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Plone

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First steps

So the basic plan is to start working on consolidating opencore with the plone4artists set of plone products, using as a pushing off point the work of the folks at indy.gr. there is also a lot of code available in plumi for video sharing, vobcasting and transcoding.

indy.gr has a WhatWeNeed/WhatWeHave page detailing what is already available in their plone/indycore site, and what needs to be developed. We need to compare this to the "What we want" of the imc-cms folks to solidify a direction for development of the imc-cms plone effort.

there are very few items in the imc-cms' desired features which are not available in plone or one of the aforementioned products. the only one i see is "customizable skins by user". everything else is either already there or "easily done" (according to indy.gr). it is also important to consider that plone recommends 512RAM, and see how this fits with respect to the requirement that our cms should have "Good performance on affordable hardware".

since our strategy for implementing a plone/indy cms is to take indycore and plugin plone4artists set of multimedia products, perhaps we´d best start of taking a look at multimedia support. in the indy.gr´s "what we have", they comment that "Images can already be handled. Videos can be handled through plumi but it hasn’t been integrated yet." so maybe we should start by integrating plone4artists video and audio into indycore. its probably a good idea to investigate how plone4artists video an plumi handle video differently and try to grab the best features from each (it seems that the actually share a lot of code, but need to investigate). from there out make a list of priorities for the rest of the work. making installation as easy as possible should probably be pretty high on the list, wrapping everything up in a bundled product, making a buildout, or even an egg.


First Summary

Please Contribute:

Detailed Review for a possible Plone Indymedia Setup

After some hours of talk with some plone kids about a possible Plone Setup, here the summary, the "best practice"

On of the main topics where

Distributed Setup

  • Frontend/Backend Seperation
  • Database Seperation
  • Seperation of the Search / Tagging System, etc
  • Static Site Producer

Migration

  • Database Import

Distributed Setup

Let me give you short summary of the idea here.

A Distributed indymedia CMS Setup has the following goals.

  • A lightwight System: We don't have any or many big servers in the network. The CMS or the modules of the CMS have to be small.
  • A distributed and independet System: Each system or module of the system has to work for itself independetly. A shutdown of any system component should not affect other parts of the system. For Example. If the Admin or Publishing Server is down, the fronten site should still work and deliver the content for days.
  • It should scale: So you can just add another frontend server or search box etc pp...
  • Nice to have: On-the-fly Replication of any system module

PLONE

General

  • the main requirement for Plone is 2G of Memory. Better 4G. Do not try to run with less memory, it will not perform.
  • the Main Plone DB Model, ZODB, is NOT a SQL Abstraction Layer but zopes own Database Model.

Cache

ZODB

  • can run on a sepereatd box
  • does not really scale, the database file gets huge
  • better use LDAP for the user logins
  • Do not use ZODB for everything. More complex database structures with allot of references could still use SQL
  • It is possible to use SQLAlchemie, a SQL Abstraction Layer like the JAVA Hibernate, but you loose certain plone ZODB Features
  • "Replication" s done via a ZEO cluster

Search

  • The search is deeply integrated into the ZODB / Backend, it would be hard to have the search seperated on a different machine.

Static Producer

  • Plone has a Static Site Producer called CMFDeployment. It is avalibel for 2.5 at the moment. A release for 3.x should be avaliable soon. People are working on it. http://plone.org/products/cmfdeployment


Migration

  • Import Articles via SOAP/XML
  • Import Images via WebDAV using cadaver (ttp://www.webdav.org/cadaver/). Image Descriptions are set via WebDAV File Properties.

Plone Meeting 2007-12-08

There was a long Plone IRC Meeting where we discussed almost all aspects of a possible use of Plone as the Indymedia CMS. Read it, it contains many informations and will give you ALL the details.

PloneIRCMeeting20071208

Available Code

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