Plone at the University of Washington
- 1. Plone at the University of Washington Melody Winkle Web Collective October 27, 2010 Plone Conference 2010
- 3. University of Washington ● Large research university ● 3 campuses ● 47,000 students ● 30,000 faculty and staff ● 140 departments ● $1 billion in research funding ● 900,000 pages indexed by Google
- 4. What was the Project? ● Move the central UW web site into Plone ● Centrally supported pages – For everybody's use – Maintained by UW Marketing team ● Most sites at the UW are maintained by local development teams
- 5. Goals of Project ● Centrally support a CMS for common navigation and branding ● Looks like everybody is part of the university ● Web site creation and maintenance easy for users ● Provide features not available to people coding HTML in Notepad
- 6. Ultimate Goal for Plone support ● Provide Plone sites for any group who wants one ● Central support (hard to charge money)
- 7. The Idea of a Central CMS ● People still want autonomy, but support and buy in for central CMS has been strong ● People are clamoring for tools
- 8. Economic Realities ● People want to play but don't have resources ● Departments are losing resources ● Need for central CMS became even greater ● People want to be part of the brand, but they need help and tools to do it
- 9. Achievements ● Home Page maintained in Plone ● Hundreds of central pages created, served from Plone ● More editors are being added to the site
- 10. Agile ● Project management methodology ● Iterations ● User stories – features are expressed in user stories "As a web manager, I want to understand the best option for blogging in Plone so that editors will be able to easily create and maintain blogs."
- 11. More Agile ● Acceptance tests – Objective statement of functionality: "The proposed blogging solution can support use of categories (controlled vocabularies)"
- 12. Agile Meetings ● Daily standup – People working on the site meet together for 15 minutes (longer, discussed requirements) ● Demo Reviews – Live demonstration of finished stories – Discussion – Retrospective
- 13. Agile Meetings ● Iteration Planning – Choosing stories for the next go-round – Estimating and prioritizing
- 14. Project Stats ● 12 iterations ● 2 weeks in length ● Launch prep – Design changes – Templating – Performance work
- 16. Team for the Project ● UW Marketing team – Gina Hills - Associate Director, Web Communications – Tim Chang-Miller - Web Producer – Jeff Hendrickson - Web Editor – Chris Heiland - Web Developer
- 17. UW Marketing Team, cont – Kilian Frey – Graphic Designer – Dane Odekirk – Web Programmer – Frank Fujimoto – Software Engineer, UW Information Technology
- 19. The Team, continued ● Web Collective team – Melody Winkle - Project manager – Derek Hoshiko - Project manager – Bryan Wilson – Developer – Ross Patterson - Developer (consultant for Web Collective)
- 20. One Site vs Many ● One site for unified navigation ● One site is more complex – Bigger – Many template exceptions – Need to manage more permissions
- 22. Site Software ● Plone 3.3.5 ● Zope (latest)
- 23. Installed Products ● Theming – Web Couturier Dropdown menu 2.0 – Plone JQuery Tools Integration 1.0dev ● Navigation – Portlet Navigation Extended 1.0.2 ● Editing – TinyMCE Editor Support 1.1rc9
- 24. Installed Products ● Syndication – Feedfeeder 2.0 – Products.fatsyndication 1.0.1 ● Multimedia – Flowplayer 3.0b3 – plone.app.blob: ZODB Blob support 1.1 – plone.app.imaging 1.0
- 25. Installed Products ● Forms – Form Criteria 2.0dev ● Maps – Maps 2.0.3 ● Authentication/Authorization – WebServerAuth 1.5 – LDAP support 1.1 – UW Plone LDAP 0.1
- 26. Installed Products ● Custom Products – UW Marketing Theme – UW Marketing Site 0.2
- 27. Hardware ● Slicehost ● 4 GB RAM ● 2 instances ● 1 ZEO
- 28. Architecture
- 29. Site Visits ● 350,000 visits/week for the live Zope pages ● 450,000 visits/week for the Home Page
- 30. Site Statistics ● 50 users ● 15 groups ● 3200 objects in the site
- 31. Workflow/Roles ● Simple Publication Workflow ● Managers – core Marketing team ● Other groups – Editors – Readers
- 32. XDV ● Theming was done with XDV ● Theme HTML file ● rules.xml file ● Compile with XDV complier into XSLT file ● XSLT file is used by Apache
- 33. Approaches to Theming ● collective.xdv ● Deliverance ● XDV with mod_transform
- 34. XDV ● Apache mod_transform ● Used dv.xdv server ● Workflow – Make change locally – Commit change – Update on uwplone2 – Rerun theme buildout
- 35. What We're Doing with XDV ● Using mod_filter – Lets us specify different transform sets based on location – Hoping to use it for content types – Got Plone to return the content type in the header – Needed a new Apache module to use it
- 36. More with XDV ● Did a lot of work outside the rules.xml file ● Complicated transforms ● Editing XSL
- 37. Custom Features ● Tiles – Blades on Home Page – Portal tiles ● Portal Types – Spotlight story (page) – Tiles – Portlets ● Portlets - 'Edit Portlet'
- 38. Tiles ● Blades on Home Page ● Tiles on Portals
- 43. Portals ● Custom type ● Top section ● Middle tiles ● Bottom portlets
- 46. Portlets ● Edit Portlets ● Lots of portlets
- 49. Successes ● Two very strong developers ● Communication – Standup – Face-to-face meetings, training – Time with developers – Web/sysadmin part of team
- 50. Successes ● Training – Bryan learning XDV a few weeks ahead, but still teaching – Chris, Tim learning Plone and XDV – Good decisions in where to spend time around training – UW team now responsible for site
- 51. Successes ● Attitudes – People all dedicated to the project – Everybody worked together ● Quality – Pleasure to work on a big project with a team that has high standards
- 53. Challenges ● Communication – more face time earlier – remote debugging hard – remote communication more difficult – primer on terminology
- 54. Agile Process ● User stories were confounding ● Bryan came in later to a massive backlog and designs from DNA ● Translation between design and stories would have helped ● Looking at the whole process more broadly - avoid the tunnel vision
- 55. Learning Plone ● Demo at beginning – User Interface – Back end ● Best way to learn is to use the tools
- 56. Content ● Helps to get real content in as soon as possible ● Start with content type that makes up 90% of content, rather than the specialized type
- 57. Design ● Design – initial design changed a lot ● Many design iterations while developing theme ● Design changes were in response to testing and political realities
- 58. Development ● Complex project – new features would cause earlier ones to break ● Issues wouldn't get fixed until later
- 59. Testing ● Challenging to get features tested right away ● Unit tests didn't cover everything ● More testing after rollouts ● Longer debugging period
- 60. Launch ● More time for launch ● Lots of content going in ● Many design changes ● Performance issues
- 61. What UW Team Wishes Plone Did ● More portable portlets ● More portable URLs – ResolveUID caused some problems ● Image handling – Can't always delete images – Credits field as option ● Easier editing – More drag-and-drop for layout
- 62. More Wishes for Plone ● Dropdown that would allow a editor to change the layout or theme their site/section uses would be ideal.
- 63. Future Plans ● Move to Plone 4 ● Move to in-house dedicated boxes ● XDV for theming? mod_transform is fast, but development workflow is hard because of complexity
- 64. Future Plans, cont. ● XDV to theme non-Plone sites – Drupal implementation – Wordpress implementation – Hand-coded header/footer
- 65. CMS at the UW ● Plone just one of several ● More sites on Drupal – Cheaper, simpler hosting – Harder on the users ● Joomla dying out ● UW Medicine, Business on Sharepoint
- 66. Any Questions? ● http://www.washington.edu/ ● http://www.webcollective.coop/ ● melodyw@webcollective.coop