Migrating your site to Plone
Case studies highlighting different approaches
- Rose Pruyne, Department of Dairy and Animal Science
- Catherine Williams, Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences
- Jeanne Spicer, Population Research Institute (SSRI)
- Joe DeLuca, IST Solutions Institute
Our Sites
- Department of Dairy and Animal Science: das.psu.edu
- Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences: huck.psu.edu
- Population Research Institute (SSRI): ssri.psu.edu
- IST Solutions Institute: solutions.ist.psu.edu
This presentation is licensed under Creative Commons
What is Plone?
- Enterprise-level CMS
- Used by many .gov, .org, .edu sites
- Security & workflow: excellent, granular, flexible
- Technology-neutral (many platforms, databases)
- Open source (GPL)
- Extensible: add-on products, customize yourself
For more about Plone, visit http://plone.org. Licensing details are at http://plone.org/about/copyrights/license-faq/
Plone at Penn State
- Colleges (e.g., Smeal, Education)
- Departments (e.g., DAS, Biology, Meteorology)
- Institutes (e.g., Huck Institutes, SSRI)
- Campuses (e.g., Penn State Behrend)
- Admin units (e.g., Tech Transfer, OPP)
- Central support team: WebLion
Large number of Penn State groups already using Plone, or in process of moving their sites to it.
Migrating to Plone: overview
- Case studies:
- starting points
- process
- timescales
- Advice: dos and don'ts
- skills / people
- process
- Contacts and Resources
What we aim to cover in this presentation
There are 4 presenters, all of whom have been involved in setting up Plone sites and migrating non-Plone sites to Plone.
As well as presenters today, there are several dozen others at Penn State with Plone experience. Can contact many of them by tuning into IRC chat at #weblion on irc.freenode.net.
Department of Dairy and Animal Science
DAS: What I started with
- Existing CMS
- Sound architecture and design
- Standards-compliant code
- Up-to-date (and relatively error-free) content
- 1-Person Web shop
- BUT, with 25 content providers accustomed to using CMS
Details on these points:
- Existing CMS
- It was built in ColdFusion.
- It's home grown, built in early part of the century.
- I've customized it over the years as needed.
- Built over relational (SQL) database (not the ideal database model for Web content).
- It has served us well for many a year!
- Sound architecture and design
- The design and navigation are uniform from section to section.
- The design is based on the principles of usability and accessibility.
- It has frequently been assessed by usability studies.
- It's not "over-designed."
- No bolt-on content and technologies to be found.
- Standards-compliant code
- Up-to-date (and relatively error-free) content
- The existing CMS prevented crappy code from creeping in.
- 1-Person Web shop
- Sysadmin
- Programmer
- Database Administrator
- Designer
- Multimedia Specialist
- Photographer, Videographer
- Web Editor
- BUT, with 25 content providers accustomed to using CMS
- And very well behaved, I might add.
DAS: Whyever Plone?
- Required enterprise-level CMS
- Homegrown CMS == maintenance issues
- Plone community
- Open Source: Infinitely customizable
- Open Source: Price is right
- WebLion Hosting
Details on these points:
- Required enterprise-level CMS - some of the things we wanted:
- Blogging environment consistent with the rest of the CMS
- Enhanced RSS capabilities (for all sorts of content)
- Course content delivery capabilities
- Homegrown CMS == maintenance issues - All needed to be hand-programmed by ME
- Troubleshooting
- Upgrades
- New functionalities
- Software upgrades
- Plone community
- Plonies get support both within Penn State and globally.
- You can enjoy many collaboration opportunities.
- Professional opportunities abound: Learning Python, building products...
- Open Source - Infinitely customizable
- Any CMS worth its salt must foster the ability to alter and create.
- Open Source - Price is right
- You can do a lot with the $60,000-$150,000 you save.
- Don't let anybody tell you that commercial out-of-the-box doesn't require programming work!
- WebLion Hosting
- 24/7
- Who needs sysadmin headaches when you've got inexpensive hosting??
DAS: How I did this
- WebLion
- Incremental migration ~ 3 months for 80 % of site
- Work in progress
- 2 CMS running parallel
Details on these points:
- WebLion
- Roughly the cost of four workstations
- Incremental migration
- ~ 3 months for 80% of site
- Started with low-risk sections and worked from there
- Work in progress
- Saving locally customized subsites until hosting is in place so don't have to fuss with Plone upgrades.
- Saving home page for last since all roads lead backwards to it.
- 2 CMS running parallel
- This is not a big deal.
- I redirect content providers within the ColdFusion admin interface.
- I set up Apache 301 redirects for all public-facing pages.
DAS: Big results!
- Endless new possibilities : )
- Lots more functionality (that I didn't have to build)
- *Far* less maintenance
- Content providers lurrrrve plone
- I am no longer a lone gun
Details on these points:
- Endless new possibilities
- For example, blogs, wikis, DMS, DAMS, multimedia handling within site...
- Course content delivery
- I can build my own products.
- We get lots more functionality (that I didn't have to build).
- I am already enjoying *far* less less maintenance
- Content providers lurrrrve plone!
- It would take me years to program an administrative interface with this many functionalities and this user-friendly
- I am no longer a lone gun
- I am a member of WebLion and plone.org communities for LIFE.
Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences
Huck Institutes: starting point
- Static site, table-based, inline styles
- poor accessibility
- nightmare to change IA / styling
- P/T webmaster posts all content = bottleneck
- Much content outdated & not written for web
- Architecture "evolved" -> hard to find info
Case study 2
Huck Institutes: why a CMS?
- Multi-use content: post once, use many x
- people
- events
- Distributed authoring:
- wide range specialized subjects
- large volume of material
- Dynamic; content varies with:
- time
- context: place, person, etc
Huck Institutes: why Plone?
- Granular security, customizable workflows
- review / signoff, intranet, extranet
- New web-based applications
- Standards / accessibility:
- Aids findability via search engines
- Design separate from content -> easier redesign
- Support:
- WebLion & other depts/colleges locally
- Wide community globally
Huck Institutes: process
- "Big bang", into Plone 2.5
- Rearchitect
- Redesign
- Revamp content: drop, add
- ~6 months for 100% migration
- After switch, incremental addition of new:
- Content
- Content providers
- Workflows
Huck Institutes: team
- Catherine: F/T 6 mo, then P/T
- Info architecture, design, content
- Usability testing (stakeholders, users)
- Build site: templates, CSS, products, etc
- Train content providers
- Mike: P/T
- Server setup, redirects, caching
- New web application
- Strategy group & drivers: faculty + key staff
Huck Institutes: results
- Growing number of content providers
- Demand for new subsections
- Research centers
- Student review app worked well
- Considering move to Plone 3.1
IST: Solutions Institute
Solutions Institute: starting point
- Migrate College website to new CMS
- Focus of SI changed
- A lot invested in learning Plone
Solutions Institute: Plone for other projects
- Keep building skills - valuable tool
- Move Solutions site to Plone
- Faculty requests for collaborative portals
- ID requests for course content management
Solutions Institute: Why Plone?
- Rapid deployment
- Good collaboration capabilities
- Strong community - PSU and way beyond
- Tools not available in ANGEL
- Can be public-facing
Solutions Institute: Course content
- Experimenting with course management
- Course management - rosters, quizzes, drop boxes, email
- ANGEL works well
- Content management - the actual course content
- Plone works well
- Faculty member (content expert) can easily edit centrally located content
- May want to make content public-facing
Solutions Institute: Process
- Build skills
- team of 2
- a lot of front-end work before offering this service
- Started small with low-risk sites
Research Institutes: SSRI/PRI
Research Institutes: starting point
- Researchers needed to distribute, collect and analyze data
- Large teams needed to keep track of protocols/procedures
- Teams included members outside of PSU
- Solutions included a mish-mash of cgi-scripting, straightup html, etc
- Push came from frustrated programming staff
Research Institutes: why plone?
- Search of CMS and PSU brought up the Weblion group
- Runs on linux, free and open-source
- Plays well with others
- Variety of 3rd-party products to use 'as-is' or modify
Research Institutes: process
- Phase 1 -- Getting our feet wet (2005)
- Developed for faculty interested in using 'the web'(1 content provider)
- Sys admin & programmer (2 developers) tracked progress in intranet Plone site
- Went live right away and got user feedback
- Phase 2 -- Overconfident?
- Added small, short lifespan sites
- Adopted new versions of Plone as released
- Experimented with many 3rd party products
- Phase 3 -- Ready for prime time (2006)
- First ongoing, public Plone site for data sharing. Visit us at http://sodapop.pop.psu.edu
- Existing public sites being converted or augmented with Plone
Research Institutes: what worked?
- Don't be a lone wolf, engage support from:
- faculty member
- key staff content providers
- system administrator
- programmer
- Tip: try starting with an intranet site to get these folks involved.
The Process
- Get buy-in, organizational support
- Approach migration sensibly
- Big Bang: High load, high risk - will age you before your time
- Incremental: Much better if you have the option
- Practice iterative improvement: Evaulate, usability test (in the manner of Agile Programming)
May require more than one person
The Process
- Understand that it never stops (this is a *good* thing)
- Understand managing content providers
- Support (in perpetuity)
- Train
- Retrain
- Reretrain
- Rereretrain...
- Invest time in learning, documenting, collaboration
- Tap the community: Don't go it alone!
Skills required
The ability to...
- Balance needs of internal stakeholders *and* primary users
- Develop sound, tested information architecture and page-level design
- Plone enables rapid prototyping for this!
Skills required
The ability to...
- Think and write for the Web
- Plone's modular content: Enter once, use many times, many ways
- Plone's editing environment: Content in context
- Plone's workflow, versioning: Aids editing, creates teachable moments
- LinguaPlone
- Research and network: Find and *share* resources, solutions
- WebLion and Plone communities
Skills required
The ability to...
- Take on a bit of programming
- Changing the look and feel; changing, adding functionality
- Mostly you can tweak existing code (rather than write completely new stuff)
- Learning Plone is a professional growth opportunity
Skills required (the sysadmin)
The ability to...
- Install, upgrade Plone and Plone products
- Handle file and database backup and recovery procedures
- Set up proxying, redirects, optimization, load balancing…
- Monitor, troubleshoot the above
…Or, you can go with WebLion hosting
Contacts and Resources
- Weblion and Partners at Penn State
- weblion.psu.edu
- #weblion on irc.freenode.net
- Beginner and intermediate training
- Community Support: Weblion Developers Group, Zope and Python Users Groups
- Global Zope and Plone Community