Lightning talks, Thursday¶

PloneHRM - Jean-Paul Ladage

Jean-Paul started in his father's fast food franchise organisation, but he's seen the light and is now running zest software. He demoed PloneHRM. You can use it for managing employee information like addresses, contracts (with a handy template system), short notes ("he came in late today"), job performance interviews, checklists, etc.

Will be release shortly! (It is already available in the collective, btw). Paul Everitt thanked Jean-Paul that Zest keeps adding useful products to plone and keeps releasing it as open source :-)

Quills and blogging - tomster

There's a new quills version out that also works nice on plone 3.0. An approach they're going to try for quills 2.0 is to use normal content types instead of using the current custom WeblogEntry type. This way, you can mark a regular folder with content-that-has-a-date (like newsitems) as a blog. You could to this also with audio content, for instance, to get an audio blog.

The goal is to be less invasive. There's a BOF tomorrow to talk about it.

GoReplace - Georg gogo Bernard

GoReplace = smart folders + regular expressions.

They had to copy over old content into plone. For that, they had to somehow massage the old content. So they had a smart folder that had two extra fields: "find" and "replace", both being regular expressions. The found text gets replaced by the "replace" text.

Integration with desktop applications - plonegov

A product to handle meetings. You can schedule them and make the meeting minutes afterwards. And you can maintain a decision list. They somehow managed to put self.Title() in an openoffice formula field in a regular document. Re-generating the same document again, the title was filled into the document. You can also add notes to sections of the document (like `do for each item in self.items()'.

Semantic indexing - Giovanni Tofoli

Part of a big European research project (INTEROP), largely implemented in plone for storing semantic knowledge inside that project ("kmap" or "knowledge map"). The plonesaurus product supports the creation, management and use of taxonomic data in plone. Is-a relationships and so. Handy: lexical variants, so different labels for the same concept.

The taxonomy can be used to browse or search the items in the knowledge map ("get me all 'actor models'", or just "get me all 'models'"). For that, you can add a link from items inside plone to taxonomic entities.

Another nice feature: similarity search, which takes the current object and finds and ranks the other objects that are somewhat similar. And you can generate a picture out of it that shows taxonomy terms and the strength of the relationship between those terms.

Grok - Luciano Ramalho

The main site about grok is http://grok.zope.org . http://paleosoft.org is a site with simple grok examples.

Bundleman

Bundleman is specifically designed to help with zope2 products and bundles. Bundleman's bm-product adds a few files (VERSION, CHANGES, HISTORY) and it adds a bundleman svn property. To a product.

If you release a bundleman-enabled product, it updates the version number and moves the data in CHANGES to HISTORY. With --archive it creates a .tgz file. And it renames VERSION to version.txt, for instance.

bm-bundle manages bundles. If a product that it manages is released it uses it, if not, it releases (=tags) the product with the number you gave to the release.

Repoze - Paul Everitt

Repoze is an effort to get plone to run nicely on standard python stuff like WSGI. For this they need to look at a number of existing things to get it to work. WSGI, eggs, paste, virtualenv: this is how they do it. Zope ought to be factored out into middleware. And it works. He demoed it.

Included in one of the demo setups is deliverance integration. Handy.

sqlalchemy - Godefroid Chapelle

He demoed a simple example archetypes field storage that stores its data in a relational database via sqlalchemy. It is a simple one-line change on your archetypes fields to use this new storage. (updated: corrected (contenttype to field) after comment by Godefroid, thanks!)

Extra configuration - Calvin

For a site with lots of non-technical content managers, they're going to add some extra configlets to the plone configuration. For instance for choosing layouts, picking site color schemes, etc. Real admins can add new color schemes and layouts.

Technorati tag: ploneconf2007