We had three great presentations (in Ukrainian)

• New in Plone 3.3. What to expect from Plone 4. Presenter: Vitaliy Podoba
• Overview of Plone-based websites for mobile devices. Presenter: Yuriy Hvozdovych
• E-commerce: solution for Plone system. Presenter: Olha Pelishok

Videos and photos  describe the atmosphere of our local event.

Ihor Berehulyak of Quintagroup talked about Plone websites for universities. Slides are here.

Myroslav Opyr of Quintagroup gave a demonstration of how to get started with Plone.

Olha Pelishok of Quintagroup demonstrated advantages of Plone for the government websites. Slides are here

Nice photo made in Quintagroup office on World Plone Day:

Map includes all content management vendors from CMS Report. You can see Plone, Drupal, Vignette, etc. If you like the subway map representation technique, you may also be interested in iA's Web Trend Map.

Sauti wasn't developed by Quintagroup, so it was better for me to realize the situation with usual Plone based sites.

Note: December 2006. The owner of Sauti.co.uk desided to switch from Plone to OsCommerce. In some cases stable shopping cart solution is better for clients then good CMS.

Second Note: December 2007. Customer decided switch back to Plone, but website archive was damaged :-(

Plone is the best CMS for SEO

I can say with confidence that Plone is the best CMS for SEO.

• It has very nice  search engine friendly URLs feature. You can create the pages with any desirable URLs like http://my-plone-site/keyword1-keyword2/keywords3/keyword4.keyword5/keyword6.php.asp.html
  It can be done in very usable way, it is as simple as adding Title.
• Default Plone generates great internal links with navigation portlet, breadcrumbs and sitemap.
• Any site structure may be implemented
  
• HTML includes a lot of whitespace, but it is very clean. Usually Plone skins include tableless layout, so you have not much redundant html code in the source.
  

Tools which can be used for Plone SEO.

• Plone SEO (qSEOptimizer) allows per document editing of Title tag and META tags.
• Plone Google Sitemaps (qPloneGoogleSitemaps) allows Plone websites to get better visibility for Google search engine by providing it with complete listing of URLs to website content.
• The Redirection Tool can be used for storing references to moved content to enable redirects. It is very useful product, but it doesn't work at Zettai hosting (at least in Sauti account) . We generated a patch to enable Redirection Tool plone product at Zettai.
  

People say that "Google likes Plone sites".  However, it is possible to use Plone in such way that only main page will be indexed by Google.  Plone is a great tool for SEO itself, but you should know how to use it.

Plone SEO Issues.

Basically, duplicated content is the main issue. It can be discussed in different situations

1. Links to folders. 
   If you insert internal link with Kupu then it creates relative link to some Page or other object. It's a pity that it is not possible to insert link to Folder. You must create link to default item of folder instead of link to Folder. Links from Navigation portlet lead to Folder and internal links lead to Pages with the same content. Here is duplicated content issue.
2. Relative links in portlets and acquisition.
   If you create links in  static portlets with relative links then links may work because of acquisition, but a lot of duplicated content will be generated. Google robots may lost in huge amount of pages generated with Zope acquisition. By the way, that's why Sauti wasn't indexed by Google.
3. RSS and relative links in Pages, News, etc.
   If you insert internal link with Kupu then it creates relative link to some Page or other object.
   

   <a href="../folder/filename">link text</a>
   In this case rich text RSS2 feeds will include broken links and images.
   I remove "relative links" feature in Kupu by customizing kupuploneeditor.js file. Just remove
   contents = this.makeLinksRelative(contents, base).replace(/<\/?body[^>]*>/g, "");
   

4. Images preview. It is not easy for me to estimate how Google index Images in Plone. Plone preview Image with different parameters without .jpg .png at the end.
   
   •  If you insert image in Page with latest Kupu, it generates the code similar to
     <img src="filename.jpg/image_preview" alt="Title"> or <img src="filename.jpg/image_thumb" alt="title">. It depends on size of thumbnail. It works perfect for image resizing. However, it is better to have
<img src="filename-image_thumb.jpg/" alt="title"> then <img src="filename.jpg/image_thumb" alt="title">
   • Random Image is not a good choice for Google. If you have subfolders with images plone-site/gallery/subgallery1 then random image represent the subgallery on the level of plone-site/gallery/.  It would be nice to see here the first image from /plone-site/gallery/subgallery1/folder_contents instead of random image.
     
   • Suppose, you create usual photo gallery: add Folder "Photos" , add images to "Photos", change folder Display View to Thumbnails View. Folder page includes the photo with thumbnails
     <img src="filename.jpg/image_thumb" alt="title"> and links to photo preview page <a href="filename.jpg/view" title="">. View template includes image <img src="filename.jpg/image_preview" and link to actual photo <a href="filename.jpg/image_view_fullscreen" class="discreet">. I don't know how Google can index it properly, site structure is broken here.
     
   Personally, I like how images can be managed in Plone, but I don't know how Google can index it in Proper way. Image file extansions .jpg .gif should be at  the end of url. Default templates use  <img src="filename.jpg/image_view_fullscreen"> for full size image.  I suppose that Plone images are not well prepared for Google.
5. HTML white spaces. If you look at html source of usual Plone page (View -> Source in IE, Ctrl-U in Firefox), you see a lot of white spaces. HTML white spaces in source of Plone pages appear because of ZPT code. ZPT may be customized to prevent white spaces, but templates will be not usable for developer in this case. We had experience before in such  type of customization. It is possible to save 30% of HTML size. Look at view source of this site  and compare it with usual Plone site source.
   
6. Default plone calendar portlet  has the following links
   

   href="plone-site/current-object?None&month:int=6&year:int=2006&orig_query=None" rel="nofollow"
   

   This issue is solved by corresponding parameter rel="nofollow". However, it would be nice to see links to smartfolders here. This issue is not critical for me.
7. Using  hidden H5 tagslike
   <h5 class="hiddenStructure">Sections</h5>
in html is not good for Google. I suppose, they will be definitely removed, but H5 is still available in Plone 2.5. It can be replaced with DIV.
   
8. I'm not a Accessibility expert, but as for me, using of H1  in Logo template is not good for SEO. H1 is the same on all pages, it is used for logo insert.
   

Resume

Plone is the best, but it is possible to make it even better.

What I'd like to know is: what kinds of tricks do you use? ...
I bet there are lots more 'smart practices' for building simple Plone sites.

So, is Alfresco the perfect open source ECM? Not quite. At least not yet. First of all, Alfresco is not all open source. Features like group based access control and clustering are actually "Shared Source" and require monthly subsription fees to use.

There is a large degree of functional overlap between Plone and Alfresco. They both have the functionality necessary for groups of users to manage and share documents: access control, search, metadata, etc. Plone also supports WebDAV and has a mechanism where files automatically updated on the server when edited with a client application such as Microsoft Word. But it does not support CIFS. Alfresco has the advantage of a content rules framework which Plone is missing because of its lack of an event model. Alfresco has a better content versioning system. The many companies who have standardized on Java will feel more comfortable working with a Java solution

There are several areas where Plone has a significant edge. The most notable of which is handling web content. Plone is an effective and elegant hybrid of a document management system and a web content management system. Plone's workflow model is more robust than Alfresco's. The other significant advantage that Plone has is its maturity

It is important to quickly find out such posts and protect Plone reputation. Sometimes only one comment can help people stay with Plone or choose Plone.

http://del.icio.us/tag/plone-dislike

Over the next few weeks, Alan and I are going to start providing some snappy, informal coverage of Plone -- along with some opinions and advocacy. We hope to expand the reach of the Plone community, catalyze some new conversations about the future of Plone and to inspire others to dive in and continue the work of building Plone into a world-class content, collaboration and community system.

Write for The Plone Blog - we're always looking for folks who love Plone and want to be part of its voice.

n our travels around the Web, we come across countless sites and services. But with only 24 hours in the day, we have to settle on a relative few as places to work, play, and get things done online. These are our picks for the cream of the crop, ranging from the ridiculous (the disturbingly hilarious StuffOnMyCat) to the sublime (the group art blog PostSecret). The list was aided, in no small part, by our readers. Some of the best, such as the tech news site Digg.com and the great group advice site Ask Metafilter, came from sharp-eyed readers and have become some of our new favorites. Others, such as Google and Craigslist, may be obvious but just canÕt be beat. Either way, check them out and maybe you'll find some new favorites.

And what does this say to the open source community at large? If a great project like Mambo can be split like this, it makes it that much more difficult for a business to trust its future to open source, any open source.

My guess is users will choose, in time, based on performance. Kwiecinski makes it sound like a freely competitive situation. "We’ll have two people doing the same thing, with the same code, in the same way, just under another name." But a year from now, or two, people will have to choose, and either way they go, they're going with an outfit that is smaller (when compared to proprietary competitors) than it would be otherwise. Why not just call Oracle?

Here is my comment: It's a normal situation with Open Source software that some developers want to create new project based of existing CMS. Postnuke CMS was based on PHP-Nuke. Plone was build on top of Zope and CMF. OscMax was based on OsCommerce. Not a big deal! If someone can organize a work of new community of developers the new project can appear.

Here is example of Nuke evolution (Postnuke, PHP-Nuke, Xaraya, Xoops):

Its been a while since I started take a play with django web framework. I run their tutorial and take alook how to deal with it. At the moment, I compare django with plone. I like plone and I wish to used it as my production area, but I got stuck with their SQL Storage capability.

Plone allows you to store your data on any other RDBMS like MS-SQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and etc. But, Plone required to store your object metadata at ZODB, and it must. This is it. This is the one that I dont want, Its mean, as my RDBMS data grows, then my metadata on ZODB will grows either. I dont want it. Thats why I keep delay my application to jump to Plone.

The most precious relics of the church is the Wonder-working Icon of the Virgin Mary (XVII c.). It was brought in Lviv from Terebovlia in 1674 by bishop Joseph (Shumlians'kyi).

With a great effort of metropolitan Atanasy Sheptyts'ky on the ruins of the ancient church a new one was erected a pearl of European art. (1774 - 1761, architect — B. Meretyn, sculptor — I.Pinsel). In its architecture the Western influences and traditions of Ukrainian church building merged.

Last week I made few photos there: St. George Cathedral, Lviv

In the end, she chose Drupal, mainly because it had built-in RSS aggregation features.

It was interesting to note what she said about Plone RSS support in her writeup:

As a CMS based on the Zope platform, Plone offers much greater programming extensibility than other CMS options we considered. The flip side of this virtue is that Plone’s relative advantages are much less compelling for a project that (like telecentre.org) specifically wants to limit its custom programming commitments.

Ultimately our biggest concern was that Plone's RSS aggregation capacity was not part of its standard install; while adding an aggregation module is a trivial technical challenge, the lack of native aggregation support spoke to the platform's orientation towards single-site content management rather than distributed community.

It is really sad that people think that Plone is lack of RSS support. Plone has RSS support by default! It is not enabled by default.

Login to ZMI. Enable syndication on your Plone site. Select portal_syndication -> Properties tab -> Enable syndication

Login to Plone. Go to the folder which contains documents you want to syndicate. Select Syndication tab -> Enable Syndication

You can also create RSS feed by any search result.

Default Plone can be extended with Plone RSS2 Product to generate RSS2 feeds with support of audio/video. It allows the syndication of ATAudio objects, mp3, wmv, ppt, jpg files using RSS 2.0 with enclosures.

You can create feeds for any contentent types in Plone. This Plone blog has RSS2 feed and default RSS feed.

Short part:

Use ZEO. ZEO rocks. Really. In essence it’s just the ZODB with a small communication layer on top. This layer is used in Zope instances instead of using the ZODB directly. That way you can run several process groups on your machine, all connecting to the same database. This helps with the above mentioned process restarting: when one is down, the other does the work. Use mod_backhand in Apache to distribute the load between the process groups or use other load balancing tools. ZEO makes regular database packs easier, too: they run on the server and not in the Zope instances - they actually don’t notice much of the running pack. If you have, use a SMP machine. Or buy one. Really - that helps. You need to run ZEO and multiple Zope instances, though - otherwise the global interpreter lock of Python will hit you over the head and Zope will just use one of the two processors. That’s one reason why you want multiple process groups in the first place - distribution of load on the machine itself, making use of multiple processors.