PLOG 2011 slides by Bruno Ripa and Simone Deponti

1. MAD: using Plone to supervise production processes
Bruno Ripa
Simone Deponti

2. Life as they know it
A joyful Rubbish dump
Pretty and ‘easy’ people working at it

3. For a single “noble” objective

4. Working as intended (tm)

5. HOW ?
Huge excel files feeding
No data centralization
No access control
No:
roles
permissions
<insert_whatever>

6. Suddenly they saw the light
Plone 2.5
Archetypes
Document conversion to PDF
GIS interface

7. “Their” Nirvana
•Workflow usage
•Centralization
•Search capabilities (well yeah, not
by diving into win folders...)
•No more yelling at MS Office
versions
•No more
where_da_hell_is_the_last_version
_of_that_damn_file_i_should_use_t
(*) intended audience: a very nerd one
oday_to_pass_the_verification_to_g
et_the_last_quality_certification
sessions.

8. ...BUT...let’s look into it:
•unmature technology (postgis ? lol)
•hard integration session (primagis ? gdal and the such)
•too much design constraints (pdf conversion sloooow)
•she was not yet famous...oh wait...

9. In details
•Huge AT schema describing documents
•Resistance to adhere to workflows logic (why
don’t you change that damn state when you’re
done ?)
•GIS: basically a vanity feature, but fantastic for the
customer
•PDF creation for some docs took minutes (yes,
MINUTES - ask OpenOffice)
•Catalog madness
•Catalog madness, little more
•Did i say “catalog madness” ?

10. A new era was coming...
New tools were ready to rule:
•Plone 4 (Dexterity)
•Geoserver
•Postgis (finally)
•Diazo
•SQLAlchemy

11. The Big Picture
Models definition (XML) Document instances
WEB
Print XSLT

12. GIS implementation
Before After
Shape files imported Geoserver serving
into Plone as Primagis postgis data, published
elements using a low on the web using
level procedure using OpenLayers
GDAL system library.
Realtime changes
Unflexible allowed.

13. Search features
Before After
Search queries were Models are actually
totally built upon persisted into
catalog indexes; some postgres tables, hence
models got hundres of providing all the
fields (and so features of the DBMS.
indexes).
Life gets better and
Painful moments. faster.

14. Statistics
Before After
Yes, you could try to If you can think about
ask the catalog for it, we can give it to
some results. Be sure you.
to get a coffee and a
break, put them To protect and serve.
toghether, and enjoy
you coffe break.
Time lapse.

15. PDF Conversion
Before After
PDF creation invoking Each document
catalog, taking back comes out from a
values, invoking html 2 pdf
SOffice server to load conversion; just
ODT model, gimme couple of
placeholders seconds, ‘bro !
substitution, one by
one, and PDF Lightweight.
conversion.
Just this.

16. MVC, you’re fired !
•Keeping definition “portable”
•Merge model and presentation
definition
•Supermodel
•ZPT

17. Storing data
•Storage abstraction
•filtering
•averages, sums, etc
•SQL storage
•Plone object that acts as
“document folder”
•More than one folder per-
site (able to handle multiple
physical sites)

18. Viewing and editing data
•Get the data (model
included!)
•Obtain template from the
model
•Use z3c.form to render
everything

19. Printing
•Is telling the user to go to
File › Print when viewing the
page good enough?
•Enter wkhtml2pdf (good
enough for us)
•Performances have been
satisfactory enough

20. Why Plone then?
•Single system that does
CMS, process management
and GIS
•Effectively, GIS and process
management are Zope3
webapps (it still works as a
web framework)