Hello All, I just wanted to let you all know that IICD (www.iicd.org) has just recently launched our upgraded and restyled website in plone 2.5. Below is a summary of some of the major improvements and challenges in case it can trigger ideas for your own website or if you have tips/ideas.
Some new elements: We have a video gallery. We don't have the resources for a streaming webserver so we upload our videos on google or youtube and the plone cms allows us to organize our videos and embed them in our website. We just add the ID from google or youtube into the video item entry. I'd like to examine if we can make use of some of the functionalities in Plumi for our gallery (thanks for the notification). The code for our gallery should be made available so anyone interested please contact me directly. The next step is to offer both low bandwidth and high bandwidth versions of the videos as our target group is also located in bandwidth-challenged areas of the world. We are able to manage our portlets without any extensive technical knowledge of plone. We can include them site wide, or in specific folders, and we can insert smart folders into them. The portlet management functionality plus the use of CMF content panels has given us non-techies a lot of freedom to determine where we show what and how. It's liberating compared to the old situation! :> We're also using lingua plone. For those who don't know this, lingua plone allows you to translate each page directly and users can switch between languages yet stay in the same location on the website. Also a great improvement to the old situation where we had a separate plone instance/cms per language! One problem we're facing with this though is getting the portlets and content panels to switch languages as well. Some issues we are dealing with: In the old plone cms we were able to search and find html code. This was useful for site management purposes. For example if an external document or web page we linked to had moved, we could search for the old URL and update it. In the new search this isn't possible (yet). Anyone know or have tips how to make this possible? Is it as simple as changing some settings of the search or is it more complex? The use of resolveuid is new for us. It's a great functionality, but we need to adapt our old content to implement this (this is also where searching for HTML code would be useful). It also seems to malfunctioning somewhat. Images inserted with the internal linking functionality (resoulveuid) have the tendency to disappear after a certain amount of time. They show up fine in the kupu, but once saved, whoosh, gone. Sometimes it takes longer for them to disappear. I heard this might be related to Python Imaging Library or indexing of the images? At a presentation on plone 3.0 hosted by Goldmund, Wyldebeast and Wunderliebe I learned that reverse integrity will be available in plone 3.0, based on resolveuid, exciting! Although I'd like to take a 'breather' before upgrading again. :> As mentioned above, we use lingua plone, which is great for translating the content item being viewed, but the portlets don't switch languages. Composite pages with content panels are also challenging (I've been told) to change with a global language flag. It's being worked on although I'm not sure were we'll end up. We wanted a more industry standard plone instance than what we had, and these changes may be moving us away from this goal. When making large changes in a website, also changes in content location, one of the challenges is not to loose your visitors which enter your website via bookmarks or old links (we have alot of those). Initially the idea was to offer an "intelligent" 404 page not found which automatically did a search on the URL trying to be accessed to offer the visitor options/suggestions. The project suffered somewhat in the planning (as so often occurs) and in the end we needed to make painful prioritizations in order to go live before a certain date. Offering an intelligent 404 page not found result was one of the functionalities which was postponed. A shame, I hope our visitors forgive us. In the old website I was able to insert a command to redirect, in the properties field of an item I think it was. This is unavailable to me now. Anyone know if this is an add-on which can be implemented easily? That's it for now. I have another question but will post it separately. Sincerely, Nynke Ms. Nynke Kruiderink Officer Knowledge Sharing International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD) P.O. Box 11586, 2502 AN The Hague, The Netherlands Visitors: Raamweg 5, 2596 HL, The Hague, The Netherlands tel:+31 (0)70 311 7311 Fax:+31 (0)70 311 7322 www.iicd.org www.iconnect-online.org www.dgroups.org www.itrainonline.org People - ICT - Development _______________________________________________ NGO mailing list [email protected] http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
