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Final stages of commodity CMS work

Project ID: 
106
Current stage: 
Manager: 
What: 

Description: Though we now have a working commodity CMS based on Zope/PLone in service, there are still some aspects of the service to be finalised.

Deliverables: At a minimum:

  • User orientated documentation
  • Better skinning in line with University guidlines - being done as part of project 93
  • better lcfg integration and resource driven creation of webs
  • better integration with Cosign
  • plan to cater for running of multiple wcms servers
Why: 

Customer: Informatics staff

Case statement: This work is needed to progress the commodity CMS to the status of a full service. Currently there is still a bit of manual work required when setting up a new Plone site, and the current integration isn't as complete as it might.

When: 

Status: Awaiting decision on whether some or all of the loose ends need to be done to achieve signoff.

Timescales:

  • 4 weeks producing LCFG header
  • 4 weeks producing initial component as outlined in plan
  • 4 weeks investigating Plone API and possible extensions to component
  • Time spent investigating comp't depends on outcome of previous item

Priority:

Time:

How: 

Proposal:

Resources: Knowledge of Zope/PLone

Plan: Much of the effort involved in setting up a Zope/Plone site is handled by other parts of the LCFG setup eg PLone is frontended by Apache whic needs to be configured via the apacheconf component and the Zope/Plone rpms need to be installed (this doesn't happen by default) via updaterpms. A suitable header file will be created to take care of this.

Initially a simple component will be written which deals with stopping and starting plone and handles the creation of multiple plone instances. Once this is complete, we will look at extending the component to handle creating and managaging individual website. This is a considerably harder undertaking which will require extending our knowledge of the internal Plone API. It shoudl therefore be regarded as the final (and possibly optional) stage of the project.

Other: 

Dependencies:

Risks:

Milestones

Proposed date Achieved date Name Description
2010-07-16 2010-03-01 produce header Produce the LCFG header file for Zope/Plone servers
New dice/options/plone-wcms-server.h header and live equiv.
2010-07-16 2010-04-01 initial compone Produce the initial version of the PLone component.
Created a simple 'zope' component, but not a plone one as Plone is really just a configured zope.
2010-07-16 2010-04-01 Investigate API investigate Plone API and decide on practicality of bringing further features under LCFG control.
This has not been done. It was felt it was not worth it until we've made a decision on Drupal.
2010-07-23 2010-03-19 user docs Produce user orientated documentation.
Basics done at http://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/systems/web/plone-user.html and linked to from the web pages.
2010-08-25 2010-08-01 signoff Produce final report and publicise for final sign off. See https://wiki.inf.ed.ac.uk/DICE/FinalProjectReport-106 existing catalog entry also updated slightly.