Hi all, I'm pleased to announce Legal Assistance for Seniors' new Plone 2.5.3 based website: http://www.lashicap.org. It replaces a small Frontpage "brochure" type site. We developed it mostly in-house with some assistance from Dan Thomas at OIS Online. I thought I'd share some of my experiences learning and integrating Plone.
We developed this site nearly exactly coinciding with the Plone 2.5 release cycle. We began using Plone as an intranet site with the 2.1 release and decided to develop our external site with Plone also right before Plone 2.5.0 was released. And now we've finished within a few days of Plone 3.0. Development took such a long time because I was learning Plone on the fly, developing the website is a small part of my job at Legal Assistance for Seniors, and I used Dan primarily as a resource when I got stuck on a problem. If I was starting now, with all I have learned, this site would have taken a quarter of the time! Description of the site: Combination external and intranet site. Staff login with their Active Directory credentials to view intranet content. Staff editors are responsible for different sections and can add and edit pages on their own. Primary goal of this new site was (1) to more effectively engage our online audience by providing more ways to "hook" them – eNewsletter, online donations, online event registration, requesting service online. (2) make the website more part of staff's everyday workflow by combining the intranet and external websites. And (3) keep content up to date by delegating responsibility from "the web guy" to development, any staff who want to write news items, and "the web guy." External ASP providers: Groundspring for online donations, VerticalResponse for eNewsletters, RegOnline for online event registration and management, Salesforce as a CRM and donor database. We're using the following products: CMFContentPanels, EasyBlog, PloneFormGen, PloneLDAP Connector, Placeful Workflow, PloneExFile, RedirectionTool, AnalyticsforPlone, DIYPloneStyle. What works well: PloneFormGen – what an amazing product. It took some training for our staff editors to understand, but now they are all able to edit and add their own forms on the website. We haven't done anything too fancy with this product yet, but will be exploring an integration with Salesforce in the future. Full text indexing with PloneExFile - very important for the intranet portion of the site. We use it to index uploaded Word, Excel and PDF files. Redirection tool – This is a great tool to ensure that other websites linking inside our site do not get 404 errors, we simply redirect all pages of our old Frontpage site to the new location in Plone. Really cool. Community Education Presentation content type – copy of Event with customized page template. This content type pulls the body of 'related items' into the view to create a hybrid view between the Document that describes the presentation and this particular instance of the presentation being given. http://www.lashicap.org/services/community-education-presentations/scheduled-presentations Elements we struggled with: Active Directory LDAP - groups and users are managed in AD. Plone roles mapped to AD groups works seamlessly. Getting AD working well was a challenge, we never did get it working completely correctly until the PloneLDAP product was released. Works great now though. Page compositing with CMFContentPanels is very powerful, but the UI is horrible. I am the only person on staff who really understands how to use ContentPanels. I really like that ability to create zpt macros to create new views of content items, but haven't figured out how to register these with ContentPanels so the view is pickable in the UI. Instead, one must navigate to the content item, select zpt macro, and type in the correct path to the zpt view. Adding straight html or flash from Groundspring, Vertical Response, or RegOnline is difficult. Kupu filters out necessary tags. I can add plain text portlets and Content Panels, but sometimes I really want to add html or flash content from an external website to a Page, Event, or other Kupu based content item. I haven't totally figured this out yet. Issues for the future: Integration with SQL db – pull Community Education Presentations straight from our MS SQL database to eliminate double data entry. Single Sign On with Active Directory credentials. LinguaPlone and multiple languages Salesforce integration, especially with PloneFormGen Google Maps mashup with Community Education Presentation content type. Migration to Plone 3 – probably wait for 3.5, I'm too tired now! ContentPanels to Collage or other compositing solution EasyBlog – heavily customized Congratulations for making it this far! I've really enjoyed building this site and have learned a ton. Though I haven't posted too often to this group, it has been an invaluable resource along with Plone-Users. Kai Harris Operations Manager Legal Assistance for Seniors www.lashicap.org
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