Download pdf - Best. Plone. Ever! Presenting Plone 3

Best. Plone. Ever!Presenting Plone 3

Jon Stahl ONE/Northwest1Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Is your local Plone running? Copy is at Plone-3.0.1start with zeocluster/bin/startcluster.sh

A whirlwind tourhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/yogi/163795676/

2Wednesday, October 10, 2007

For the next 45 minutes, we’ll take a whirlwind tour of Plone 3.

I’ll summarize and demonstrate the biggest new features of Plone 3, and rattle off a bunch of little details. We’ll have a lot of time for questions at the end.

A lot has changed with this version of Plone, and my hope is that you’ll walk out of here with a good sense of what’s new, and with a head full of ideas about what you want to dive deeper into during the rest of the conference.

About me

From Seattle, Washington, USA

Work at ONE/Northwest

Started with Plone in 2005

Ran Plone Conference 2006

Zero Python knowledge


I work at ONE/Northwest, a nonprofit based in Seattle, Washington.

We provide technology and communications strategy consulting to environmental NGOs, mostly in the Northwestern US and Canada, with a focus on helping deepen public engagement in environmental issues.

Plone is a big part of our consulting practice. We started building sites with Plone in 2005, and have now launched over 100 small to midsized Plone sites for non-technical clients.

In early 2006, we started getting more deeply involved in the Plone Community. I was honored to serve as the lead organizer of last year’s Plone Conference in Seattle.

Last, and perhaps most importantly, I have zero knowledge of Python. This is going to be a completely content-free presentation! But don’t worry, I’ve got a couple of special guests lined up to answer technical questions.


Enough about me, let’s talk about Plone. ;-)

Plone 3 was released on August 21, 2007.

It’s the culmination of over a year of work from the Plone team. Wichert Akkerman was the release manager. Wichert did a fantastic job of keeping a complex release process on track, and continues to supervise the process of rolling out bug fixes.

Big, exciting features


OK, let’s dive in. Plone 3 has a number of big, exciting new features, including

An upgraded graphical HTML editorImproved image handlingImproved sharing and permissions managementVersioning, working copies and lockingA new set of workflowsContent rulesA new portlets management systemA new javascript framework

Upgraded HTML editor

http://www.flickr.com/photos/psd/3434511


If you’ve used Plone in the past two years, you’ll know that Plone includes a graphical HTML editor called Kupu. It’s a central part of the Plone experience for most users.

Plone 3 includes Kupu 1.4, which addresses a lot of small issues -- and a couple of big ones. I’m going to briefly demonstrate Kupu, but before I do, I’ll point that you can install this new version of Kupu into an existing Plone 2.5 or Plone 2.1 site, so even if you’re not yet on Plone 3, you can enjoy some of its goodness.

Improved images7Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Kupu 1.4 handles images a lot better.

It’s easier to find images to insert, because Kupu now previews images before you insert them.

Kupu now lets you insert automatically resized versions of your images.

And, finally, Kupu can now generate automatic captions for your images, drawn from the Description field on the image.

http://localhost:8080/Plone/captioned-image

http://localhost:8080/Plone/captioned-image

Anchors Aweigh!http://flickr.com/photos/stawarz/1107593541/

http://onenw.org/somepage#a-section


Kupu 1.4 has nice support for HTML anchors, and for building automatic tables of contents. This is really handy for making longer pages more accessible.

You can also build a table of contents in Edit>Settings... this is easier, but offers less control over the content, format and placement of the TOC.

http://flickr.com/photos/stawarz/1107593541/

http://flickr.com/photos/stawarz/1107593541/

Share nicely9Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Plone’s security and permissions system is one of its strongest features. Few other CMSes can touch it. In previous versions of Plone, this power was a bit hard for average users to harness.

In Plone 3, the Sharing tab has been massively overhauled, giving us a simple front-end to a much-cleaned up set of permissions and roles.

Before10Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Ok, here’s the old sharing tab in Plone. The key thing to notice here is that it’s really, really LONG. And it doesn’t really do what I want, which is make it easy to give people permission to view a page, add content to a folder, and edit content. So much power, but all buried.

Let’s click over to a live copy of the Plone 3 sharing tab.localhost

Workflowshttp://zestsoftware.nl/producten2/plone/specs/publicatieproces/index_html?set_language=en&cl=en


Workflows let you transition a piece of content through a series of “states” in which it can have different permissions or be reviewed by different people. Plone’s workflow engine is powerful and mature, and has long been one of its strongest selling points for larger organizations.

Plone 3 now ships a simpler default workflow, along with the classic Plone workflow and several new workflows.

Workflows can now be assigned both to individual content types and to specific sections of your site with the CMFPlacefulWorkflow product . This allows you to set up powerful, flexible permission systems entirely by pointing and clicking.

Keep track of stuff Versioning

Locking

Working Copies


Content management is more than just writing new stuff; it’s also about managing the process of updating content you already have.

Plone 3 has three powerful new features for helping you keep track of content as it evolves, including:

VersioningLockingandWorking Copies

Versioning13Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Versioning in Plone 3 is enabled automatically. Each time you edit a page, it saves the differences from the previous version.

The new “history” tab lets you access that version history.

Locking14Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Plone automatically locks documents that are being edited. You can break a lock, but only if you really want to. Totally automatic. No configuration needed.

Working Copies15Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Ever wish you could take a page in your site, check it out to work on it for a while, let others review your work, then publish it back over the old copy? Working copies lets you do just that. Some people call this feature “staging.

Working copies is a very simple implementation of this idea. It allows you check out one document at a time...

More complex staging scenarios (e.g. checking out an entire folder at once) are supported by add-on products like StagingAddOn and EnSimpleStaging.

All-new portlets system16Wednesday, October 10, 2007

This is Geir Bækholt and Martin Aspeli, who created Plone 3’s new system for managing portlets.

The most important thing to know is that your old portlets still work just fine in Plone 3!

The new portlets system pushes a lot of control over portlets up to site administrators, and if you create new Plone 3 style portlets, you can make your portlets do some new tricks, like give them configuration options.

Portlets can be assigned to:

folderscontent typesgroups or roles

Portlets can cascade down through a folder hierarchy or (for the first time!) you can block inheritance.

Content rules17Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Content Rules is another entirely new system in Plone 3, also written by Martin. He’s quite prolific.

Content rules includes a bunch of triggers and actions for doing things automatically to content objects, and is very easy to extend.

For example, you could write a content rule every time a user publishes a News Item, move it to the News folder. Or send an email to the site admin. Or popup a notification.

KSS: A Javascript “Meta-framework”


Plone has had javascript-based UI since 2.0. With 3.0, we add a new javascript framework, called KSS, created by Godefroid Chapelle and Balazs Ree.

KSS abstracts away the underlying javascript libraries (e.g. JQuery, Prototype), and lets integrators and add-on product developers add javascript behaviors to simply by writing CSS-like stylesheets.

Godefroid and Balazs are both doing talks about KSS today and tomorrow, if you want to know more about KSS.-

A “Nu” Theme19Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Plone 3 ships with the same default “classic” Plone theme you know and love, but also includes “NuPlone”, a clean new visual theme by Cornelis Kolbach and Alex Limi.

NuPlone is an experiment in giving Plone an even cleaner, simpler visual design, and it’s very much still a work in progress. Expect to see it continue to evolve rapidly.

Some add-on products still look a little funny with it. Use with care.

Small, but still exciting

features


Plone 3 also includes a lot of small, but still exciting features. I’ll give you a quick run-through.

Wiki markup [[link like this]]

Link integrity checking

Full-text indexing of Word & PDFs out of the box*

Presentation mode

HTML field on Collections

OpenID

Sitemap protocol

New markup formats* Requires some supporting Python libraries that aren’t bundled with

Plone.


Upgrade process

http://plone.org/upgrade


Plone puts a lot of effort into the upgrade process.

There is now really good documentation for upgrading Plone sites.

Difficulty depends on how much custom programming you’ve done and the readiness of any add-on Products you’re using.

Overall, difficulty seems about the same as 2.1->2.5, and a lot less painful than 2.0->2.1.

In other words, we’ve learned a lot. ;-)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/travelinlibrarian/223839049/




Me.

[email protected]

www.onenw.org

blogs.onenw.org/jon

IRC/Skype: jonstahl
