  an XML file generated by the manufacturer of the device, but can contain mistakes that can not be fixed by the community.  Some devices (like iPhone) don't provide UAProf.

Wurfl : Wireless Universal Resource File

  • organizes device capabilities into capability groups
  • since November 2011 no longer open source
  • alternatives exist

 

Enter Diazo

  • Plone asks client for properties
  • according to client properties, Diazo manipulates URL

 

Jens W. Klein
Ausfallsichere Kultur mit Plone - Effektives redundantes Hosting mit OpenSource Boardmitteln (slides)

Tr.: "Failsafe culture with Plone - Effective redundant hosting with open source"

Introduction:  the context for this talk is the regional agency for the promotion of arts and culture for lower Austria (Kultur Niederösterreich), and how they deployed Plone for all their sites.

Plone + virtualization +  redundance = thumbs up!

 

virtualization

  • KVM

 

redundance

  • OpenAIS
  • Pacemaker
  • Corosync Cluster Engine
  • OSF-Scripts
  • DRBD - Blockdevice (filesystem) replication

 

web publishing

  • nginx
  • varnish proxy cache
  • pound load balancer
  • Zope instances
  • ZODB, MySQL, Samba

 

Massimo Azzolini
Scalable Plone: from town-wide sites to regional portals and Intranets (Slides)

Small sites don't need anything but Plone with CacheFu and Apache

 

Large sites:

  • sc.social.like
  • integration of google search appliance
  • anonymous view for editors:  editors have a way to switch to a view that shows them the site as if they were not logged in
  • redturtle.smartlink
  • rt.purge ?  to purge the varnish cache on-demand, when content managers want a new content to be pushed out at a specific time
  • Newsletter:  Singing & Dancing, add-ons (collective.dancefloor)
  • Tag Cloud:  collective.vaporization
  • Maps:  collective.geo

 

Architecture:

  • IIS in front of everything
  • three servers with the following stack:
  • apache
  • varnish
  • Pound
  • 4 zeo clients
  • one zeo server
  • ZODB partitioned

 

"siege" for load testing

  • http://www.joedog.org/siege-home/
  • http://www.serverwatch.com/tutorials/article.php/3936526/Load-Testing-and-Benchmarking-With-Siege.htm

 

Subsites

  • do you really need it?
  • yes, if you want to create an internal link to content inside another subsite
  • create a collection that takes content from more than a subsite
  • find documents from outside the subsite as well
  • custom theme
  • domain.com/subsite
  • subsite.com
  • subdomain.domain.com

redturtle.subsites similar to lineage, but context-sensitive, depending on domain used to access

example.rtsubsites_theme

see blog post

 

Intranet/groupware

Internos (between us)

  • user dashboard/bookmarks, personal notifications
  • mercatino
  • the expert replies

Standard plone installation

  • custom theme
  • "usual" add-ons
  • 7000 registered users
  • Auth with Active Directory
  • used standard plone dashboard, but one column of dashboard is always shown on the left side of the whole intranet
  • rer.passaparola
  • rer.bookcrossing

Groupware

Documents, events, news, extreme management, ploneboard

 

Andreas Jung
Von Plone zum EBook oder PDF - Dokumentieren und Publizieren aus Plone und mit Plone

From Plone to EBook or PDF - Documenting and Publishing from Plone and with Plone

http://www.produce-and-publish.com

Single-Source Multi-Channel Publishing

This looks like a very powerful system!

Keynote von Matt Hamilton

"…It's Like Buying a Relationship"

I would summarize Matt's keynote thus:  Plone is not the code, it's the community

This one had a quote that Matt took exception to:

This brings us to CMS licensing costs. These can be modest, or they can add up to millions of dollars, depending on which solution you're looking to buy. Your budget can start at $5,000; $20,000; $50,000; $100,000; or $250,000, just for the license. It is still a common misconception that open source WCM is free. You may not pay for the license, but you get what you pay for.

And then further down it has the comment in the title of the keynote, which Matt used sarcastically:  there are only certain types of relationship which you can buy with a wad of cash, and they usually don't last very long...  As Plone developers/implementers/... you can pay us for our services, but our relationships are real.

 

Lightning Talks

Stefan Antonelli:  time-lapse video of preparations, the day before plonekonf

Daniel Kraft:  Hosting Must-Haves

  • Backups:  regularly, restore tests
  • plonevulntest  (non released)
  • Tested Rollout

Armin Stroß-Radschinski:  Plone in der Nähe von OLAP - Ein Argumentationsansatz (Plone close to OLAP, a few arguments in favor)

Robert Niederreiter: LDAP plugin

Armin Stroß-Radschinski: Plone, Zope, Python brochures

 

Open Space

I went to the one led by eleddy and Jörg Baach.  Theme:  Things that should be easy but are not.

Later I joked with Jörg that it was like a "Ploners Anonymous" group, with all the steps:  admission that we have a problem, rage, acceptance...  It felt good!

Eleddy captured notes, some of which already ended up on the Angry Plone Developer SMASH google moderator.

 

City Tour

As a pre-party extra-curricular activity we were invited to participate in a guided tour of Munich.  The title was "The other Munich".  Behind the architecture, the hospitality, the art and the celebrations Munich has a completely different historical dimension, which many are only vaguely aware of.  Before some city government PR geniuses renamed Munich as the "Metropolis with a Heart", it used to be the "Capital of the Movement".  Here is where the NSDAP (aka the Nazi party) was founded, this is where the national socialist movement started its ascent to power.  Munich is also known for many courageous acts of resistance, such as the students' "White Rose" and Georg Elser.  Resistance came from bourgeois and religious circles, as well, and even from the nobility.  Munich is full of buildings, streets and squares that remind us of those times.

I really enjoyed this tour, and want to convey all my appreciation to the organizers!

Oh, and while we were looking at the plaque commemorating the place where the former Gestapo headquarters used to stand, a cab and a van got into a wreck:

Party

It wouldn't be a Plone conference (whether with a C or a K) without a great party.  We had the run of the entire Villa Flora restaurant, with a very civilized buffet-style dinner made up of too many great selections to count, and unlimited beverages.  A DJ, too.  Great fun!

 

Some other random notes

First of all, one of the participants was a PhD student who is currently doing research on the factors that cause retention or attrition in FLOSS projects.  He had no prior connection to the Plone community, and so he didn't know much about it.  I thought it was really interesting to have an outsider asking us lots of questions, forcing us to think about who we are, why we do what we do, what caused us to maybe change or stay the same, etc.  It's one thing to hear a keynote tell us what a great community we are (which is true), but it's another to be put in a position to articulate it ourselves, trying to be as objective as possible.

Possibly the only snafu of the whole conference was that the wifi in the main auditorium stopped working about halfway through the second day, and never came back up.  I know the organizers were very chagrined about it, but were powerless to fix it.

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