I want to talk about some categorisation and classification options in Plone, next to the folder structure.

Faceted navigation: drill down on 'facets' when you search for items. It was popularized by online shopping. Facets in Plone for developers is: whatever is in the ZCatalog, and for users: what you can search on in Collections. Gold standard is eea.facetednavigation, developed for the European Environment Agency. Examples: EEA, and on two sites by Zest: Vaquums and Minaraad, where it replaces the standard search.

collective.collectionfilter is a much leaner, meaner, but also more limited version of faceted navigation. Demo with standard Plone News Items with some tags (also known as categories, also known as Subject). Add a Collection that filters on News Items. Now add collection filter portlets.

eea.facetednavigation takes over your complete page. In an action you enable or disable it.

Now a demo of collectionfilter in SGBP, a documentation website for water management planning in Belgium/Flanders. The customer wanted to take some graphs and compare them. We did that with collectionfilter and collective.classifiers. With the last one we added structured categories: one for water basins and one for parameters of the graphs. Now we use collectionfilter to query a parameter and show the graphs for all water basins.

You can adapt several things in the collectionfilter UI, for example change how search options are displayed. This is documented, but took me a while to get right.

Collectionfilter also works with Mosaic, because the portlets are also mapped to tiles.

Here are the slides.

I am a software architect at University of Jyväskylä. I have been using Plone since 2004 and GatsbyJS since 2018. The university wanted one student information management system to rule them all, but... every organisation shall do their own integrations, using granular REST API with deep JSON responses. And there should be branded study guides, which we crafted with GatsbyJS. But this was not enough for the Open University part. They really needed a CMS.

We use Plone 5.2, Volto, GatsbyJS, and have 6000 html pages, times two languages, out of which 760 are Volto pages. With Plone we could extend content types without needing to do any coding, in the content types field editor. In volto we added auto-complete widgets with custom vocabularies. On the GatsbyJs side, we query the connected pages with GraphQL. We render Volto layouts with React components, rendering individual blocks.

Why did we choose GatsbyJs? It is a ReactJS-based site generator. Being static, it is very fast. You can use multiple sources as input, using a plugin architecture. Data lookup is done with GraphQL. It is easy to get started, with comprehensive documentation.

I mentored two Google Summer of Code projects for the gatsby-source-plone plugin. It supports default types and most TTW types, also Volto blocks. You can do incremental updates by modification date, so it is really fast.

Not everything is easy. The full "GatsbyJs experience" requires practice. You want to replace inline images and links with GatsbyJs images and links, replace file links with direct downloads.

Using @plone/volto as dependency to render blocks seemed like a good idea, but it required webpack overrides to be impartable, and could not be used for images and links.

The ugly parts of GatsbyJs:

• The GraphQL source plugin cannot cache.
• The build may take hours, and gigabytes of memory.
• The build result in readonly.
• For me it is hard to follow GatsbyJs development, especially individual plugins, because they use a monorepo.

Editors can work on the site during the day, and then wee rebuild the result during the night

Here are the slides.

With some other people I have created pendect.com. The idea was to build a TL;DR (Too Long, Did not Read) platform. Create short cards, linking to long articles. Cards are submitted by our community (Pentributors). Also: for every card, we plant a tree.

Technical requirements:

• Collaborative workflow
• Permission control, who can do what, where and when
• Metadata, categorization
• We are a startup, so we need SEO.
• Open source

We decided for Plone as Content Management System. It has most features out of the box. I know Plone of course. But I considered building a simple API on top of Pyramid. But with Plone we could go to market immediately. It has a proven record with news portals, and also a friendly community with smart people.

We use DBpedia for Metadata and categorization. This works on a Wikipedia dataset. They have a tool Spotlight to detect entities in texts. We use a Sparql connection to DBpedia to query for more information.

We use a bit of everything else: Cloudflare, nginx, varnish, HAProxy, Ansible, Thumbor, Sentry, Mailhun, IFTTT, Zapier, Gravatar. We already survived twelve different surges in traffic from Reddit. We have tens of thousands of users. We use Thumbor for image scales. Actually easy to integrate in Plone.

Our toolset and add-ons:

• We have development speed thanks to some friends, like Python 3 with F-strings, Type hints (I put them in from the start, helping me to think about my code), data classes (better than returning dictionaries everywhere). Also: black, isort, flake8, PyCharm.
• We do not use many Plone add-ons: collective.z3cform.datagridfield for table-like content, collective.sentry to talk with Sentry, contentrules.slack to send messages to Slack, souper.plone to store many small data records/

Content types:

• Default folders, documents, images, collections
• Category: collection behavior with sub-objects
• Card: similar to news item, but more categories

Adapting Plone:

• Browser views: dashboard became "My Feed", Author page became the profile
• Some content rules

New features:

• Aggregator pages for tags, people, locations, organizations.
• Development with souper.plone: you can follow categories, tags, people, locations, organizations, and Pentributors

Sync to archive.org. Takes too long, so this needed to be asynchronous. Also other external services, like translating.

Lessons learned:

• Always create upgrade steps. Be aware of existing registry configurations: use purge=false.
• Plone training materials are the de factory documentation for Plone.
• I hate the current resource registries.
• Plone lacks a simple and working async/delayed solution.
• Webp images are not for all. Be careful with caching them.

Future:

• Translation and auto summary to all Pentributors.
• Card threads, similar to Twitter threads, using content relations.
• Use ElasticSearch.
• Move to RelStorage.
• Plone as headless CMS, with Volto and mobile applications
• Move away from the default user folder, it is getting slower already.

Here are the slides.

A talk about the essence of Plone. What does Plone mean for somebody?

Plone is an awesome combination of vision, software and community. But what defines Plone, what is the essence, and how does it change over time.

At the Plone Conference 2019 I had the feeling of realizing why we sometimes speak of very different things and why the Plone of today is not the Plone we know from the years.

This talk wants to summarize this feeling of realizing, explain why we may have a problem of misconception. It is a mix of technological questions, the overall vision, branding and community topics in depth.

Plone is a software, an api, a community, a foundation. Plone core is an API, but there are more than one: plone.api, plone.restapi, the Plone UI, none is complete. Every Plone company has a different point of view of what Plone is or should be.

Plone is a mature open source Python CMS. As said earlier today, implementations change, but values do not. We want to simplify Plone.

What is or was Plone for me? The CMS product, the framework/toolkit, the vision, the community, the foundation. Plone is an umbrella for a lot of frameworks.

Anish Kapoor: "All ideas grow out of other ideas."

Plone was the User Interface that gave users the power of Zope and CMF. It is a layered system. Layers hide complexity, make complex things easier, you have a defined API between the layers. It should be possible to switch out one layer for another. For  example we switched out the Archetypes layer for the Dexterity layer.

We are the Plone community, not the Zope community. Values and ideas are more important to us than technology.

Problem for API: there are always undocumented features without API definition.

At Plone conference 2013, Paul Everitt showed a lesson from Zope 3: rename the beast. Zope 3 was very different from Zope 2, so it should have been renamed.

The vision lives on. Volto is the future of Plone UI. It is the essence of the Plone vision.

I want to thank all the active Plone community members.

The Plone Foundation has a mission: protect and promote Plone. Lots of decision making, but no coding.

Wishes for the future:

• Endorse Volto, the Plone vision of simplifying CMS work
• Attract new developers, keep the community vital
• There is overlap with the Pyramid and Pylons family, we could absorb them.
• Stay commented and learn from each other. There are no rock stars, everyone started small and is still learning from each other.

Most important milestone for Volto this year: we went from a small number of people to a critical mass of developers who work on Volto.

Plone has evolved from a product to a contract. Implementations may change, but values do not. Tiberiu Ichim: "Through the freedom that they provide,Volto blocks are a foundation for innovation that enables Plone to step in line with the latest state of the art for web development."

Volto is not only UI and UX for Plone, but it is a framework. We have design principles, like approachability, do not overengineer things, frontend and backend are meant to be decoupled, use semantic versioning.

Where are we in Volto today? 203 releases, 58 contributors, closed 1253 pull requests, 3024 commits. In which areas is Plone 6 better than Plone 5 today? Blocks engine, authoring experience, we have a schema and layout editor, the listing block, direct access to the full JavaScript and React ecosystem, performance. Bonus: Volto still works with Plone 4 as API backend. So if a customer is not ready to jump to Plone 5 or 6, you can give them a new UI on top of Plone 4. Every last Friday of the month we have the Volto Early Adopters Meeting. It is open for everyone interested.

We call Volto 4.0.0, from March 2020, the maturity release. And in nine months we went to Volto 10. We have huge improvements in extensibility. A new generator based on Yeoman will replace create-volto-app.

• There is a new add-on architecture, using the mrs.developer tool.
• API Block Transforms are great. You can serialize and deserialize input and output. We use this for example to handle resolveuid links.
• Lazy loading
• You can force a layout in the blocks editor, so Editors have to stick to this layout.
• You can copy and paste blocks now, even on a different page in a different window.
• Listing blocks: we talk about adding support for variations, removal of the listing container object from the results.

Future:

• We want to bring back slots in Volto, a mix between viewlets and portlets, evolution of the Plone and Mosaic tiles concept.
• Adoption of the Slate editor.
• Albert Casado worked in UI improvements for us.