Blog

LOCAL GOVERNMENT OPEN SOURCE CONFERENCE 2009: EFFICIENCY, TRANSFORMATION AND INNOVATION

1st April 2009 - Manchester United Football Club

I will be presenting a case study on Kent Connects Portals, a Plone based set of portals for a local government initiative:

Kent Connects: Harnessing Open Source for Shared Services and Partnership Working. Debbie Wisdom, Strategic Director, Kent Connects and Matt Hamilton, Technical Director, Netsight Internet Solutions and international board director of the Plone Foundation.

Kent Connects, the lead technology partnership in Kent & Medway, are using Plone Content Management System to provide partners from different public sector organisations with a flexible, virtual online space to collaborate and share information and knowledge via the internet in a secure way. Learn how Kent Connects came to be using Plone and what the benefits, issues and lessons learnt have been in adopting OSS for the partnership. Find out more about Plone, its community of practice and the opportunities it can offer the public sector.

Full details and agenda available here

In my opinion, Plone's 'livesearch' is one of it's most rewarding features. We recently moved our company intranet to Plone 3, and livesearch makes it very easy to find the information I need quickly.

In contrast, Plone's advanced search form is huge, unwieldy and a little scary. It also creates insanely long URLs, even for simple queries.

For instance, searching for the text "Hello" (using the live search) I get something like this:

http://localhost:8080/plone/search?SearchableText=Hello

However, if I want to search for 'Images' in my site (using the advanced search form) I get something like this:

http://localhost:8080/plone/search?SearchableText=&Title=&Subject_usage%3Aignore_empty=&Description=&created%3Alist%3Adate=1970%2F02%2F01&created_usage=range%3Amin&portal_type%3Alist=Image&Creator=&rs_toggle=%23&review_state%3Alist=external&review_state%3Alist=internal&review_state%3Alist=internally_published&review_state%3Alist=pending&review_state%3Alist=private&review_state%3Alist=visible&review_state%3Alist=published&submit=Search

We recently developed an intranet for one of our customers which involved us adding extra search fields to the advanced search form. The resulting page was a monstrosity, and the URLs which came out of it were often so long that they exceeded the URL length limit for Internet Explorer (!) (see http://support.microsoft.com/kb/208427 ).

From discussing these issues at the Plone Conference in Washington DC last October, the consensus was that the advanced search form needs a rethink. Some good ideas were shared between myself, Geir Baekholt and Danny Bloemendaal about the way forward on this, but that's a subject for another blog post.

To cut an already long story short, we needed an interim solution - a halfway house if you like - as rethinking the advanced search is something we just haven't found the time for yet.

Introducing collective.advancedsearchtamer

Rather than reinventing the wheel just yet, collective.advancedsearchtamer is a mini-product which uses Javascript to tweak the interface to the advanced search form.

When you load the advanced search page, collective.advancedsearchtamer will hide all of the form elements, leaving their labels and description. It then adds a checkbox to each option, allowing you to manually specify which options you want to include in your query.

It looks like this:

With collective.advancedsearchtamer, searching for 'Images' results in the following URL:

http://localhost:8080/plone/search?portal_type%3Alist=Image&submit=Search

... which is a little easier to read, a little less likely to kill Internet Explorer, and a much nicer RSS URL to 'subcribe' to, should you wish.

So there you have it: collective.advancedsearchtamer

It's on pypi now. Hope you find it useful.

Back in the days of Plone 2.x, page templates used to be able to just access Zope's DateTime module like this:

<b tal:content="DateTime()" />

This would give you the current date and time.

In Plone 3.x, this ability disappeared. Now, I'm confident that people wiser than I made this decision, but sometimes I want it back. Imagine my delight when, whilst perusing Plone's advanced search form, I found this little beauty:

<form tal:define="DateTime python:modules['DateTime'].DateTime">
...
</form>

Ker-ching.

An article was recently published comparing the usability of Joomla with Wordpress for simple tasks. The article argues that whilst Wordpress is not necessarily as powerful as Joomla, it does many of the simple, common tasks that one might want a CMS for and does them in a much simpler, easier manner.

So just for completeness and to see how Plone stacks up doing the same things I'm going to present how Plone fares doing the exact same tasks in that original article. One aspect that Plone has always been really hot on is usability and accessibility. Before some of these other CMSes were even born, Plone had access keys, tab ordering, and a pretty strict concept of what functions go where in the UI. Back in 2004, at the Plone Snow Sprint in Austria, we had a woman from the Austrian Institute of the Blind come in to test out Plone. She was not only just navigating the site with text to speech software and a braille reader, but she was actually authoring and workflowing content! To make it even more impressive, she spoke no English, and was using Plone's amazing internationalisation features so the the user interface was all in German.

So, back to the task at hand, how does Plone compare to Wordpress and Joomla for simple tasks then?

Example 1: Create a blog-post with an image

1. From the 'Add new...' drop down menu select 'News Item' (or 'Blog entry' if you've installed Scrawl, or one of the Plone blogging tools)
2. Enter the Title, Body Text (and description if you want one)
3. Click on the 'Browse' button next to the image field and upload your image (also give it a caption if you want)
4. Click save
5. Select 'Publish' from the 'State...' drop down menu

Example 2: Create a static page accessible from the menu

1. Navigate to where you want the page to appear
2. From the 'Add new...' drop down menu select 'Page'
3. Enter the Title, Body Text (and description if you want one)
4. Click save
5. Select 'Publish' from the 'State...' drop down menu

Plone will automatically add the page to the Navigation for you. If you don't want it to show up in the navigation, you simply click on the 'Setting' tab at the top and check the 'Exclude from Navigation' checkbox.

You might have noticed something about the two screenshots and list of steps... yes, they are virtually identical. That is one aspect Plone is very strong on -- Consistency. Virtually all Plone content types are added and edited in the same manner. This leads to very short training times needed to get people up and running on the site.

Since by default Plone's editing is done 'in-line' ie. you are editing in the same interface as the public will see the site, it is very easy for new people using Plone to understand where there content is going to show up. Of course that is not for everyone, and you can easily split the process and have a public site and a separate admin site (at different URLs) if you want to really heavily brand the public site and want to have the editing separately. As an example:

So where does this put Plone with respect to Joomla and Wordpress? I would say if you just want a blog, then Wordpress might be the best for you, but if you are looking for something much more powerful with the ability to integrate with many different systems, with fine grained role-based authorisation, workflow, etc yet still retain a very simple UI for end users, then Plone might be the tool for the job.