To infinity and Beyond with Plone 5!

To Infinity and Beyond with Plone 5!
Rikupekka Oksanen
rioksane@jyu.fi

2017
In this presentation I will try to peek into our university’s
changing future - what challenges we will face with website
renewal and how we’re going to overcome
them using Plone 5.

Who
Rikupekka Oksanen
rioksane@jyu.fi
Twitter: @rikupekka
Working at University of Jyväskylä (JYU), Finland
● Web developer (HTML/CSS) 1996 ->
● Plone-user/site builder/support/project manager since 2004
● Not a programmer, but a TTW developer/integrator
● Team lead of 10 developers (Python, Java, Shiny modern JS)

In Ploneconf 2014-2015
You might remember me from highlighting different Plone
cases at JYU:
● www.jyu.fi
● Moniviestin
● Koppa
● Forms
● Plomino
● Humantech
https://vimeo.com/110364529 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X4x53ZO-jY0

This year
Not looking back,
but to the future!

“The Only Thing That Is Constant Is Change -”
― Heraclitus

1. New organizational structure 1.1.2017
2. New brand and new theme
3. New intranet
4. New search engine
5. And Plone 5 everywhere
In the year 2017 at JYU - changes

University of Jyväskylä, Finland
“A significant multi-discipline research university and an
expert in education”
http://esittely.jyu.fi/en

Jyväskylä
https://www.buzzfeed.com/patricksmith/alternative-maps-of-europe

Plone at JYU
● Plone since 2004
● Starting with Plone 2.05, up to 2.1, 2.5, 3.0, then 4.0
alpha, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3 and now 5.0
http://tech.blog.jyu.fi/2016/04/from-plone-2-3-or-4-to-plone-5.html
● Websites and applications/services on top of Plone
● https://plone.com/success-stories/university-of-jyvaskyla-finland

Plone affects everyone!
● Students
● Staff
● External users
● 15 000 students
(+ adult education
students =
40 000 students)
● 2 600 staff members

Statistics of www.jyu.fi - main website
● Pageviews 2 000 000/month
● Visitors 240 000/month
● Content: approx 100 000 pages, portals, forms.
● Another 100 000 of files and images.
● Hundreds of content editors all around the university

Statistics of www.jyu.fi
Not making this up!

Fragmentation of sites (lately more of that)
● Some 20-30 sites that form www.jyu.fi
○ Main website
○ 5 faculty sites
○ Multiple departmental sites
○ Separate institute sites
● New site for applicants and students (2016, Plone)
http://opiskelu.jyu.fi/en
● New site for JYU information (2016, static)
http://esittely.jyu.fi/
●

Information site (static html)

About Plone 4.3 and current theme
● Pretty stable situation for the last couple of years at the main site and
departmental sites
● People know what they get
● Theme is tweaked and solid
● But...

Organizational changes
● 7 faculties -> 6 faculties
● Combining faculties and departments
● Combining departments inside a faculty
● Moving departments under another (new) faculty

Challenges for project management and support
● Organizational changes -> many stakeholders, different
ability to manage content, lots of uncertainty
● New theme -> communication, expectations
● Plone 5 -> communication, expectations
● Guides + Training/coaching content editors -> new guides
in finnish, training sessions
● Intranet project -> Process changes needed
● Certain deadlines -> Well that’s a good thing actually

Challenges for content editors/staff
● Organizational changes - “Where do I work next year?”
● New theme - “Where is my email?”
● Plone 5 - “You said it was gonna be easy!”
● Search: Getting rid of obsolete content - “My prreciousss!”
● Keeping/making search shine with good content - “My
content is just fine!”
● Intranet project - “Where is my email?”

Challenges for students
● Organizational changes - “What do I eat today?”
● New theme - “Cool! But where is my email-link?”
● Plone 5 - “zzzzz”
● Search - “lunch today”
● Keeping/making search shine with good content - ”Where
is my email-link?”
● Intranet project - ”Where is my email-link?”

Challenge for developers
● Organizational changes -> new sites, moving data,
migrations
● New theme -> From html to Diazo, lots of tweaking, new
content types needed
● Plone 5 -> Does it do everything Plone 4.3 did?
● Migrations -> Keeping everything still working
● Intranet project -> New plone LDAP, new content types
Plone 5 migration etc.
● Search -> new search engine integration?

Plone 5!
● Out-of-the-box-features are plenty
● Barceloneta theme and Diazo
● Dexterity content types
● Mosaic layout
● Accessibility improvements
● Integrating JS libraries easier

● Nobody questioned the choice of CMS platform
○ Plone has been working well since 2004
○ The cost of changing the whole ecosystem might be
pretty high
-> re-training the staff members who manage content
-> migrating from one CMS to another?
-> 2017 comes pretty soon
● We could use Plone 4.3 with new theme and organization,
but what’s the point?
On selecting Plone(5) as the platform

● October 2016
○ Plone 5 migrations
■ Help center migration and others
○ New Plone 5 sites
● November 2016
○ New theme: portals, content page
○ More migrations
○ Intranet-site to plone 5
○ Content editors working on content
● December 2016
○ Theme to production ready for main website
Roadmap 2016-2017

● January 2017
○ Release the new main website
○ Release the two new faculties
○ Release intranet
● Spring 2017
○ Migrate and release departments
○ Tweak everything
● Summer 2017
○ Enjoy!
(Optimistic) Roadmap 2016-2017

● Mostly from Plone 4.3 to Plone 5
○ Some 4.1 and 4.2 -sites
● Migrate most content, perhaps not all
● We’d like to go full dexterity…
○ But there are like 1500 Plone Form Gen forms
■ Can those be replaced with Easy.Form or similar?
○ Also lots of Portalviews
Migrations needed

● Help Center - guides for students and staff
● Portalview - portals
● TUTKA-page - collects data from our research data system
● Studyguide - shows course information from our study data system
● Dynapage - page with carousel and dynamic lists
● Customized news items and events
● Collective roster - personnel list and views
● Form folder - forms
● Lingua Plone - translations
Migrations needed, more custom stuff

● Help Center → Folders and pages and couple of views
● TUTKA-page → already dexterity, add new theme
● Studyguide → already dexterity, add new theme
● Dynapage → replace with mosaic
● Customized news items and events → already dexterity, add new
theme
● Collective roster → already dexterity, add new theme
● Form folder → Keep as it is (archetype)
● Lingua Plone → Plone.app.multilingual
Migrations needed, solutions

Portalview contains e.g. the following features:
● Possibility to compose a customised layout
(based on folders and other Plone content)
● Image/text/video/page carousel (Carousels are evil)
● Accordions and Tabs
● Dropdown menu with links
● Unique ID:s on every box/element
● Custom CSS = power! (also problems)
Tricky? Replacing Portalview with Mosaic

Tabs
Carousel
Boxes
Dropdown
Accordion
Custom CSS

● Mosaic: No unique ID:s on different tiles - makes it harder to
create customized CSS for certain tiles?
● Mosaic: No custom CSS TTW for content editor
● Portalview = archetype
● http://tech.blog.jyu.fi/2016/07/creating-flexible-and-responsive-tile.html
Solutions
● OK, just serve Portalviews as they are at Plone 5 at first
● Introduce Mosaic and add some features if needed
Mosaic & Portalview

● Transmogrifier
● Own blueprints and pipelines
● Ask @datakurre for more :)
Technical details about migration

Theming
● Current theme from around 2011
○ “Beautiful, clear theme, stained with content”
○ Round corners, shadows are so 2010
○ Responsive
○ Quite coherently used in most sites at jyu.fi until 2016

Changing the theme - challenges
● In 2017 there are 5 different JYU themes around
○ Current 4.3 theme
○ Basic theme for Plone 5 (resembles the old theme)
○ Student-site theme (from 2016)
○ JY Introduction site theme (from 2016)
○ New brand Plone 5 theme

Plone 5 with
current JYU theme
- logo
- colors
- Simple!

New theme 2017
● Based on the new refreshed brand “JYUnity”
● Mobile first
● Especially for (young and hip) external audience :)
● Large images, videos, white space and social media
● Should be modern and clearly different from before
● “If no-one gets angry, nothing changes.”

● Huge images
● Duotone images
● Videos
● Clean menu
● Less links in one
screen

New theme - challenges
● Creating the theme on Plone
● Box-layout for portals
○ How rigid/flexible it should be to edit this?
○ How easy to edit content?
● Heavy emphasis on images in portals
○ Needs good quality images
● Responsive: desktop, tablet, mobile
○ Current theme is very responsive - keep the level
● Accessibility with the new popup navigation?

New theme - solutions
● From HTML to Plone → Diazo
● Box-layout
○ Mosaic-layout
○ Can be copied as a template
● Image Duotone effect stabilizes image differences
○ Duotone JS - easier to add JS libraries to Plone 5
● Responsive:
○ Built on responsive Barceloneta theme in Plone 5

New theme - solutions
● Diazo theming
○ http://docs.plone.org/external/diazo/docs/
○ More info on Diazo: check out other presentations here :)
● Prototyping and quick tweaking TTW
○ http://datakurre.pandala.org/2016/10/on-building-fat-them
es-for-plone.html
● Separate theme and Plone more efficiently
● Accessibility through Plone 5

Intranet
● Intranet =
○ Internal news and events
○ Useful links for staff
○ Internal guides
○ Viewing restricted by IP area or permissions
○ Dedicated (good) search

Current intranets at JYU
● One portal for all staff in Plone
● Departmental intranets in Plone here and there
...or no departmental intranets or anything
● IP-restriction for viewing (not a very good idea)

New intranet
● New intranet in 01/2017 with Plone 5
● Portal for all staff + new departmental intranets
● All internal guides moved here - better separation of public
and internal content
● New way to publishg news items and events across public
and internal sites
● New Plone LDAP - should be fast even with many large
AD groups
● Dedicated Plone search

Search - problems
- I can’t find anything.
- OK, tell us what you want to find?
- Anything!
● Problems with the huge amount of content, and copies of the same
content is repeated in many sites
● Tip 1: “Use clear titles, descriptions and categories”
-> Use unclear titles, no descriptions and no categories
● Tip 2: “Delete old unused pages”
->Keep every unused old page public and make copies of them (just
in case!)

Search - solutions
● Right now: Google Search Appliance (GSA)
○ Licence expires next year
○ Plone search in some sites
○ GSA doesn’t index intranet content (IP restricted)
● 2017:
○ Separated intranet with Plone internal search -
○ New search engine for public content
○ Keep educating content editors
○ Go through Analytics data and refine search results
● Plone is very search engine friendly!

This is what happens when I
demo Plone 5 to our users:

Feedback about Plone 5
● After people have actually used it
● People = 4 people (other than me :)

Feedback about Plone 5 - User 1
1. Your technical background
Web-developer, ~fullstack
2. Have you used Plone or other CMS’s before?
Yes: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla and Hubspot.
3. First impressions on Plone 5
Compared to previous version, this is modern. Some glitches might be
there, but debugging is easy and new features come swiftly.

4. Managing page structure, creating a site.
It is fairly easy to create structure for a site. Managing the navigation
might be difficult for a non-techie.
5. Creating pages: texts, images, tables etc.
Mosaic is a huge improvement. Texts and images work fairly well. Table
styles could be better. Creating tables is easy, though.

fluent user of browsers and some HTML
Yes: Plone 4.3
Quite ok.

The term portlet is confusing when trying to manage footer. Also
confusing is the ability to create news and events in everywhere (instead
of the dedicated folders):
Pretty easy. Creating more defined layouts might be troublesome when
Plone deletes customised styles from content [Note: a site without Mosaic]

fluent user of browsers and some HTML
Yes: Plone 3, Blogger, Joomla etc.
Looking good!

I like how I can manipulate the order of content easily and decide what is
show in the navigation.
Works well. When linking content the search works well. I miss full screen
option on the editor’s HTML-view (which I use quite a lot). Missing the
undo-option though.

I mostly use one browser and office applications
Wordpress and Episerver
Hmm, pretty confusing

Basically not hard to manage content.
Compared to e.g. Episerver editing content feels clumsy. You can also
create different types of pages more easily, and create custom layouts,
like putting two text blocks and an image side by side, making content
look more interesting.
[Note: no Mosaic on this site]

Feedback about Plone 5 - all users
6. General comments
The new toolbar is a huge improvement
I like the new toolbar.
In general Plone 5 feels much more modern when compared to the previous (4.3)
version. I think upgrading is worth the work it requires with editing the old content.
I have a lot of Wordpress experience... compared to that Plone 5 feels lacking.
Perhaps the use case is different, so comparing them might not be fair. Lots of
small bugs and need for tweaking. When editing content, Mosaic is good and
works well.

To infinity and Beyond with Plone 5!

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