Plone Overview

Introduction

These notes are partially for enhancing this Nepalstudies.org website and partially for possible relevance to other aspects of software development for Universal Communications. Also for a general approach to web development that is widely applicable and may be particularly useful in least developed countries.

Although Plone is central to these notes they are actually about an approach that can use software like repoze and deliverance to combine many other Zope, python and other components using the strengths of each.

ContentMirror

The contentmirror package supports synchronization of all changes to a plone site content to an RDBMS such as Postgresql via SQLalchemy. This could be useful to automatically maintain a a set of "static files" standard html web servers that could handle unlimited read only traffic loads - eg using scalable cloud computing such as googleappengine to cope with any surge. Would also provide full version control and possibilities of adding various sophistications.

Commercial support available from kapilt (objectrealms).

Avoid content types not based on Archetypes to reduce complications.

There are other Plone products that support dumping to static files, but would require regular complete dumps instead of supporting. continuous synchronization.

A good overview explaining other aspects is here.

SQLAlchemy

Bulk data is always better suited to an RDBMS. This should always be done via SQLalchemy, so as to easily switch between heavy duty Postgresql or lighter SQLite (or less likely other databases) and support simultaneous maintenance of complex database scheme and domain code in python with database schema versioning.

Geospatial Information Systems

There is a Plone based system for GIS support which should be checked out. More likely something more recent should be used based on GeoAlchemy to support either PostGIS or Spatialite.

Miscellaneous

PloneGetPaid supports generic payment processing.

There is a parliamentary and legislative information system, bugeni, with extensive features that integrate OpenOffice and Plone.

Indexing

There are ways to index content from multiple databases eg ore.xapian.

Some notes on python development environments.