Fitting Plone in a custom stack
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This document summarizes a project to create a content management system for a large online retailer in Italy to manage marketing content across multiple brands and sites. The system needed to integrate existing content, provide speed, flexibility, and coherence. The solution involved aggregating content in Plone and using Genshi templating to publish content across sites. It also featured primary content organized as folders with composition of objects and multicast publication. Lessons learned included defining functional areas clearly and having multiple presentation layers while managing as a single system.
Fitting Plone in a custom stack
- 1. fitting in a custom stack
- 2. Who am I ● Simone Deponti ● Python/Plone developer @ Abstract ● simone.deponti@abstract.it
- 3. The customer ● Largest on-line retailer in Italy ● Several brands
- 4. The initial situation March of the Cart Catalog empire Marketing kingdom ...and a lot of small Imperial cities
- 5. The problem ● Need to manage “marketing” content ● To integrate already existing content ● Stand alone
- 6. The problem (2) ● “Large theatre of operations” ● Must maintain good relations with “neighbouring states” ● Parallel universes (multisite)
- 7. What do we need? Speed Flexibility Coherence
- 9. Speed ● No ● Repetitive tasks ● “useless” steps ● Yes ● One click one kill
- 10. Flexibility ● Marketing is not accounting ● Creatives ● Exception is routine ● Knowledged users ● Web is their work ● Possesses skills (that we can leverage)
- 11. Coherence ● Few base concepts ● Stick to them! ● Fast training
- 12. The solution ● “Aggregated” content ● “multicast” publication ● Information Architecture CMS != IA Site
- 13. The solution (2) ● Primary content ● Page is folder ● Object “composition” ● Templating (Genshi)
- 14. The solution (3) ● “primary” content ● Explicit positioning of root element ● Site-level multicast ● Internal structure follows Plone IA
- 15. The solution (4) ● Several content types ● “Standalone” or providing interfaces to internal WS ● Can be used within “primary” content
- 16. Lessons learned ● Plone's structure is optimal to manage content ● Presenting content is an altogether different story ● In the presentation layer, multiple is good, while managing, it's a <CENSORED>
- 17. Lessons learned ● Integration is simple if functional area are well defined and grouped ● Several ways: ● Webservice ● SQL ● Etc etc
- 18. Challenges ● Know the stack ● Automated refresh ● Componentize, componentize, componentize
- 19. And then? ● You can always do better ● Still too many useless steps ● Fine grained security ● UI polishing
- 20. Cast ● Plone ● Genshi ● SQLAlchemy ● PostgreSQL ● SOLR