Entries For: May 2006
May 31, 2006
Jonah Bossewitch: Death and Taxonomies
A forray into drupal 4.7's taxonomy system and what Plone can learn from it.
The site I have been working on, theicarusproject.net has a very rich collection of content, and one of the primary motivations for the migration is to get a better handle on the classification system - noboday can find anything on the current site. They were committed to Drupal long before I arrived, so I dug in with the hope of learning something from the contrast.
PHP bashing aside, there are alot of interesting things happening in Drupal land. I hope to follow up this post with a few more cross-pollinating nuggets, but for now I will focus on their taxonomy system.
Taxonomies in Drupal are considered the heart of the system, and the essential modules ship with the core and cannot be disabled. Most URLs in Drupal are effectively queries, much like our smart folders (actually, for anything aside from anti-chronological display order you need to install the Views module) but the display results are all instances of content with matching vocabulary terms. The absence of folders and containment initially confuses many administrators, and renders breadcrumbs largely useless, but does allow for the creation of sophisticated information architectures.
Taxonomies are managed top-down, not bottom-up, and have a separate administrative interface for their creation and management. Once the taxonomy vocabularies are created, specific terms can be added to these vocabularies without having to create content associated with those terms (in contrast to a bottom-up category system, like the mediawiki).
Category Management - Vocabulary Listings:
Druapl supports multiple vocabularies, which can each be associated with one or more content types. Vocabularies can be flat, one level deep, or N-levels deep (hierarchical). They can be fixed or free form (meaning content authors can make up new categories upon content creation). The core tagging system does not support the creation of tags per-user, per-object - only per-object.
Category Management - Add a Vocab:
Category Management - Add/Edit a Term:
The Drupal taxonomy system is very powerful, but its power is very open ended and does not necessarily lead users towards a uniform experience. The confusion around categories and taxonomies is best exemplified by the category module meant to consolidate and simplify taxonomy and navigation, but there is no consensus on its incorporation into the core.
A large number of modules are built around taxonomies. Core Drupal supports roles, but no groups (organic groups is a popular access delegatoin solution, but it is incompatible with other access restriction modules - so you have to choose one), and does not have a notion of containment (ie folders). So, for example, one way to restrict editing access is by enabling the taxonomy access module. Another useful module is the taxonomy browser which allows for advanced search against unions/intersections of vocab terms.
Category Browser:
Once vocabularies are created, and terms added, content can be associated with these terms:
Working on this site really drove home the value in separating the navigation axis (section) from the thematic axis (keywords), and separating these dimensions was easy to accomplish with the taxonomy/category tools built into drupal. In particular, once the scheme was developed, managing vocabulary lists (even hierarchical ones) is intuitive, albeit slightly clunky. I further chose to introduce a free-form tagging dimension for member contributed posts which may or may not fit into the fixed taxonomy. This is similar to myspace and facebook allowing for free-form hobbies and interests, and banking on a large enough user base that there will be overlap and potentially interesting intersections.
The system still does not allow for the intuitive modeling of a many-to-many relationship, which I continue to think is the litmus test which will mark of a truly powerful taxonomy UI. There is still quite a bit of programmer know how involved in setting up this system so that it operates the way that content administrators expect, and arguably there are too many degrees of freedom introduced by such a general purpose modeling capability (if you think about it, a tagging system can essentially allow web administrators to model relationships which used to require programming custom applications against an rdbms).
Nonetheless, Drupal's taxonomy/category/vocabulary system definitely captures a few use cases more elegantly than Plone's current core does. But perhaps the real lesson is the importance of not mixing navigation space and content space, which can be kept separate in Plone, but is all too easy to conflate (in Drupal too!).
Note: most things I describe in this case study could have been accomplished within core Plone - I think the most interesting things here are the administrative UI for multiple vocabulary management, the different types of vocabularies, and how central they are in the construction of a Drupal site.
May 27, 2006
Jon Stahl: Real-world Plone Experiences
Matt Blair of Humaninet has published a lengthy review of their experiences with Plone 2.05 and Plone 2.1.2. It's a meaty nugget of real-world nonprofit-sector Plone experience.
Late spring must be NGO season for Plone. Following hot on the heels of Oxfam GB's very successful Ploneability Plone for NGOs mini-conference, Matt Blair, Humaninet's Chief Plonista, has written at length about his experiences implementing Plone as a collaboration tool for Humaninet's internal and external project teams.
There's a lot of great feedback in these documents, covering both the general usability of Plone, as well as features specific to intensive team collaboration.
Matt's also written a very practical guide to evaluating third party Products for Plone, which contains a ton of hard-won wisdom, a simple explanation of Humaninet's custom workflows (a great example of this powerful feature in a real-world situation), and some interesting thoughts about Plone's unsuitability for multi-author real-time collaborative document editing. (Which is a darn hard problem, I might add, which no open-source CMS solves very well. Yet.)
Matt's writeup deserves a much closer look than I've had time to give it, but one thought that occurs to me right off is this: a bunch of his needs and frustrations seem to revolve around's Plone lack of built-in document versioning and rollback. I'm surprised that he didn't give CMFEditions a whirl, which on the surface seems like it's exactly what he needs, and was sponsored in large part by a fellow NGO, Oxfam GB, who presumably are using it for similar use cases.
May 26, 2006
Jon Stahl: Plone for NGOs community emerges
A Plone-for-nonprofits email list has been started, starring some of the Plone community's best and brightest. Come join us.
As Martin Aspeli reports, Oxfam GB just wrapped up "Ploneability," which sounds like it was an amazingly successful event showcasing what Oxfam has accomplished with Plone over the past couple of years. (With only a few weeks' notice, they had over 60 people and to turn away over 20 more due to lack of space!)
One of the first follow-ups from Ploneability is the launch of a new Plone community email discussion list specifically to cover nonprofit users, developers and administrators Plone sites.
As a nonprofit user of Plone, whose organization works to help other nonprofit environmental groups build power by using technology effectively, I couldn't be more thrilled so see this kind of excitement and momentum.
The list is at http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo.
May 23, 2006
: Eating the Plone Dogfood
The Plone Community may be even more entrepreneurial than I thought.
Geoff Davis takes note of the"Brake-Fast Dog Bowl" which looks like it may have been designed by the Plone Marketing Team during a particularly rowdy late night session.
It's even official Plone Blue. Most amusing.
: 2006 Plone Conference Planning Begins
The Plone Foundation wants your input on the 2006 Plone Conference; painless survey link attached.
The
Plone Foundation has invited the Seattle Plone community to put
together a bid for hosting the 2006 Plone Conference, and has requested
that we do a bit of background research to aid in planning and to
assess the level of interest and enthusiasm in the Plone community.
We've put together a 10-minute survey to help us gather some of that information.
http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.asp?u=38782170316
Please take a moment to share your hard-won conference wisdom with us today, and we'll do our best to repay the favor with an amazng Plone Conference.
Jon Stahl: New Screencast: Rapid Application Development with Plone
Sean Kelley follows up his popular "Better Web App Development" screencast with another bravura Lessig/Hardt-style screencast.
Sean Kelley, screencasting superstar of the Plone community (I keep on wanting to say "Ploniverse"), has released another amazing screencast, titled "Getting Your Feet Wet With Plone."
In this episode, Sean covers the entire process of creating a basic time tracking application with Plone. Along the way he covers:
- Installing Python, Zope and Plone on Unix
- Using the ArchGenXML and the ArgoUML graphical editor to create content types. ("Look Ma, no code.")
- Building out a basic time-tracker app.
May 19, 2006
Jon Stahl: I'm enjoying ATRatings
ATRatings seems like a fun community-oriented product that deserves wider exposure
I don't know about you, but I kinda like installing random products from the Collective to see what they do. (On my development server of course, never on a live production server!)
Tonight I played a bit with ATRatings, which provides simple, snazzy content ratings (1-5 stars) and hit counting. This is one of those "online community" features that isn't essential for every site, but can really help a site that wants to guide users to its most popular content.
What's particularly cool (to me) about ATRatings is that it marries some heavy duty math from Dr. Geoff Davis with some slick javascript UI bits from Junyong Pan. Crunching the numbers to get accurate average ratings and hit rates is tougher than it first seems, and so is providing a nice UI that makes rating stuff quick and painless. (It looks to have been inspired by Netflix's very smooth 1-5 star movie rating tool.)
One minor suggestion: currently, enabling ratings on a folder and choosing which content types can be rated requires going through the ZMI, but it would be great to push these into a folder tab and Plone Control Panel configlet (respectively) so that average site administrators can control the basic switches of ATRatings without having to delve into the sometimes-intimidating ZMI.
ATRatings is a great example of the kind of simple, useful community-oriented features that oughta be bundled with future releases of Plone (but be disabled by default!). My compliments to the chef(s).
NB: The current release on Plone.org, tagged version 0.2, doesn't seem to work as well as the latest checkout from SVN trunk. I hope that Pan (or Geoff) will consider tagging a new release soon.
May 17, 2006
Jon Stahl: Rob Miller Video Interview
Check out this short video featuring Plone developer Rob Miller talking about OpenPlans.org
I just stumbled across this brief video interview with Rob Miller of OpenPlans.org, in which he briefly discusses the Plone-powered collaboration goodness that is OpenPlans, and how it's being used by community organizing groups.
OpenPlans combines Wicked (simple wiki features), TeamSpace, CMFEditions and some other goodies to create powerful and easy-to-use collaborative spaces for community organizations and other ad-hoc teams.
Rob recently mentioned that they're gearing up for a big intern-powered development push this summer, aimed at further expanding the collaboration features of Plone.
Good stuff.
May 16, 2006
Jon Stahl: Inspirational Marketing
Plone can't out-spend its competition, but it can out-inspire them.
I've really been enjoying Kathy Sierra's blog "Creating Passionate Users" and I can't recommend it highly enough to all of you who are thinking about how to market and promote Plone. Her recent post "Out-spend vs. Out-inspire the competition" had a deeply insightful comparision table that I'm shamlessly reposting.
Plone, like many mature open-source projects, naturally gravitates
towards the "Inspirational" side, and is already doing many of the
"Inspirational" behaviors listed below. But reading Kathy's list definitely made me want to do more to focus on getting Plone's stories out there in a personal, visceral way. (Which makes me wonder, what's up with Plone.net?) I think that the Plone Foundation can and should be playing a key role in identifying and celebrating success.
Another point that Kathy makes in this list, and repeatedly throughout her writing, is the importance of providing users with immediate, tangible results. To me, this is a strong argument in favor of things that make it faster and easier for new Plone site admins to make progress quickly. Ideas I've heard that might do that include:
- Shipping Plone with more useful Products that are disabled, but can be turned on with a mouse click.
- Pushing as much functionality into the Plone web UI as possible (but preserving the option to transition to filesystem development as you become more sophisticated)
- Contextual Help
I'm sure there are more.
The other item in Kathy's list that really resonated with me was "Help others learn from your up-from-nothing story." This was exactly what we tried to do with our tutorial on "Nonprofits and Plone" at the Plone Sympoisum this spring -- tell the story of how a few regular blokes at ONE/Northwest are kicking ass with Plone. I'd certainly like to see more of those stories.
May 10, 2006
Jon Stahl: Podcasting From Portland
The Portland Plone Users' Group has a podcast. Good stuff.
So I think that the ante for Plone User Group documentation has just been upped. The brand-new Portland Plone Users Group already has a podcast of their first meeting up, thanks to Chris Dawson. Tune in and you can hear my brilliant and good-looking colleague Jon Baldivieso and his charming co-conspirator Darci Hanning talk about "Why Plone?" and "Plinkit" (a cool project to deliver Plone sites for Oregon libraries).
If you like what you hear, you can join the Portland Plone email list to get notified of future meetings.
May 08, 2006
Jon Stahl: Ploneboard 1.0-alpha is out
The long-awaited Ploneboard 1.0 is out... in alpha. Caveat installer.
Unlike the Bush Administration, who usually announce bad news on Friday afternoons, Wichert Akkerman chose this past Friday afternoon to announce the release of Ploneboard 1.0-alpha. Ploneboard is the next-generation web forum product for Plone, and you can download it from Plone.org if you want to give it a whirl.
As the name implies this is not a final release but a first development release, intended further testing and
translations.
A lot has changed since the last release (0.1-beta). Most of the work has taken place under the hood: the code has been completely refactored. A couple of user interface improvements have also been added: threaded conversation views, a mini-kupu for editing comments, translatable templates (Dutch translation included) and editing and removing of comments.
There are a few missing features that will be included in the next alpha
release:
* comment moderation
* better user interface for editing and removing comments
* use mini-kupu more often
There's been a tremendous amount of pent-up demand for a clean, simple, modern Plone forum product, and it looks like Ploneboard is poised to deliver on its early promise. It still needs some bug-fixing and general cleanup, and it's definitely not ready for production use yet. But it's time to do that open-source thing and get lots of eyes on it.
Big love to Wichert, Tim, Alexander, Helge, Geir and all the other folks who have put a lot of effort into this important product.
May 01, 2006
Jon Stahl: Archipelago Sprint Report
Plone 3.0 is going to be amazing.
Alexander Limi just posted a lengthy report-out on last week's Archipelago Sprint, which was the first big work session for Plone 3.0, slated for a late 2006 release.
It's a great report that blends community, technical geekery and screenshots of some mind-bendingly cool new features that are going to push Plone to even greater heights of usability and power.
This is exciting stuff.
