Plone conference 10-26-06: Morning sessions
10:30 Vive Le Plogs (Plone Blogs)
Donna Snow
Awesome! First slide shows a Penny Arcade cartoon. (PA Volume 2 is out now – go buy it.)
Lots of introductory What are blogs, why blog stuff. I really want to talk about what people are using in Plone as their Blog add on and the pro’s and cons. Myroslav mentioned Quills yesterday but said that it’s Zope based primarily and has trade offs with SimpleBlog. QG is still going to develop out SimpleBlog. I need to get a feature by feature comparison of these along side WordPress.
OK cool! Comparison of Plone Tools!
CoreBlog2 is the one Donna is using. Likes because it has an good archiving feature. CoreBlog2 has categories (wonder how this is different from SimpleBlog’s categories). Previously was a Zope product that is now compatible with Plone. She prefers the way that coreblog organizes entries to quills. CoreBlog2 works well for a single blogger who blogs often. It has comments moderation options.
Quills good for multiple bloggers in the organization. Quills is “meaty” and has a lot of stuff that are standard to blogging. In version 1.5. Quills has RSS2 support and you can use for podcasting now.
She used SimpleBlog two years ago. She said there’s no development going on which isn’t really true as we’ve been paying QuintaGroup to continue to add features and create associated products. So I mentioned that we were paying for development but it looks like the QG adjustments haven’t been uploaded yet as when she looked up SimpleBlog for the latest version it was quite old. The original developers told her they are no longer supporting it. I’ll have to ask Myroslav in more detail about the future of this product as I got the impression they will continue to work on it for other clients as well.
Plodcasting is a blog for uploading podcast to plone. She hasn’t used it.
She as a demo of a template she made that shows the results pages from the categories. It’s a really nice look. We should steal this concept it’s far superior to the default categories search results style display that we have.
Excellent question about when do you give your client Plone as a solution rather than a blogging only solution. She says that usually she suggests Plone for clients who want to add other content to their site beyond just blogging.
Question about remotely adding entries. She thinks Quills have this and if I remember correctly Myroslav was interested in doing this for SimpleBlog.
11:20 Creating and managing multilingual websites with LinguaPlone
Geir Baekholt
LinguaPlone is for managing multilingual content.
4 audiences
- Site manager/ content editor
- Site visitor
- Product developer
- Translators
Site manager – Easy to create and manage translations and work with and navigate various language versions of content.
Site visitor – Provide content in language the user understands and allow the user to override automatic choice
Product developers – Easy to integrate custom content types, hooks for writing workflows for managing translations
Enable multilingual support
from Products.Archetypes.public import *
Translators – LP has simple UI for translating content in small sites, hooks for making translation workflows
For larger deployments, XLIFF lets you translate site in XML – used for huge amounts of translations.
Recording of LinguaPlone in use – gives a tab for translation which gives a split screen and a language drop down. After you add a translation, a flag shows up in the corner and you can switch translations.
Best Practices for Multilingual sites
- Don’t mix languages. User interface and content in different languages are confusing to users.
- Use workflows to manage translations. LinguaPlone does not yet ship with example workflow – just provides hooks to create workflows. May be providing a real example in next couple of months
- Make someone responsible and create processes.
Flags as language icons work but are not technically correct and can be politically sensitive. LinguaPlone provides a fall back to a selection with words if you need it. This requires that the language list not be in English to work.
Original document is the canonical version so if you update that one you can have a workflow that tags the translations as “tainted” until they are updated as well.
You can share fields across translations – dates, numbers, locations, names s when you update canonical it updates all. languageIndependent = True
Search results on return results in the current language and results that have been marked as language neutral. You can override catalog filer to get results in multiple language Language=['en', 'de', 'no']
Plone 2.1 has automatic id-from-title generation and gives pretty, multilingual URLs.
Getting right language to users. LinguaPlone looks for:
- Language codes in URL
- http cookie for override
- browser language
- default fallback
Roadmap – kill bugs (there aren’t many bugs), minor improvement, Zope3 improvements allowing significantly streamlined code.
Question – how well does LinguaPlone deal with non-ascii characters? Since Plone works great with UTF-8 it is no problems. (Plone is moving to unicode which will work well also.)
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OK no time to review this for grammar and spelling so sorry for any chaos.
