1. Open Source in the Enterprise Plone @ Novell

• • Jared Whitlock

• Web Marketing Systems

2. Why do you care? 3. Presentation Outline

CMS History at Novell

• Other CMS systems we have used

• How we got to Plone

Challenges

• CMS needs and how we met them

• Exciting adventures along the way

Mistakes

Future Direction

Sage Advice

4. CMS History at Novell

Interwoven TeamSite

• Whole page only in our version

• Didn't care about us

• Thermonuclear detonation (more on this later)

Vignette VCM

• Expensive

• Required Vignette consultants for EVERYTHING

• Flexible...sort of

Never-ending coding death spiral

5. How we got to Plone

Neither Vignette nor TeamSite had all the features we needed

Novell is investing heavily in open source

Plone has great features

• Easily expandable

• Active community (lots of third-party products)

• Localization, localization, localization

• Archetypes are awesome

• Scalable???We hoped so...

• The price was right

6. Challenges 7. Challenge 1: Security How do we not get hacked? Warning: Eye Chart Ahead! 8. Plone Architecture Plone3 ZEO3 Plone2 ZEO2 Plone1 ZEO1 intranet/cms www.novell.com /* ZRS FileDeployment Read/Write Inside Firewall Read Only Outside Firewall Zope Client1 Zope Client1 Zope Client2 Apache File System ZODB Zope Client2 iChain iChain Zope Client1 Zope Client2 Apache File System ZODB File System ZODB L4 L4 L4 L4 9. Challenge 2: Localization

LinguaPlone for languages

• Core of eight languages

• Up to 15 languages on some content

• Built an XLIFF exporter that connects to translation vendor

GeoPlone for geography-specific content

• Similar in operation to LinguaPlone

• Simple example: Novell.com home page phone number

10. Challenge 3: TeamSite Disaster

Can we do a mass-migration of static files to Plone?

How do we make common changes across files?

How do we push those files to the production servers?

Story time 11. TeamSite Disaster (cont.)

StaticFile content type

• AttachmentField

• FileSystemStorage with our own storage strategy

FileDeployment product

• Queues files for deployment to targets set up in the tool

• Transactional processing ensures that the files arrive when they should

• Only deploys to Apache targets on publish

Search and Replace product

• Uses either strings or regex

• Returns a preview list with checkboxes to change only what you want

12. Meanwhile...back to Dynamic Content

Novell.com home page

• Composite Page/Composite Pack

• Generated static file for English, dynamic for non-English

Press Releases

Corporate Events Calendar

ListPages

• Extends Smart Folder

• Query Results based upon taxonomy field (patched to all content types)

13. Challenge 4: Handling the Load

Some stats for August

• Home page: 537,377 page views

• http://www.novell.com/linux : 1,357,157 page views

StaticFiles

• Apache + iChain (Novell's reverse proxy cache)

Dynamic Pages

• CacheFu + iChain

14. Plone Architecture Plone3 ZEO3 Plone2 ZEO2 Plone1 ZEO1 intranet/cms www.novell.com /* ZRS FileDeployment Read/Write Inside Firewall Read Only Outside Firewall Zope Client1 Zope Client1 Zope Client2 Apache File System ZODB Zope Client2 iChain iChain Zope Client1 Zope Client2 Apache File System ZODB File System ZODB L4 L4 L4 L4 15. Other Load Gotchas

Web Crawlers

Broken-link/orphan-file checkers

Plone skin exposed URLs

• Don't have an elegant solution for this

• Currently using isAnon variable in templates to hide things externally

• Sounds like Plone 3.x technologies will help with this

16. Mistakes 17. Mistakes

ZODB Insecurities: we know and love SQL databases

Fear of Python: we know and love Java

Wouldn't SQL queries and a search engine be better than catalog queries?

How about replacing Plone's interface with a home-grown one?

Answer: no Answer: DEFINITELY no 18. Future Direction

Entire website in Plone

• Many more dynamic pages

• Content targeting based on locale and interest

Intranet on Plone

• Currently under way

Moving to Plone 3.x

19. Sage Advice For Beginners

Read The Definitive Guide to Plone (outdated, but still very good) Read Martin's Book

Become familiar with every third-party product on Plone.org

Subscribe to the "Latest releases" RSS feed on Plone.org

Subscribe to the Plone users mailing list

Use Plone as it is intended

Use quick prototyping to win people over

Don't be a wuss (just learn Python)

20. Sage Advice For Beginners (cont.)

Hang out in the #plone chat room

Don't be afraid to add debug logging in Plone code

DeadlockDebugger and Clouseau are your friends

21. Questions? 22. Our Products: Do You Want Them?

BackgroundTasks- Run ZODB operations asynchronously

CharsetConversion- Character set conversion on file upload/download

FileDeployment- Deploy files to SFTP targets

GUITopic- Smart Folders whose views can be edited TTW by end users

GeoPlone- Like LinguaPlone, but for Geography

RDBSynch- Synchronize data from a RDB into Plone objects

SearchAndReplace- Regex capable multi-file search & replace

TxnFileOps- Transaction support for Filesystem and SFTP