PloneA Content Management System

Agenda

• The issue • What is Plone?• Why Plone?• What can Plone do? • NCI-DCEG Experience• What is the cost?• Who is using Plone?• Books

The Issue

• Large studies that involve multiple disciplines, centers and investigators

• Goal: to communicate more rapidly with more people

• Solution: Collaboration Portals using Plone

What is Plone?• Open source content management system (CMS)• Freely downloadable software under a general

public license (GPL) - No license fee required - Download from http://plone.org

• Plone is standard- follows standards for usability and accessibility; compliant with WAI-AAA & US Section 508

• Widely tested in browsers on multiple platforms

Why Plone?Content Management features:• Access via standard Web browsers

• WYSIWYG editing interface

• Tools to create/control basic HTML features, including tables, font, form elements, image insertion

• Support for multilingual content

• Integration of content or documents produced through other Web authoring applications (e.g., Dreamweaver)

Why Plone? (2)• Workflow tool

- allows for editorial approval before publication

• Searching - fast, full-text searching

• Comes with Dublin core metadata standards

• 100+ add-on products - most are open source

NCI-DCEG Experience• Collaboration portal features:

- group distribution lists

- message board- calendar with the capacity to embed meeting agendas and minutes

- serves as a repository for many essential documents, such as protocols and published papers- allows roles to be assigned to users

example: manager, reviewer or member

NCI-DCEG Experience

Intranet using Plone• Pros:

- Site administrators add content- Easy to keep content updated- Encourages content production- Leads to more people using the intranet actively- Strong focus on end-user usability- Most users need minimal training

• Cons:- Customer support is weaker than for commercial products- Security is complex- Content publishing is harder without knowledge of HTML

What was the cost?• Require a server – Unix, Windows or

Solaris• Two weeks of programmer time that

included:- requirements analysis- set up of the server- set up of a template portal site- training of users

The approximate cost was $10,000 (excluding the cost of the server)

Who Uses Plone?

• Oxfam America - http://www.oxfamamerica.org/

• United Nationshttp://www.undp.org/

• NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratoryhttp://www.jpl.nasa.gov/

• NASA’s Mars Rover Websitehttp://mars.telascience.org/home

Try Plone

• A Plone demonstration site is available at:

http://demo.plone.org

Books• Definitive Guide to Plone

Andy McKay, APress

• Building Websites with PloneCameron Cooper, Packt Publishing

• Plone LiveMichel Pelletier, Munwar Shariff, Sourcebeat

• Plone Content Management EssentialsJulie C. Meloni, SAMS

DEMO PLONE SITE