GSoC/GCI Archive
Google Summer of Code 2009

Plone Foundation

Web Page: http://socghop.appspot.com/document/show/org/google/gsoc2009/plone/ideas

Mailing List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/plone-users

The Plone Foundation exists to promote Plone, an open source Content Management System based on Zope 2. Plone has existed for almost 10 years, and was started by Alexander Limi, Alan Runyan and Vidar Andersen. The community has had an annual conference since 2003 which has taken place in New Orleans, Vienna (twice), Seattle, Naples and Washington DC. Over 350 people are expected at the next conference in Budapest. Over 300 companies specialise in Plone development and users include NASA, the CIA, the Brazillian Government, Akamai and Oxfam.

Projects

  • APP Project Implementing the Atom Publishing Protocol for use in maintaining content involves defining web page material in a way that Atom can understand (defining workspaces, collections, and child content) and parsing an Atom xml request in order to modify and change content.
  • Atom Publishing Protocol (APP) The plan is to use the web services API I've developed (wsapi4plone) as the first step to building support for the other web service standards, including APP. I envision an APP solution as a web services gateway interface (WSGI) middleware application that uses XML-RPC to communicate with the Plone site.
  • Commenting in Plone It is generally accepted that Plone's support for commenting is not quite as strong as we'd like it to be. There are several add-on products out there to try to rectify this, but they are basically wholesale replacements, with a new API, that do not use the existing services we have in Plone. The motivation is to provide easy to adjustable comments. Additionally to provide the optional possibility to re-use the existing framework for third party products. A list of features which are needed to make commenting work include moderation, confirmation, captcha support, spam protection, mass editing screens, configurable commenting forms, extensibility, and a local configuration.
  • Improve Large Plone folder user experience and scalability I am proposing tackling the usability and scalability of “large folders” (folder with many items within) in Plone in such a way that compliments existing community efforts. Areas of focus would include a dashboard UI and a faceted navigation structure as an alternative to folder_contents, and improvements to the scalability of FTP folder listings of large folders.
  • Proposal for a pluggable architecture for ontologies in Plone While Plone has a unique combination of pluggable extensibility & easy custom content type creation; it falls short in its ability to seamlessly interoperate with the semantic web. Conversely, the RDF framework while powerful, is difficult to use even by data architects.This project proposes to begin the process of making RDF a pluggable component of Plone that users can leverage to import/export ontologies, enrich their content with ontological classes/relationships, & eventually reason over it