Magic Web Fairies

Jeff treated me to a lovely lunch at an Indian restaurant. It was fun to have lunch with someone who could related to my whining about security flaws in PHPNuke and lack of SEO in SMF forum. Jeff had some problems with Multimedia (video specifically) and Plone himself so had great sympathy over our ATAudio woes which lead to the ditching of that product on TalkBMC.

1:30 Case Studies: Plone for education

This is a panel sessions of 5 guys from different universities talking about how they used Plone to solve needs specific to education. After 5 years doing Web development for UF this is bringing back a lot of memories. One of the guys just mentioned something that hasn’t changed – “IT assumes hey if you work for a university you must be smart” and hands you a folder and FTP to use for collaboration. And that’s it. lol. Budget constrains are still the same.

Ah another reminder from one of the panel members about over customizing Plone and getting stuck on 2.0.5. I was just talking about that with Jeff over lunch around that problem with DBAzine and my concerns about over customizing Plone.

2:20 Case Studies: Plone for large enterprise

Munwar Shariff

Another panel – Jeff Watts from NI is on it and I see Alan from Enfold Systems.

Jeff’s story about selling Plone inside NI is pretty amazing (ie funny if you’ve worked for a big corporation). Quite a bit different from us since we didn’t sell Plone so much as sell Blogging/Podcasting … “oh and by the way they’ll be in Plone.” We also flew under the corporate radar quite a bit since we had already transfered the HTML-based DBAzine to Plone. Something we could do because DBAzine was already hosted outside of corporate IT and we didn’t have to create any type of ROI proposal to make any changes to it.

Munwar is speaking about selling Plone to enterprises by selling the value of plone not the technology of plone. He worked on a project where plone scaled to millions of users. 15 million in fact. I’m a bit in shock over that and would like to hear more.

They just gave away an award for something around Plone implementation. I’m not sure what they’re talking about with this. But the winner got an iPod nano which is very cool.

3:30

Talking a break – there aren’t any sessions I feel I need to attend and I need to catch up on email.

4:20 Plone and Accessibility: A case study

Aaron VanDerlip

Aaron used out of the box plone initially in order not reduce existing accessibility of Plone with modifications. Migrated the site recently from 2.0.5 to 2.5 – this seems to be a running theme at the conference. So much content has been added to the site (500-600 articles) that the nav structure has to be redone. This is really sounding familiar.

He makes an interesting point about taking CMS claims of accessibility at face value without doing the manual testing that is really required to prove actual accessibility. So Aaron did a basic audit of CMF templates and says they are compliant from a code standpoint. (Bonus references to logical meaning of headers and how it they have been implemented in the default plone templates.) If you view a default plone page without the styles you can see a very well optimized display for screen readers which will skip them to links or skip them to content. Nice. Forms in the UI have the Section 508 compliant labels. So if you heavily modify and add form fields you have to remember to add these labels.

CSS pointers

display: none removes element entirely

view: hidden removes from browser display but not from screen reader

Using Kupu seems to give better accessibility than using Epoz. Not really a surprise. Looks like Kupu forces use of alt tags which is definitely a bonus.

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OK that’s it for the talks I’m going to today. I’m going to go and decide if there are any birds of a feather sessions I need to attend or if food/beer are calling instead.