A presentation for World Plone Day 2008 in Auckland, New Zealand that discusses some of the reasons that Plone should be considered for CMS deployments, and a small case-study of the Plone deployment at the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development

1. www.fmit.co.nz

2. Why Plone?
 Cost
 Endorsed by the State Services Commission
 Freedom to develop and customise
 Strong codebase
 Integration with existing systems
 Multilingual and Accessible
 Proven in Government and business
www.fmit.co.nz

3. Cost
 No acquisition costs
 No ongoing licencing fees
 Status protected by the Plone Foundation
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4. Endorsed by the State Services Commission
 “The Content Management System, Plone, is a particularly powerful tool for managing websites”
 “Plone met all those criteria [...] and is a very cost effective solutionquot;
­ Laurence Millar, Deputy Commissioner for Information and Communications Technology at SSC
www.fmit.co.nz

5. Freedom to Develop and Customise
 GPL – source code will always be available (the same licence that Linux uses)
 Copyright protected by the Plone Foundation
 Large documentation ecosystem:
 plone.org/documentation
 api.plone.org
 Seven published books covering user documentation to site customisation
 plone­users mailing list
 online help channel: #plone on irc.freenode.net
www.fmit.co.nz

6. Strong Codebase
 Open Source
 Built on Python
 Excellent security track record:
 33,000 CVE entries
 only 9 recorded mentioning 'Plone'
 only 3 of those are 'High'
 Excellent automated test coverage
 For example, there are approximately 17,000 lines of code in part of Plone's core libraries of
which about 14,000 are covered with automatic test routines
 Even the CIA uses Plone (www.cia.gov)
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7. Integration with Existing Systems
 Windows Active Directory
 LDAP
 Lots of webservices APIs – standard Python libraries for:
 XML­RPC
 Soap
 JSON
 SQLAlchemy for Oracle/MySQL/MS SQL Server...
 Salesforce.com integration available
 Run Plone in virtually any environment
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8. Multilingual and Accessible
 Translated into over 35 languages
 Translate pages into multiple languages with LinguaPlone
 Extensive effort invested in meeting W3 standards, WCAG, and Section 508 for maximum
compatibility and accessibility
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9. Proven in Government and Business
 Many New Zealand Government sites using Plone currently:
www.e.govt.nz ­ www.mwa.govt.nz ­ www.treasury.govt.nz ­
www.electricitycommission.govt.nz ­ www.companies.govt.nz ­ www.ppsr.govt.nz ­
www.crownminerals.govt.nz ­ www.rsm.govt.nz ­ www.societies.govt.nz ­
www.insolvency.govt.nz ­ www.iponz.govt.nz ­ www.oag.govt.nz ­ www.auditnz.govt.nz ­
www.courtsofnz.govt.nz ­ www.natlib.govt.nz
 Many worldwide Governments, Councils, and Agencies using Plone:
 177 Government sites listed at:
http://plone.net/sites/sites_listing?industries%3Alist=Government&countries%3Alist=
 ...And a further 244 Non­Profit sites listed at:
http://plone.net/sites/sites_listing?industries%3Alist=Non­profits&countries%3Alist=
 Many businesses worldwide running their public website with Plone (see http://plone.net for more
indicative numbers)
www.fmit.co.nz

10. Plone in the Ministry of Economic Development
 Integration with existing websites and systems
 Separate Internal from Public
 True HA for the Public sites
 Aggressive website caching for optimal performance
 Visitor numbers – Plone is an Enterprise system
www.fmit.co.nz

11. Integration with Existing Websites and Systems
 Many challenges with existing bespoke registry sites running on a variety of platforms:
 Oracle PL/SQL
 Tomcat
 J2EE Weblogic
 Needed to support business continuity – no extended outage period while CMS was implemented
could be contemplated
 Needed to seamlessly wrap and complement existing site functionality, not replace
 Needed to satisfy both internal business users and diverse external users
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12.  Several approaches used depending on situation and appropriateness
 'Wrapped' functionality – CMS presents existing site functionality with IFRAME
(www.companies.govt.nz)
 'Co­operative' functionality – CMS generates special custom templates that are consumed by
J2EE/Weblogic and integrated into generated pages before being delivered to the client
(www.insolvency.govt.nz)
 'Collaborative' functionality – CMS hosts links to external site a­la 'internet banking model'
(www.crownminerals.govt.nz)
 All approaches were feasible and easily achieved with Plone – it fit the environment, instead of
forcing the environment to fit itself
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13. Separate Internal from Public
 Create/Modify/Edit/Rework/Withdraw/Delete content independent of Public view
 Enforce content review policies, regular audit intervals, content versioning, hyperlink coherency etc
without disturbing the Public site
 Review a 'Preview site' before deciding to make it Public
 Enforce policy on what it means for an item to be 'ready for Public consumption' with a high degree
of confidence – only items past certain review states ever touch the Public site
 Easy separation of content Caching policies for Public versus Internal, to allow aggressive caching
of the Public site and very fast site response
 EnSimpleStaging to enable content deployment based on policy to the 'Preview site' (3rd­party
Product)
 BSBDeployTool to enable transition of Preview site to Public and integration with Caching Policy
framework (bespoke Product)
 Deploy and update the Public content at any time of day
www.fmit.co.nz

14. True HA for the Public Sites
 Plone's licencing and architecture has allowed us to develop a true High Availability solution for the
Public websites, with no Single Point Of Failure (SPOF)
 Meets the needs of online­only Government services such as the Personal Property Securities
Register, which must meet certain legislated criteria concerning its public availability
 Four independent Plone instances power the Public site, at least two are always running
 Enabled by the BSBDeployTool and a fully Open Source software stack:
 Linux Virtual Server (load balancer)
 Apache (client web server)
 Varnish (website caching tool)
 Pound (application server load balancer)
 Zope (application server for Plone)
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15. www.fmit.co.nz

16. Benefits
 Continuous service availability for the last 27 months (since go­live)
 CMS is available even during scheduled weekly service outages for the Transactional systems:
 Customers can be kept updated of the progress of the service outage
 CMS software is updated live
 Only external factors have disrupted customer access to the site (eg, ISP goes down)
 Environment has migrated across hardware platforms twice in this period with no customer­visible
disruption
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17. Aggressive Website Caching for Optimal
Performance
 Varnish (www.varnish­cache.org)
 Having separate Public site allows very aggressive caching rules – only generate a page once
 Caching rules tracked and managed by BSBCacheManager (bespoke Product) – more traditional
Plone sites have the CacheFu Product (standard with Plone 3)
 How fast? For a complete page view with all associated resources...

www.google.co.nz
– 229ms

www.trademe.co.nz
– 326ms

www.companies.govt.nz
– 274ms
 Plone on its own generates pages ready for delivery at around 400ms – still very fast if the site is
scaled and sized appropriately for expected load
 Caching only added this year as a 'nice to have' – prior to that all website requests were serviced
directly by Plone
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18. Visitor Numbers – Plone is an Enterprise
System

www.companies.govt.nz
one of the busiest New Zealand government sites:
 Many transactional functions
 Daily business processing occuring with company registrations, annual return filing, etc.
 October 2008 – pretty average month for 2008, all transactions for the entire site:
 114,000 unique visitors across the whole month
 22,000,000 pages for the month
 52,000,000 hits for the month
 408GB of bandwidth consumed for the month
 about 2,000,000 hits per business day during business hours
www.fmit.co.nz

19. How Much of that was Plone?
 145,000 pages viewed per business day during business hours (not mere 'hits')
 3,200,000 pages viewed across the entire month
 plus another 125,000 website text searches
 Four pages every second from Plone were being requested by someone in New Zealand, every
business day for the month of October
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20. Growth
 From initial site (Companies) two years ago to 8 today
 More sites planned to go­live before the end of the year
 Plus a major intranet site used for the Contact Centre
 recently won TUANZ award for information architecture
www.fmit.co.nz

21. Make Plone Work for You
 Anyone can install with the Unified Installer and very little advance knowledge
 Low barrier to entry with customisation:
 Basic theming tools can give way when necessary to more complex development.
 Plone architecture means projects can be small and build on one another
 Massive 3rd­party plugin library already
 FMIT is ready to help when you're ready!
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22. Questions
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