Introduction to Plone

If Plone was a bachelor advertising in the smalls it would introduce itself as a "Friendly, successful CMS seeking a long term-relationship." It would continue: "I've worked all over the world and speak 48 languages, but people who've met me say I'm easy going and fun." Of course Plone won't need to advertise for company until it's old and lonely, but you get the idea.

Plone really is easy to understand and fun to work with. It has a very intuitive user interface that was designed by usability experts who understand web interfaces. But before I continue smooching my favourite CMS, let's step back and define content management. If you understand what it is, you may ask yourself if you really need to buy what this buzzword sells. I tell you what -- I'll believe in what content management has to offer if it has an answer for real problems we experience on a daily basis. Ironically, these problems are caused by software in the first place. They are:

Finding files

The overwhelming speed at which we produce documents causes a pile-up on file servers that make it impossible to find files. We end up browsing through deep hierarchies of directories, opening document after document and often giving up entirely.

Sharing files

This is best illustrated with a short dialogue:

"Hi Bob, did you get the latest version of that file I sent you?"

"Which one, the one you sent yesterday afternoon?"

"No man, the one I sent this morning."

"But I've already made changes to the ones you sent yesterday."

"Which version was that then, because I sent two versions."

File servers were meant to solve the problem of sharing files, and they are probably successful in a single office or branch. It doesn't solve the problem of sharing files with a colleague in a distant office however.

Publishing documents

Most people don't know how to publish a document to a website. They will most probably phone an IT guy who knows how to work FTP. The IT guy will upload the document for them. The following week, the IT guy will get a phone call from an angry customer because he forgot to upload it.

Quality control

Chances are that the guy who phoned the IT guy not only got in trouble for the late publishing date, but also for some spelling mistakes in the final version. This is really the manager's fault, since he is responsible for checking the document before it is uploaded to the webserver, but he has given up trying to find the file on the file server.

Let's stop here. I can see that reliving the handful of problems mentioned above has already got your blood boiling, and that's not good for your heart. These are the problems that most content management systems try to solve (and Plone actually solves). Next, we'll see how it does it.

Full text indexing and metadata (solves the "finding files" problem)

Whenever a file is uploaded, or a new document created, Plone indexes the content of the document in what we call a catalog. The catalog stores long lists of words associated with each document, so that you can easily locate documents when you search on specific words. It can index PDF, Word, Excel, Open Office, RTF and a host of other document types.

In addition to indexing the content of documents, Plone allows one to enter metadata about the document. Metadata includes fields for the title, description, author, contributors, version, copyright, publication date, expiry date and keywords associated with the document. Don't ignore metadata, they can greatly improve search results.

Sharing files over the web (solves the "sharing files" problem)

In Plone, files are stored in folders, just like on your desktop PC. The only difference is that these folders live on a webserver and are accessible through your browser. To share a folder with a friend or colleague, you simply browse to the sharing tab of the folder, search for your friend using his username or email address and assign the Owner role to him. You can even search for a group and share ownership with the whole group.

Plone makes it really easy for a group of people to work on the same files. Whenever a group is created, a workspace is created for that group. Every member of the group has access to this workspace and files and folders created inside it are automatically shared with other group members.

Isn't this great, no matter where you are, you have access to your documents! And don't tell me it's not safe to put your documents on the web, you've been doing your banking online for years now. Just make sure you don't hire a monkey to do your web security.

Through-the-web editing (solves the "publishing documents" problem)

Putting files on a webserver should be just as easy as creating files on your desktop PC. With Plone it is. There are a couple of ways to do this. The most obvious way is to use Plone's web interface, which has a simple dropdown where you can select the type of content you want to add, and immediately start editing once you've made your selection.

Plone contents tab

Document edit tab

If you want to edit a document, you can edit it directly in the web interface. You can also open it directly from the web in your editor or word processor of choice, and save it back to the web. This is made possible through a small program you install on your desktop called External Editor. But generally the WYSIWIG editors that work with Plone are more than sufficient for editing documents.

You can still use FTP to upload documents to Plone. This is especially useful if you have a lot of documents that you want to upload.

You can even make your Plone site appear as a folder inside your file browser, and drag and drop files inside it from within your file browser.

Plone site mounted inside Nautilus

Plone site mounted inside Windows Explorer

Workflow (solves the "Quality control" problem)

Every piece of software claims to offer workflow tools these days. So what is so cool about workflow? A good workflow shows that the software understands how real people do their job. It supports the fact the even simple jobs, like publishing a document, involves a group of people that have different roles and responsibilities.

The default Plone workflow has just 4 states and involves 2 roles. A documents starts out as visible. The owner of the document submits the document, changing its state to pending. If a user with the reviewer role logs in, all the documents that are pending appears on his review list. The reviewer can then either reject it, which moves it back to the visible state, or publish the document, which leaves it in the published state.

It should be obvious that the role of the reviewer in the above workflow is to check the quality of documents before they get published. If you look at the content on most South African sites, it is clear there is nobody reviewing content. Just last night I browsed a couple of local websites that "aim to deliver". What if they shoot and miss? The worst one said "The intention is to intiate an online presence that will in time grow into something bigger and better." I hope so!

More about Plone

Plone has a lively community of close to a hundred and fifty developers contributing to its development. In May 2004, the Plone Foundation was formed to provide support for the development and marketing of Plone. Their goal is to ensure that Plone remains the premier open source content management system and to broaden its acceptance and visibility.

Plone's ability to solve real IT pains has drawn many organisations world wide in all industries to the platform. See http://plone.org/abouts/sites/ for examples.

For more information about Plone, visit the community website at http://plone.org

To see some demo movies of how common tasks are performed inside Plone, visit the documention section on our website at http://www.upfrontsystems.co.za/plonedocs/movies/

Conclusion

There is much more Plone bragging to be done, and in future articles I'll do just that. For a start, I wanted to show you that content management is not just buzz fired at you by an IT marketing machine. It is useful. And secondly, know now, that there is a great open source content management system called Plone.