Blog

Having just seen Hanno's blog post on how much faster Plone 4 is, I thought I'd give it a test myself. Whilst Hanno did a test on a simple 'default' site in which he removed most of the portlets and the likes, I thought I'd try it out on a 'real' site and see what sort of performance gains I get.

The site I chose was a site we designed called Kent Rural Network. This is a very simple site, so I thought a good one to try as it doesn't have such vast amounts of customisation that it would render such comparative tests moot. Plone has always been able to go fast if you've known what knobs to tweak, the news here is how much faster is out of the box, without needing to enable any caching, clustering or tuning.

The Kent Rural Networks site is written on Plone 3 (was developed on Plone 3.1) and has a very simple skin applied, yet retains much of Plone's out of the box features such as news items, events and a number of simple custom content types created in Archetypes. This is the kind of site that could be developed taking Plone out of the box and spending a a few days creating a theme and some content types for it.

The tests were carried out on my Macbook Air (1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo Processor). The absolute values are not that important as every server will give different results, the main thing here is the ratio of performance of the newer versions of Plone.

As you can see, the upgrade to Plone 4 brings a pretty significant performance boost, the same as Hanno's figures show. You get almost double the performance accessing the homepage of the site. I also tried testing it with Chameleon installed (the new template rendering engine in Plone trunk) which gave a speedup of over 2.5 times!

As an aside: the upgrade process from Plone 3.3 to Plone 4 on this site was pretty painless. There were some tweaks that needed to be made, mainly in templates we had customised and were referring to methods that are no longer global in Plone4. An example is the toLocalizedTime() method which used to be global, but now you need to add

<tal:define="toLocalizedTime nocall: context/@@plone/toLocalizedTime;">

in order to bring it into scope.

Definitely the easiest major Plone upgrade we've ever had.

Is Open Source a viable way for the public sector to contain its IT costs? Government policy is gradually becoming more favourable to open source. Many commentators identify open source as a way to contain spiralling project costs. Yet much of this discussion is driven by underlying agendas: it contains as much disinformation as realistic appraisal of the capabilities of open source software.

The BCS Open Source Specialist Group is organising an event to look at the reality behind the rhetoric. Responding to the challenge in the above Guardian article, we aim to bring together a group of information management practitioners and vendors to discuss their experience of web and document management in the public sector. The event will consist of a series of talks, panel sessions and open discussion of the challenges of web and document management in the public sector, and the ways in which open source software might be suitable for addressing these challenges.

Netsight Technical Director, Matt Hamilton will be speaking at the event and presenting a series of mini case-studies on public sector organisations successfully using the Plone content management system to provide services with much more transparent costs.

Full details of the event including location and registration details can be found at the BCS website.

Last week I presented a case study talk at IMS 2009 in London. The talk was entitled 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a large Corporate Intranet'.

The slidecast with audio is below, or you can download the PDF version of the slides, or the MP3 version of the audio.

Abstract

The advantages of Open Source systems go beyond simple cost savings. Content management by its very nature requires a significant level of customisation and integration to meet business requirements. By not prohibiting the inspection and modification of the source code, Open Source enables a level of flexibility not available with proprietary systems.

This talk will present a case study of the process one corporation, Belron, went through in the development of a corporate Intranet based on Plone. Belron is the world's largest vehicle glass repair and replacement company, owning some of the best known brands in the industry including Carglass, Autoglass, O'Brien and Safelite. Belron employs more than 19, 500 people working in 28 countries worldwide.

In this talk you will see how the flexibility of Open Source allowed an initial modest Intranet to adapt and grow over time to an organisation's evolving requirements, and the development of multiple sub-sites, specific business processes and multilingual support. You will also see how Open Source's licensing model allows un-fettered growth and deployment of the Intranet to multiple countries.

A blog post today by Janus Boye on some (quite unbelievable) claims by Danish CMS vendor Sitecore got me thinking about something...

Several analysts have talked about the growing trend towards Open Source for Content Management systems. Many people still have this outdated view that Open Source means a free lunch. Well, in the CMS space it doesn't really. You do still need to go through all the due diligence, planning, requirements gathering, customisation, etc that you would do with a commercial system. The main difference being that you are not taking a big hit up front for the license fees and can be a lot more flexible in your approach to the development on top of the CMS as you are not held back by vendor licensing, and are not beholden to one single vendor company.

Commercial CMS vendors like to try and debunk that Open Source gives a lower TCO in a project by stating that the licensing fees are only a small part of the total TCO, and the main chunk is made up of points mentioned above (planning, implementation, etc).

If that is the case and fast forwarding a few years to the point that all CMSes become 'Open Source' (or claim they are Open Source by just giving away some freebie version, or dropping their license fees altogether) how will companies like Sitecore survive, whom according to their numbers in Janus' blog post earned DKK 76M out of a total DKK 79M by license revenue? If the license fees is such a small insignificant part of the total cost of a CMS implementation then how can you base an entire company revenue stream on it?

This year we have been representing Plone at the IMS / Online 2009 expo at Earl Court Olympia in London.

After a great start with day one we were back to start day two of the expo. I went over to the venue a bit earlier today for a meeting with Janus Boye of JBoye to talk a bit about the state of Plone and to bounce a quite interesting idea around, which hopefully we will reveal soon.

The main show floor then opened at 10:00 and people started coming to the Plone stand to chat about Plone. I was presenting a talk in one of the show floor lecture theatres on 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a Large Corporate Intranet' at 11:15, so Astra and Chris set about wandering the show floor to hand out more flyers we'd created for the show. One side of the flyers was the Flexible Plone advert we created, and the other side some promo about my talk.

My talk was the second talk of the day, and was preceded by a talk entitled 'Moving a large institution to an Open Source WCM system' by Richard Morgan from the Victoria & Albert Museum here in London. His talk focussed on the evaluation and procurement process they went through to eventually end up at a decision to use Squiz's MySource Matrix as a CMS. One of the key points he made was the importance of the relationship between the client and the vendor and how he really enjoyed the 'colocation days' they did (customer sprints in the Plone world). As it happened this turned out to be a great introduction to my talk, which was then taking the Open Source story a bit further and presenting a specific case study of a Plone based intranet for a large client of ours. My talk was packed to capacity with standing room left only, about 60 people in total.

The talk went really very well, and I even managed to keep to time pretty accurately. The talk described the relationship with one of our clients over the past three years and how their initial intranet has grown and evolved over that time to encompass a number of specific business processes.

Following the talk we had a rush on the Plone stand and were doing demos non stop for the next couple of hours until lunch time. As usual I'll be putting a Slidecast of my talk on Slideshare.net as soon as I've edited the audio.

After lunch thing quietened down a bit at the show, but by the end of the day we had handed out about 150 brochures over the first two days and spoken to even more people than we did yesterday.

We did have one quite amusing incident towards the end of the day, where some random guy decided to impart his aged wisdom to us and loudly proclaimed that we needed a 'gobble gobble' machine and needed to buy up all the competing CMS systems in the market (as there are too many to choose from) kill the competitors off and then sell stock options. I think in all his wisdom he had completely missed the point of Open Source. He told us we were wrong and that we needed a USP. I told him our USP was that by being Open Source, companies who spend time and money investing in using Plone as their CMS can rest safe in the knowledge that their CMS won't be bought out by a 'gobble gobble' machine and killed off by someone following his advice. He didn't get it. Oh well. I'm sure he'll catch up with the modern world one day.

Once the show closed at 5pm we headed over to the Hilton next door for the vendors drinks reception and caught up with the Squiz guys for a chat and some beers.

As we were wrapping up for the day, the Gilbane conference in Boston seemed to be revving up to full swing and pics were coming in of the Plone stand there. It was great to see the pic of the stand there and to see the new plone brochures on display. With Thanksgiving just last weekend, Nate, Ken et al must have worked incredibly hard to get them printed in time. As I headed back to my hotel room, checking twitter, a panel discussion between Plone, Drupal, Joomla! and Alfresco was just kicking off... go Plone!

Tomorrow is the last day of both IMS and Gilbane, so if you want to come along and find out more about Plone and you are in either London or Boston then please do come along for a chat.

This year we have been representing Plone at the IMS / Online 2009 expo at Earl Court Olympia in London.

It's the end of the first day of the show, and its been a fantastic day. We arrived yesterday to setup the new Plone stand we've had printed and arranged the stand in a similar fashion to the previous shows we've been to with the big display stand along the back, two iMacs on funky stands either side and a literature stand near the front of the stand. Once again we had a nice corner stand which was open on two sides making it much more accessible and approachable to passers by.

As well as the new stand background, we have produced some new, very sexy, Plone brochures explaining all about Plone (both the software and the community) and Open Source. We've released the brochures under the Creative Commons license so you can download the PDF and the original Adobe InDesign files if you want to modify them.

We also printed up a bunch of information sheets of Plone in specific sectors (Non-profit, Public Sector, Education, Enterprise, NHS) based upon templates supplied by Nate Aune at Jazkarta.

These brochures have already been modified by Nate Aune and Ken Wasetis for use at the Gilbane conference happening at the moment in Boston.

Yes, that's right... running from the 1st - 3rd December Plone is simultaneously being presented at both the IMS / Online 2009 expo in London and the Gilbane 2009 conference in Boston!

Whilst this year there seemed to be a lot fewer visitors in general on the show floor, the IMS conference organisers report a greater number of pre-registrations to last year. We've certainly found that whilst there are less people passing the stand, there have been a greater percentage stopping to chat to us, so in fact I think we've had a more successful first day overall.

Once again, the sheer diversity of people coming to chat to us about Plone has been amazing. We've spoken to a large well known Orchestra, several people from the Ministry of Defence, some medical publishing companies, a university, a society for women in engineering... all of whom have shown fantastic response to Plone. In fact, just 4 minutes after the doors opened to the public this morning, the very first person to come to the stand was from a business school in London who have been using Plone for about 6 years and was saying just how amazing it was.

Another notable thing was the absence of some well known large commercial CMS vendors who I was expecting to see. Jadu, Open Text, Ektron, Fatwire and Percussion were all vendors who were attended last year, but were not here this time. Last year Jadu had an enormous stand visible from almost anywhere on the show floor. Maybe commercial CMS vendors are feeling the pinch this year?

There were a few Open Source systems represented there: Squiz (MySource Matrix) and eZ Systems (eZ Publish), but Plone was the only true community Open Source company represented. Interestingly, compared to last year there were far more people aware of Plone, and far fewer people who said 'We've heard of Drupal and Joomla, what is Plone?'. So I think our attendance at these style of events (both IMS 2008 and Internet World 2009) is showing signs of increasing awareness of Plone. We probably talked to about 80-100 people today and gave demos of Plone to most of them.

I also got a chance to have a good chat with Tony Byrne from CMS watch and have a look at their 2010 Web Content Management report and read the Plone chapter in it. Its pretty complimentary, but there are a few points that need updating in the report so I'll be submitting my feedback to them to hopefully be taken into account for the next update.

Tomorrow morning I'm giving a talk at 11:15 in Theatre A on 'The Flexibility of Open Source: A Case Study of a Large Corporate Intranet'. So if you are about in London, go to the IMS website and register for free and come along and say hello.

Well, I'm now back from the 7th Annual Plone Conference 2009 in Budapest, sat at my desk with the post-conference come-down as the excitement of a conference fades away. Once again the Plone community has come together and put on an absolutely awesome event. Considering the general doom and gloom about the world economy, it was amazing to see over 400 people attend the conference (I think this is the largest yet).

Netsight had a delegation of 6 people this year: Adam, Adrian, Ben, Daniel, Matt H, and Matt SS, plus honorary Netsighter Dan Fairs along as well. Daniel gave a talk on "Extending Plone: Using python to integrate with external data sources" showing people new to Plone how easy it is to extend Plone with a few lines of python code to get data from Google Docs, Twitter and YouTube into Plone. Matt SS gave two lightning talks, the first one 'Products.TranslateInPlace' which allows you to update Plone's UI translations whilst browsing the site so you can see the translations in context. The second was a practical demonstration on some work we've been doing on re-skinning a legacy .NET portal using Deliverance.

I co-presented a talk with Steve McMahon on 'How Does Plone Happen?' in which we had a very informal, tag-team, talk about the various aspects of how Plone is developed and how the people behind the code, the release process, the day to day chat and support on the Plone IRC channel and mailing lists all adds up to create the multi-million dollar value body of work we call Plone, and the Foundation that protects and promotes it.

At the last minute I was also asked to be on a panel discussion led by Sally Kleinfeldt of Jazkarta on Plone Web Services, along with Matthew Wilkes, Calvin Hendryx-Parker, and Alec Mitchell. We discussed the various existing ways of getting data in and out of Plone via XML-RPC, WebDAV etc. and also the new AtomPub WSGI middleware for Plone written by Chelsea Bingiel as part of the Google Summer of Code. We also discussed the pros and cons of looking to implement CMIS, a proposed standard for interoperability of CMSes.

The conference as a whole was extremely well organised, and credit goes to Balazs Ree and the rest of the organising team from Greenfinity and the other volunteers for their hard work in making it such a success. Budapest is such a beautiful city for the event and a great host country.

I was involved in the production of the conference talks schedule this year and leading the talks committee. After putting the call out for talk submissions we had over 70 talks for about 45 slots available, which unfortunately meant that we didn't have space to fit all of them in the time available. I have to say though, this year that quality of the talks -- not just their content, but delivery -- exceeded all previous years.

It was great to see what is coming up in Plone 4 and a chance for conference attendees to ask the Plone core developers and Framework team any questions they had about features of the upcoming release. For me, personally though, the talks that really showed how far we've come as a community over the years were the number and quality of the business and case study talks I managed to get to:

• Frank DiMauro from UNC Healthcare System in the US on the CMS Impact on Corporate Culture
• Francesco Ciriaci from Reflab in Italy on the Medicins Sans Frontieres International Intranet
• Peter Breithaupt from N.V. Nederlandse Gasunie in The Netherlands talking about his experiences and successes of getting Plone introduced into large scale business operations
• Chantal Foster and Alex Sielicki from FosterMilo in the US talking about getting Plone into three Government institutions in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

It's talks like these that show that Plone, both as a CMS and as a community really are able to provide large organisations with the solution they need, and with far more flexibility and agility than many commercial CMS rivals.

Plone is promoted and protected by the Plone Foundation, a not for profit legal foundation that holds the IP of Plone. Each year the foundation elects a new board of directors, whose job it is to oversee the legal and promotional aspects of Plone. It is tradition for the final board meeting of the board each year, the AGM, to be held at the Plone Conference. The board presented the accounts for the foundation and spoke briefly of the achievements in the past year, including the introduction of a relicensing policy for Plone components, and guidelines around logo usage and its new marketing budget. The fact we now have a budget for marketing is a testament to the community and the generous companies that sponsor the Plone Foundation.

This year, I ran again for the Plone Foundation board and was elected onto the new board. Its an honour to be re-elected by my community peers and to serve again on the board. Once again we have a great bunch of people on the board, and will carry forward on the momentum of the previous year to make Plone even better.

At the end of the second day, there was the conference dinner at the Museum of Transportation. There was something quite surreal, but very pleasing about being sat drinking a beer with other Plonistas in a vintage railway carriage! Looking around upstairs at some of the photos of Budapest's shipping heritage made me do a double take as quite a few photos looked identical to Bristol city docks.

The third day was started off with a Keynote by Georg Greve of the Free Software Foundation Europe, entitled 'Rising to the Challenge of our Own Success'.

Then we had something new for the conference: an Open Space day. The third day had absolutely no agenda before the conference began. In an Open Space (also known as an unconference) the attendees themselves propose talks and put them up on a large board and a schedule is created organically by the people at the event. This fell under my remit to organise, something which I have to admit I was a bit nervous about, as I was quite worried that we'd end up with an empty board an no talks. Of course I needn't have worried at all. Within about 10 minutes of putting the board up, the majority of the slots were filled, and within an hour the board was full.

I proposed a talk on 'Plone Marketing - Producing brochures and case studies' which was very well attended with about 20-30 people there all interested in promoting Plone further and producing high quality marketing materials.

Overall, from the feedback I've had the Open Spaces day worked very well, and I think we should repeat it again next year. And if I'm involved in it next year I promise I won't forget how to count and mess up the timeslots as I did this year ;)

Anyways, I'd just like to repeat again what an amazing event it was, and what a fantastic community Plone is. It really is something that sets Plone the software apart from other CMS systems out there.

If you missed out, you can catch up with some of the banter on Twitter and see the photos of the event on Flickr. Also a bunch of the talks were streamed live and recorded on ustream.tv. A few of the presentations are on slideshare too. Maurits van Rees did an excellent job live blogging all the talks he was in.

-Matt

This week there has been quite a few big news items about Open Source. One of them is that the White House announced its move from its previous CMS system to the Open Source CMS Drupal.

Whilst this was some pretty big news about the US government adopting Open Source, I do think they did slightly over-egg the cake. Both the FBI and the CIA have been running the Open Source Plone CMS for a number of years already on for their public websites, so Open Source is already running some pretty prominent sites for the US Government.

Yesterday, Chris Wilson from Slate published a blog post entitled 'Why running the White House Web site on Drupal is a political disaster waiting to happen.'. In the blog post he makes some pretty scathing remarks about Drupal, which I think possibly deserve a bit more investigation.

In his article he states that Drupal is impenetrable, hates change, disorganised and righteous. Now, I don't know a huge amount about the internals of Drupal and its community, but I think some of these remarks need a bit more context:

"...a lot of ordinary, code-fearing people who just want a simple Web site are getting left behind". Well, this isn't just a simple Website. OK, so it might not be the most amazingly complex website and might not be much more than a news site for what's going on in the Whitehouse, but it *is* a pretty prominent website. If a user 'just wants a simple website' then I'd suggest that looking at Drupal might be the wrong thing to be doing. It is a pretty large CMS, similar in scale to Plone, or many of the mid-range CMS systems out there. Indeed CMS Watch list in the same category as Drupal and Plone: OpenText, Sitecore, EpiServer, Alterian. Now I doubt anyone would serious suggest any of these systems would be where you would start for 'a simple website'. As for being 'hostile to newcomers' or its 'learning curve' I would take a guess that whatever internal, proprietary .NET system the Whitehouse used to use would be far worse.

I think most of this comes from a common misconception I have seen over the years, and that is people think that just because they can download and install an Open Source CMS for free and have it up and running in 15 minutes, that they don't need to actually spend time learning how to use a system. Again, compare to commercial CMS systems (or any commercial software for that matter). When you procure such a system you generally include a significant amount of end user training, or developer training. Why do you think that this needs to be skimped with an Open Source CMS? Granted, I know Plone is still significantly easier to use and more intuitive than many other systems out there, I still wouldn't wander blindly into it without either taking advantage of some training or being comfortable in going and asking for help yourself.

On Twitter, someone responded to Chris' blog asking 'What would you recommend then?' and he responded 'Probably Alfresco, though there's certainly no such thing as a perfect CMS.'. I would challenge Chris to pick up Alfresco and try and apply the criticisms he levels at Drupal to it and see how it holds up.

I do know that Plone is certainly a lot better on some of those criticisms, and sat here at the Plone Conference 2009 in Budapest, that Plone has a pretty vibrant and friendly community. Combined with its outstanding security track record this could be why, as posted by Karl Horek on his Plone Metrics blog, Why so many government sites use Plone.

I've just read an interesting article over at CMS Watch by one of their Analysts, Adriaan Bloem, entitled Open Source: It's Just a License.

In it Adriaan discusses TCO costs for Open Source vs. Commercial and mentions that there are a lot of gray areas between Open Source and Closed Source systems. In the end he sums it up pretty well with a great piece of advice:

"There's only one thing you can generalize: open source is a specific kind of license. And discussions about which license is better are rather academic. What you'd want to decide on is what your software should do, if and how you want to customize it, and how easy it is to get support when you need it. That means doing your homework, and finding out the real story: you'll certainly want to know what's behind the facade. And that's something that applies to software under any license."

I'd like to actually take this even further, as there is a point further up the article in which he talks about costs with some example numbers:

"Get out your calculator and tell me this: what's more expensive over the course of three years. Software that's $30K up front, with a 15% annual maintenance and support fee; or software that's "free," but with $15K a year in "gold support"? Or, if you're planning on doing it yourself, one FTE?"

You could pretty much pick any numbers out of the air to make this argument and you could make it go either way pretty easily. However it misses a pretty big point for Open Source, and that is control.

Those costs above are a pretty small part of the equation if we are talking about Enterprise-level content management systems. And indeed its a point Adriaan makes:

"It's just an example, but you get the point -- it's very hard to do an enterprise implementation cheap, whichever way you turn it."

Anyone who has done any kind of CMS deployment in a large organisation know that the CMS they procure 'out of the box' is only going to be about 20% of the way towards their end goal. The rest is going to be customisation towards their specific business requirements, processes, branding, etc; and working out what they actually want to do. The key point is how easily does the CMS that you procure allow you to customise it to get the remaining 80% done?

With Open Source you get the choice of how you want to spend your budget. Make no mistake, you are still going to have to spend some money (see above, you have 80% still to do) but you get the flexibility to spend it how you want and when you want. You could start off with installing and evaluating an Open Source CMS with very little initial outlay. Then, as you build the system up and start to implement your requirements, you have the choice of how to do it: you can do it with internal development resources or you can hire in external help (or contract the development out). You can do it with a mix of these at different points in your project as you deem fit.

Furthermore with Community Open Source (as opposed to 'Commercial Open Source' in which, usually, a single vendor produces a system then open sources it) you have a choice of development partner. This is a pretty critical point. You can choose if you want a small local one-man-band with lower costs, or a large consulting company with full-on project management and offices around the globe. You get to pick what fits best in with your organisation... and even better... you are not locked in to them! Should for whatever reason you need to move development partner, then you can pick another one. Each of these companies will (should) have equal access to the core development of the system you have chosen and be able to make changes and fixes on your behalf. With closed source systems you might have a choice of VAR/Integrator/Developer, but in most cases these companies will still be one step removed from the software and have to go via the original software vendor to make any changes.

You also have lower risk with Community Open Source systems. There is no one central company that could go bust or be bought out by another vendor and end your CMS. Just look at the number of vendors acquiring other vendors in the commercial CMS space (there has been quite a flurry recently). These acquisitions are often to bolster an area of the portfolio that the vendor is weak in, but as a side effect they often acquire pieces that are superfluous to their current offerings and may be dropped. And when they are you are in trouble. The same risk is also present with 'Commercial Open Source' too if Alfresco, Hippo or Magnolia went bust then whilst their code might be Open Source, you have just lost the single dominant force in the development and may also have lost support, mailing lists, bug trackers, etc with them too.

So back to Adriaan's advice: "What you'd want to decide on is what your software should do, if and how you want to customize it, and how easy it is to get support when you need it." Do your homework, look at the different systems out there and make an informed choice. Just make sure that whatever system you choose gives you the flexibility and security that you know that you will be able to make the changes you need not only now, but three years down the line when you inevitably procure that new sparkly CRM/ERP/HR system. ;)