Berehulyak - Plone

Plone on Content Technology Vendor map 2008

Thu, 13 Mar 2008 10:31:53 -0500

CMSWatch published Content Technology Vendor map on their website.

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.

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tags: Plone

Plone, SEO and international calls.

Thu, 27 Jul 2006 10:36:25 -0500

Some time ago I and Olena Zavorotnia optimized a html of new Plone based website Sauti, Business Phone Services. Sauti Corporate Telephony Solution Provider offers cheap international phone calls from UK mobile or landline network, fax services, conference calls, competition lines, votelines, switchboard plans, and personal numbers.

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

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.
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.
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.

link text
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, "");
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
  or . It depends on size of thumbnail. It works perfect for image resizing. However, it is better to have image_thumb.jpg/" alt="title"> then
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 for full size image. I suppose that Plone images are not well prepared for Google.


  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.

  
  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.
Using  hidden H5 tagslike 
Sections

 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.
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.

 
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     tags:
     
           CMS
           
           | 
                      Plone
           
           | 
                      Plone SEO
           
           | 
                      SEO



Plone skins development
Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:48:31 -0600
Jon Stahl in his post "How ONE/Northwest Customizes Plone For Grassroots Websites" describes the process of Plone skins development in ONE/Northwest. 



Jon Stahl inspired other developers:



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.

Recently Volodymyr Rudnytsky from Quintagroup wrote tutorial Creating Plone Skin Products with Plone Skin Dump . He describes the process of  Plone skins development using Plone skin dump product.

For example Plone skin dump was used for generation of all Alternative Plone skins. 
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     tags:
     
           CMS
           
           | 
                      plone
           
     



Alfresco vs Plone, is Alfresco the perfect open source ECMS
Mon, 16 Jan 2006 11:07:22 -0600
Seth Gottlieb in his blog  compares Alfresco  vs Plone



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 
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     tags:
     
           Alfresco
           
           | 
                      CMS
           
           | 
                      Plone
           
     



Plone-dislike keyword proposal
Wed, 16 Nov 2005 08:42:17 -0600
Sometimes it is possible to see blog posts and forum threads with Plone antipathy.

 People compare Plone with other CMSs
 Someone try Plone and post that it is hard to learn
 One can write that he dislike Plone because of performance issues or lack of some features

 
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.

So proposal is to add articles with Plone antypathy to del.icio.us with Plone-dislike keyword. People from Plone community will react more  quickly to such posts.

http://del.icio.us/tag/plone-dislike
 
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     tags:
     
           Plone
           
           | 
                      Plone blog
           
     



The Plone Blog launched
Wed, 16 Nov 2005 06:07:13 -0600
Alan Runyan (Enfoldsystems) and  Jon Stahl launched The Plone Blog an effort to provide some more accessible and easy-to-digest coverage of the Plone Community.


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.


Jon Stahl invite people write to The Plone Blog

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

Nice start. I'm very interested in http://blogs.plone.org project or http://blogs.plone.net.  Such project can have similiar implementation to "The Plone Blog" or aggregate content from Blogs like CMS Info blogThe Plone Blog is based on Quills. However it is not the only plone product that can be used. There are also Plone Blog by Quintagroup and Knotes.

 
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     tags:
     
           Alan Runyan
           
           | 
                      Jon Stahl
           
           | 
                      Plone
           
           | 
                      Plone blog
           
           | 
                      blog
           
     



Plone disadvantages, SQL Storage capability
Sun, 28 Aug 2005 15:47:58 -0500
Here is a guy who talk about Plone disadvantages
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.

 
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     tags:
     
           django
           
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                      google
           
     



Why people choose Drupal over Plone
Sat, 27 Aug 2005 02:19:44 -0500
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.

Here is my comment:

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.
 
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     tags:
     
           Drupal
           
           | 
                      Plone
           
           | 
                      Plone vs Drupal
           
           | 
                      plone
           
     



Export an OWL ontology into a working Plone content-type
Wed, 04 May 2005 08:45:23 -0500
Here is recipe by AkaSig: 
	Choose any existing OWL ontology
	With Protege equipped with its OWL plugin, create a new project from your OWL file.

	Still within Protege, with the help of its UML plugin, convert your OWL-Protege project into a UML classes project. You get an XMI file.

	Load this XMI file into an UML project with Poseidon. Save this project under the .zuml Poseidon format.

	From poseidon, export your classes a new xmi file. It will be Plone-friendly.

	With a text editor, delete some accentuated characters that Poseidon might have added to your file (for example, the Frenchy Poseidon adds a badly accentuated “Modele sans titre” attribute into your XMI) because the next step won’t appreciate them

	python Archgenxml.py -o YourProduct yourprojectfile.xmi turns your XMI file into a valid Plone product. Requires Plone and Archetypes (see doc) latest stable version plus ArchgenXML head from the subversion repository.

	Launch your Plone instance and install YourProduct as a new product from your Plone control panel. Enjoy YourProduct !

	eventually populate it with an appropriate marshaller.
	 
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     tags:
     
           owl ontology
           
           | 
                      plone
           
     



How to migrate from phpbb to Plone
Tue, 05 Apr 2005 05:01:34 -0500
Here is a link to the main info.

"from phpbb to Plone":http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.web.zope.plone.user/32808



Informational Links:



http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=6147588 

http://www.zope.org/Members/TheJester/exUserFolder/UnenlightenedZopistasGuideToXUF

http://www.phpbb.com/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=234106

http://www.zope.org/Members/adustman/Products/ZMySQLDA

http://zope.org/Members/TheJester/exUserFolder

http://exuserfolder.sf.net/



Products required for Plone/phpBB MySQL connection (install from

command line in Debian):



apt-get install python-mysqldb



Products required for Plone/phpBB MySQL connection (from within Zope):



ExUserFolder 

ZMySQLDA 



Untar into /user/lib/zope/lib/python/Products



Restart Zope.  Verify that both exUserFolder and ZMySQLDA installed

properly by clicking on the Control Panel --> Products links in the

ZMI.  If they didn't, figure out why.



In ZMI root, add:



"Z MySQL Database Connection" from the dropdown menu.



Supply the database, and the username and password for access when prompted.



If it works, it should say the connection is open.



Access your phpBB Database using phpMyAdmin:



ExUserFolder requires the table name, username column name, password

column name, and a Zope Roles column name.  Inside the phpbb2

database, the usernames and passwords for phpBB are located in the

phpbb_users table.  All of the above information is there with the

exception of the Zope Roles column.  I had to create this 'zope_roles'

column in the phpbb_users table as this is where Zope/Plone stores its

Roles for that particular user.  The column had the following

attributes:



Field: zope_roles

Type: varchar(255)

Null: No

Default: Member



I also had to run the following SQL within the phpbb2 database:



DROP TABLE IF EXISTS passwd;

CREATE TABLE passwd (

	username varchar(64) NOT NULL PRIMARY KEY,

	password varchar(64) NOT NULL,

	roles varchar(255)

);



DROP TABLE IF EXISTS UserProperties;

CREATE TABLE UserProperties (

	username varchar(64) NOT NULL,

	prop_key varchar(128) NOT NULL,

	value text NOT NULL,

	istemporary int

);



CREATE UNIQUE INDEX username_prop_idx on UserProperties(username,prop_key );

CREATE INDEX username_idx on UserProperties(username);



This SQL came with the exUserFolder product and is required.



Modifying the password encryption used in exUserFolder:



PhpBB stores md5 hashes of your password in its database.  As

supplied, exUserFolder uses DES encryption.  In order to use md5

hashes I needed to edit mysqlAuthSource.py located in

exUserFolder/mysqlAuthSource/ and add the following (replaced

"Original cryptPassword function"):



# Original cryptPassword function

#	def cryptPassword(self, username, password):

#			salt =username[:2]

#			secret = crypt(password, salt)

#			return secret



# Alternate cryptPassword function, returns md5 hash of the password

	def cryptPassword(self, username, password):

		passhash = md5.new(password)

		secret = passhash.hexdigest()

		return secret



I also had to add ",md5" to the import statement at the beginning of

the file in order to use md5 encryption.



NOTE: This code was taken from pgAuthSource.py in exUserFolder/pgAuthSourceAlt



Restart Zope from either the ZMI or the command line.  md5 hashes now are used.	



In your Plone root in the ZMI (e.g. /testing/):



If there is an acl_users folder in the Plone site, delete it.  Do NOT

delete acl_users from the ZMI root or you will be screwed.



Add "ex User Folder" from drop down menu in your Plone root.  Supply

the following information:



Add MySQL Authentication Source

Database Connection: MySQL_database_connection	

Table Name: phpbb_users

Username Column: username	

Password Column: user_password	

Roles Column: zope_roles



Restart Zope from either the ZMI or the command line.  



Success!  You can now log into Plone using an existing name from phpBB!



If you receive an error, take a look at the error message in your

Plone portal and your traceback in your Error Log in the ZMI.  From

those two error screens, you should have an idea what went wrong. 

Correct your mistakes and restart Zope.  Test.  Wash, lather, rinse,

repeat until successful.



We're not out of the woods yet.  We still need to deal with a couple things. 



First off, Joining a Plone site from the Plone side will cause a

problem.  As supplied, anyone can join a Plone site by clicking the

Join link at the top of the page.  Joining a Plone/phpBB website from

the Plone side is BAD as phpBB needs additional information from you

in order to function properly.  In order to fix this, we need the Join

link to always take you to the phpBB registration screen instead of

the Plone registration screen.



Change link to where Join points:



Click portal_registration in the ZMI.



Change action from 'string:${portal_url}/join_form' to

'string:http://mysite.com/phpBB2/profile.php?mode=register'.



This takes care of directing the anonymous user to Join at the

bulletin board.  However, it doesn't keep someone that is savvy with

Plone from accessing the /join_form within Plone itself.



To keep someone from accessing the join_form:



Customize the join_form in portal_skins/plone_forms/ by clicking on

join_form and then on the customize button.



In portal_skins/custom/ click on join_form and then click on its Security tab.



Uncheck Acquire from the View action and check it for Manager.



Now only the manager of the website can get to this form.  Anyone else

will be prompted to log in instead.  If down the road you want to go

back to allowing people access to join_form, just delete it out of

your /custom/ folder or rename it.



Second, phpBB doesn't have as rigid of username requirements as Plone

does.  Because of this, members of your phpBB website can use

non-standard characters in their usernames that Plone will not want to

work with.  These non-standard characters include .,#  !{})*%, etc, and

can cause errors for that user if he/she tries to log in with that

non-standard name.  Errors are primarily the lack of a Member Folder.

To fix this on phpBB's side, do the following:



In line 106 of includes/functions_validate is a list of not allowed chars:



Code:

  	 // Don't allow " and ALT-255 in username.

  	 if (strstr($username, '"') || strstr($username, '"') ||

strstr($username, chr(160)))



You can add more characters to this line by putting as many as you

want of thes before the last two "))":



Quote:

|| strstr($username, 'CHARACTER')



Here is where we will add our characters.  Once done, replace the

existing one on your server and you're done.



That's it!  You should now have a fully functional integration between

Plone and phpBB! 
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     tags:
     
           phpbb
           
           | 
                      plone