You're never alone with Plone

Ask Plone users what they like best about the open source content management software and chances are a key feature they'll list along with ease of use and multilingual support is the community of experts that's grown around the product.

Having access to knowledgeable people is of particular importance to Plone users right now as the software, which is based on the open source Zope Web application framework, continues to incorporate more and more Zope 3 functionality. There's a sizable skills gap among users who are familiar only with earlier versions of the application server and not the most recent release. The community is also putting the finishing touches on version 3.0 of Plone itself due out next month.

Plone, named after a British electronica band, began life in 2000 as an attempt by the project's co-founders Alexander Limi in Norway and Alan Runyan in the United States to create a more user-friendly interface or skin for Zope 2. Plone helps users manage documents, files, and images through a Web interface and also lets them publish that content to the Internet or to an intranet. Earlier this month, Limi announced that more than 1 million copies of Plone had been downloaded so far from the Plone.org Web site.

One way of getting Plone users together is a sprint, a three- to five-day meeting where participants work in small groups to develop, test, and document new functionality for the software. The latest sprint took place in Boston and focused on improving the handling of audio and video files and images in the Plone4Artists software bundle used for creating portal Web sites.

Aaron VanDerlip, from nonprofit relief agency Oxfam America, was among the participants. The organization's Web site is based on Plone. He said the site's mettle was tested and proved strong and stable when donors flocked to make online contributions to Oxfam to help the survivors of the terrible tsunami that rocked South Asia on Dec. 26, 2004.

Looking to the future, Oxfam would like to add audio and video to its Web site both as a way to attract more donations for its relief work and to show donors how their money has been spent. VanDerlip is also keen to see a lower-bandwidth version of the site accessible to those with limited connectivity options as well as catering to the needs of people visiting the site from their mobile phones.

The Nature Conservancy, a conservation organization that works worldwide to protect ecologically important lands and waterways, uses Plone to power the ConserveOnline open forum where environment groups, government agencies, and private landowners can come to exchange views. The site also makes a variety of conservation resources available, including documents and maps and enables users to create small Web sites or workspaces to flag particular environmental problems they're working on to solicit both feedback and assistance.

The Nature Conservancy is a longtime Zope user, and that's how it discovered Plone about three years ago, according to Sally Kleinfeldt, senior technology architect, technology and information systems, at the organization. Previously, the charity had developed its own custom content management applications based on Zope and a small raft of these legacy applications are still in use. Although no decision has been made, over time The Nature Conservancy would look to rewrite or replace those applications using Plone.

In terms of Plone4Artists, the Conservancy is particularly interested in how the software handles content that contains embedded GIS (geographic information system) data. Web services are another important Plone feature, Kleinfeldt said, as the Conservancy looks for ways to enhance information sharing across different environmental organizations and enable mashups.

David Siedband is a Plone developer who's been working with environmental groups at the grassroots level. While a large entity such as The Nature Conservancy may move slowly in adopting new technologies, state and local groups can respond much more quickly and may not be subject to the same legal restrictions in terms of sharing land data. Those groups are moving ahead with embracing audio and video and when new forays into technology prove successful, those moves can "bubble up from the field" and later be taken on by the likes of The Nature Conservancy, Siedband and Kleinfeldt noted.
Utah State University is using Plone as the content management system for its eduCommons OpenCourseWare management system. EduCommons helps universities develop and manage educational material from their undergraduate and graduate courses that they've decided to make available to everyone for free online. The university has done a lot of work around dealing with copyright issues and is donating that effort back to Plone.

Universities in Cuba, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States are already using eduCommons and Utah State is in discussions with universities in China, said David Ray, developer at the University's Center for Open and Sustainable Learning. Software vendor Novell's global training services unit is also a fan of eduCommons, using it to make educational material available for its Novell authorized courses and other customer training information.

Novell also uses Plone to power its novell.com Web site. The company turned to Plone after finding Web content management software from Vignette didn't provide the functionality the software vendor was looking for in terms of support for multiple languages and different types of content.

Nathan Sandland, an independent consultant, has been helping Novell adopt Plone and notes two other teams within the vendor are also using the open source content management software.

As Plone users get to grips with Zope 3 and start becoming familiar with Plone 3, there's another issue to consider: when the open source software will move to the latest version of the GNU general public license (GPL). Plone is currently made available under GPLv2, while GPLv3 debuted at the end of June. The topic's likely to be on the agenda at the annual Plone Conference due to take place in Naples, Italy, in October