Fermilab Plone Update
- What is it?
- Why did we do it?
- Local Additions
- New look
- New Server/Configuration
- New Software Versions
What is it?
- Customizable Content Management Framework
- Good CMS out of the box
- Supports various content types (vs "everything is a
Wiki page")
- Rich suite of addons/tools
- Main weakness: Documentation (improving...)
Why?
- Pondering Global Sitewide Domination
- Platform for all interactive content
- Common, effective security system
- Nix wiki-of-the-day requests with "we support Plone, use it".
Tools/features
- Wiki (Zwiki)
- form management
- workflow
- trouble ticket systems
- Editor support (external/in-browser/WebDAV)
- Searching (RSS of search,smart folders)
- Myriad plugins
Local Additions
- SSL Cert Authentication [demo]
- Logbook [demo]
- Committe Request Approval [demo]
- Date Range folder (Agenda, Gantt Chart, etc.
w/content) [demo]
- Twiki markup for Zwiki
New pretty pictures
- Before:
- After:
New Config
- Diamond architecture for performance
- separate ZEO object database process
- pair of Zope instances
- Front-end squid cache
- Local ldap vs win2k AD
New Software Versions
- Migration issues
- Exporting content from old site, importing to new
- Whole site export/import worked sometiems
- 2.0 -> 2.0.5 yes
- 2.0 -> 2.1 no
- 2.0.5 -> 2.1 maybe?
Caching vs security issues
- security: https: w/ certificates or passwords
- Browsers don't cache SSL content by default
- Firefox
- about:config, set browser.cache.disk_cache_ssl
- IE
- Tools | Options | Advanced, scroll to the Security
group, uncheck Do not save encrypted pages to
disk.
Conclusions
- Useful, very flexible system
- Well worth the learning curve
- Performs well if setup right
- Early performance issues scared
off many potential users
- effort < 0.5 FTE => slow going
- not yet the active content service