Migrating your site to Plone: case studies highlighting different approaches
Have you been considering Plone/WebLion? Are you daunted by the idea of moving your entire website into a(nother) content management system? In this panel presentation, 4 Penn State developers share their approach to migrating their units' sites to Plone. Experiences range from big-bang makeovers of static sites to incremental migration from existing content management systems. A talk given at the 2008 Penn State Web Conference.
Presenters
All of us have been involved in setting up Plone sites and migrating non-Plone sites to Plone
What is Plone?
- Enterprise-level CMS
- Used by many .gov, .org, .edu sites
- Security & workflow: excellent, granular, flexible
- Technology-neutral (many platforms, databases)
- Open source (GPL)
- Extensible: add-on products, customize yourself
For more about Plone, visit http://plone.org. Licensing details are at http://plone.org/about/copyrights/license-faq/
Plone at Penn State
A large number of Penn State groups are already using Plone, or are in the process of moving their sites to it:
- Colleges (e.g., Smeal, Education)
- Departments (e.g., DAS, Meteorology)
- Institutes (e.g., Huck Institutes, SSRI)
- Campuses (e.g., Penn State Behrend)
- Admin units (e.g., Tech Transfer)
- Central support team: WebLion
Migrating to Plone: overview
- Case studies:
- starting points
- process
- timescales
- Advice: dos and don'ts
- skills / people
- process
- Contacts and Resources
Department of Dairy and Animal Science (DAS)
DAS: What I started with
- Existing CMS
- Sound architecture and design
- Standards-compliant code
- Up-to-date (and relatively error-free) content
- 1-Person Web shop
- BUT, with 25 content providers accustomed to using CMS
DAS: Whyever Plone?
- Required enterprise-level CMS
- Homegrown CMS == maintenance issues
- Plone community
- Open Source: Infinitely customizable
- Open Source: Price is right
- WebLion Hosting
DAS: How I did this
- WebLion
- Incremental migration ~ 3 months for 80 % of site
- Work in progress
- 2 CMS running parallel
DAS: Big results!
- Endless new possibilities : )
- Lots more functionality (that I didn't have to build)
- *Far* less maintenance
- Content providers lurrrrve plone
- I am no longer a lone gun
Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences
Huck Institutes: starting point
- Static site, table-based, inline styles
- Part-time webmaster posts all content = bottleneck
- Much content outdated & not written for web
- Architecture "evolved" -> hard to find info
Huck Institutes: why a CMS?
- Multi-use content: post once, use many x
- people
- events
- Distributed authoring:
- wide range specialized subjects
- large volume of material
- Dynamic; content varies with:
- time
- context: place, person, etc
Huck Institutes: why Plone?
- Granular security, customizable workflows
- review / signoff, intranet, extranet
- New web-based applications
- Standards / accessibility:
- Aids findability via search engines
- Design separate from content -> easier redesign
- Support:
- WebLion & other departments/colleges locally
- Wide community globally
Huck Institutes: process
- "Big bang", into Plone 2.5
- Rearchitect
- Redesign
- Revamp content: drop, add
- ~6 months for 100% migration
- After switch, incremental addition of new:
- Content
- Content providers
- Workflows
Huck Institutes: team
- Catherine: F/T 6 mo, then P/T
- Info architecture, design, content
- Usability testing (stakeholders, users)
- Build site: templates, CSS, products, etc
- Train content providers
- Mike: P/T
- Sysadmin: server setup, redirects, caching
- Development: new web application
- Strategy group & drivers: faculty + key staff
Huck Institutes: results
- Growing number of content providers
- Demand for new subsections
- Research centers
- Student review app worked well
- Considering move to Plone 3.1
IST: Solutions Institute
Solutions Institute: starting point
- Migrate College website to new CMS
- Focus of SI changed
- A lot invested in learning Plone
Solutions Institute: Plone for other projects
- Keep building skills - valuable tool
- Move Solutions site to Plone
- Faculty requests for collaborative portals
- ID requests for course content management
Solutions Institute: why Plone?
- Rapid deployment
- Good collaboration capabilities
- Strong community - PSU and way beyond
- Tools not available in ANGEL
- Can be public-facing
Solutions Institute: course content
- Experimenting with course management
- Course management - rosters, quizzes, drop boxes, email
- ANGEL works well
- Content management - the actual course content
- Plone works well
- Faculty member (content expert) can easily edit centrally located content
- May want to make content public-facing
Solutions Institute: process
- Build skills
- team of 2
- a lot of front-end work before offering this service
- Started small with low-risk sites
Research Institutes: SSRI/PRI
Research Institutes: starting point
- Researchers needed to distribute, collect and analyze data
- Large teams needed to keep track of protocols/procedures
- Teams included members outside of PSU
- Solutions included a mish-mash of cgi-scripting, straightup html, etc
- Push came from frustrated programming staff
Research Institutes: why plone?
- Search of CMS and PSU brought up the Weblion group
- Runs on linux, free and open-source
- Plays well with others
- Variety of 3rd-party products to use 'as-is' or modify
Research Institutes: process
- Phase 1 -- Getting our feet wet (2005)
- Developed for faculty interested in using 'the web'(1 content provider)
- Sys admin & programmer (2 developers) tracked progress in intranet Plone site
- Went live right away and got user feedback
- Phase 2 -- Overconfident?
- Added small, short lifespan sites
- Adopted new versions of Plone as released
- Experimented with many 3rd party products
- Phase 3 -- Ready for prime time (2006)
- First ongoing, public Plone site for data sharing. Visit us at http://sodapop.pop.psu.edu
- Existing public sites being converted or augmented with Plone
Research Institutes: what worked?
- Don't be a lone wolf, engage support from:
- faculty member
- key staff content providers
- system administrator
- programmer
- Tip: try starting with an intranet site to get these folks involved.
- Become a Weblion partner
Advice: the process
- Get buy-in, organizational support
- Approach migration sensibily
- Big Bang: High load, high risk - will age you before your time
- Incremental: Much better if you have the option
- Practice iterative improvement: Evaulate, usability test (in the manner of Agile Programming)
Advice: the process (cont'd)
- Understand that it never stops (this is a good thing)
- Understand managing content providers
- Support (in perpetuity)
- Train
- Retrain
- Reretrain...
- Invest time in learning, documenting, collaboration
- Tap the community: Don't go it alone!
Advice: skills required (planning, listening)
The ability to...
- Balance needs of internal stakeholders *and* primary users
- Develop sound, tested information architecture and page-level design
- Plone enables rapid prototyping for this!
Skills required (communication, research)
The ability to...
- Think and write for the web
- Plone's modular content: enter once, use many times, many ways
- Plone's editing environment: content in context
- Plone's workflow, versioning: aids editing, creates teachable moments
- Research and network: find and *share* resources, solutions
- WebLion and Plone communities
Skills required (programming)
The ability to...
- Take on a bit of programming
- Changing the look and feel; changing, adding functionality
- Mostly you can tweak existing code (rather than write completely new stuff)
- Learning Plone is a professional growth opportunity
Skills required (sysadmin)
The ability to...
- Install, upgrade Plone and Plone products
- Handle file and database backup and recovery procedures
- Set up proxying, redirects, optimization, load balancing…
- Monitor, troubleshoot the above
…Or, you can go with WebLion hosting
Contacts and Resources
- WebLion and Partners at Penn State
- weblion.psu.edu
- #weblion on irc.freenode.net
- Beginner and intermediate training
- Community Support: WebLion Developers Group, Zope and Python Users Groups
- Global Zope and Plone Community
