All right, the recording is on. Hello, everyone, and welcome to this World Plone Day discussion. We are here to talk a little bit about the Plone usage in different universities.

And we are gathered here from different universities from Europe. And so, my name is Rico Pekkaaktenen. I come from the University of Iwascula in Finland. And I've been working with Plone-related stuff since maybe 2004.

And also, I'm now part of the Plone marketing and communications team. And I'm really eager to hear what you others are going to tell today about your universities. So, let's give a short round of introducing ourselves.

Maybe Alexander, you can go next. Hello, I'm Alexander Löchel from the University of Munich, the Ludwig Maximilians University. I'm an IT manager there and I'm, well, working now with Plone since 2003.

So, started with the 2.0 alpha 4 version back in time. And I'm also on the Plone security team, was six years on the Plone board of directors. And yeah, glad to see others from universities around the world still using Plone and enjoying the benefits of it.

Thank you, Alexander. What about Kim? Hi, I'm Kim Paulus. I've also been working with Plone, I don't think since 2004, but definitely over 10 years since beginning of Plone 3.

And yeah, we've been using Plone since then at the university. Also, I hope with great success for end users too, but for us, it's been a very good system.

Yeah. And I'm a developer for the, well, we call it the web management system. All right. Welcome, Kim and Peter. Hello. Yeah. Hi, I'm Peter Seifert from the Theschenische Universität Dresden in Germany.

2004 seems to be a good year to have started with Plone. We did also, and I think in 2007, I joined the university programming team for Plone. And I'm now in the Strategy and Communication Directorate web communications group, and we are doing a lot of Plone.

Yeah. All right. Yeah. And I forgot to mention that in my university, I started as a developer and nowadays I'm a kind of team leader and project manager,

but still doing lots of hands-on work with Plone customers and different setups. OK, so maybe the first question is if you could give a short overall of the main uses of Plone at your university.

That may be a long question, but try to highlight the main places where you use Plone. And if we start the round this time from Peter. Yeah. So as I said, in 2000, I think seven.

Now the Plone, our first Plone website, which is the main website of our university, it was from 2004, I think. But I joined a bit later and we did a relaunch in 2016. And we are now on Plone 4.3, a bit behind, but it's very stable.

And we have about 40 gigs main and catalog storage and 700 gigs of blob storage. So a quite huge installation. And it's used for our main university website with all our schools, institutes and professorships in there.

And we have a decentralized editorial control for about 2000 editors using, we call it, web CMS. And we did a lot of integration for applications.

We developed applications integrated into our Plone, for example, the student information system and other things that will be addressed in the next questions. Yeah. That's the integration thing is something that I also want to highlight.

But what about Kim, your university? Well, at our university, I think there's two big use cases for Plone. Plone is the main web content management for all KU Leuven websites.

So I guess the same as Andries, then all departments, faculties, central websites. And that setup then has been customized, obviously, mostly not the applications, but integration with the data.

So all the people and the units. And we provided things for that for researchers, but mostly editing web pages. And the second big use case, and that has been renewed last year, almost a year old now, is the full KU Leuven intranet, which has always been in Plone,

has now completely revamped in Plone, using Plone, and is now running well, as far as I know. So the whole KU Leuven intranet was custom built on top of the Plone infrastructure we have.

Right. And what about Alexander? The LMU Munich has several Plone instances in use, but actually, for the central university, we do use two other content management systems which make static site exports.

So Plone is very much in specialized use cases. For example, several intranets for some institutions, our genetics department, our geophysicists, our computer science department.

We do have some application on top of Plone that has special usage. So we do have something called Eigenungsfeschlungswafern, which is an application portal for signing up for our master studies in some cases,

where we do have all the workflow benefits of Plone using in there and so on. And there is a centralized whole university intranet and extranet portal that was originally designed around the old static exporting CMS,

but the features that are necessary for such an intranet could not go static. So there is integration with the Plone side to make it run. So they are running two different content management systems side by side in one domain

URL and serving intranet with all the benefits that you can have from both worlds. And I've seen that it is the technologies that the Plone community provide and the knowledge you acquire by them that makes it possible that we can have such an intranet.

Without the need of switching fast or paying extremely much for external consultants to build up a system that may not work. All right.

That is interesting and I will... In the University of Uvascular, we also do have our main websites running on Plone. It's Plone 5 now. It started with Plone 2.05 and then 2.5 and 3 and 4 and now 5.

So we renewed the sites a couple of times, but until now we have been keeping the migration so that there's a lot of content that has been uploaded maybe in 2005 and it still runs in 2021. So that's pretty interesting, at least to me and impressive.

But we also have a lot of like customized functionality built on Plone. We have this video publishing platform that started with Soap in 2003 and it's still running and it's now Plone 4.

And there are like very much video content in there and the content editors can do the other stuff also beside the videos. And then we have two learning management systems built on Plone which are integrated to our study information system.

So when you enroll into a course, then you can get to the learning management system and see only the materials that are for those course students. And there's also lots and lots of content there. And maybe the fourth most important thing or things we have built is many like customized

workflow or form based systems where we utilize the main strengths of Plone with the permission management. And that you can create your custom forms and then put it into some kind of workflow.

So lots of different things done with Plone in University of Uvascular.

Maybe the next question, you don't have to do it in a strict round, but what would you highlight as the most interesting or challenging case? And maybe if you have questions to others, you can do it that way.

So what would you find most interesting or challenging case in your university? So maybe I start again. All right. Go ahead.

So the most recent thing we did was a multilingual editing view where you can have two languages at least next to each other. So you have the normal Plone editing view, but twice.

And you can directly see when you forgot to edit one field in English, for example. So normally the German is the main language here and English is the second. And there was a need to increase our internationalization and communication capabilities in English.

So we have now introduced this editing view where you can easier see where you missed English translations. And you can, when you see them next to each other, it's easier to write translations for yourself.

Is that using the default Plone add-ons for it, or did you build something custom? It's built into the old, we still have 80 content types. So it's built into the 80 editing views, but in a way that we can use it for dexterity as well.

So we will integrate it into dexterity when we start switching, which is a long process that is in the planning right now. And we hope that we will be on Plone 5 and dexterity. We'll see where exactly we end up, but there's a long process to get there. But for now it's integrated in the 80 views.

I just wanted to say that we're sort of at the same position. I heard from your explanation that we're about the same size, I guess, in gigabytes and number of users, editors. And we are also migrating to Plone 5 now. Well, we started the process finally after talking about it.

We had a really long discussion whether to switch to Plone's multilingual idea with Plone app multilingual, which is a lingual trees. And our system is based on attribute-based multilingual.

So we have one object which has attributes in English and attributes in German, for example. So we won't have any problems with synchronizing trees and permissions on those trees and so on, because we only have one tree.

And in this one tree, I give permissions to someone and then he has permissions for all languages. And because we decided that the content will be the same in English and in German, we don't want to have less or more content in another language. Which is okay because the complete structure is separated into sections, we call them, which have their own workspaces.

So you have like the professorship is inside an institute, which is inside a faculty, for example, and a school.

And there's permission levels, workspaces with permissions on every level. And we have local language settings, so you can have a professorship with English main language and French additional language inside an institute which has German main language and so on. And it's integrated with that.

And because of the structure, we needed to do something to allow people to submit events and news to the central event and news boards. In our system, news and events can only be created inside news boards and event boards.

And now the substructures can all use a submission system to submit their news to the global scale news boards. So like for studies, there's one big news and event board and all the professorships can submit their news directly there, which is using workflows.

So, of course, it's not published directly, but will be in a state where the editors for the main boards can then review the content and publish themselves.

Yeah, this was a thing we did in 2016. And another thing, another application that we built an inside plan where we had been discussing if it was suitable and we didn't find any free system for that digital signage.

There will be wall-mounted monitors around the campus in every large building. And those monitors will show an application which is built with React inside Plone

or on top of Plone, which is a bit like a PowerPoint slide presentation. But inside there's events and videos and images and so on. But the editorial system is in Plone.

That's really interesting. We had one of those on the walls and then they wanted to update some content there. And there was this software that was designed to show the content on the monitors, but they couldn't do everything.

So we had to implement more features to it. And we did that just by using Plone and with folder structure and certain folders for certain monitors in certain spaces. So it worked well there. But multilingual, that's also something that's really important to our university also.

We don't have everything in the two languages. It's mostly these, but there are a lot of sections that are in English or in Swedish. So it's kind of like you can choose whether or not to translate that page.

All right. What about others? Highlight something, Kim or Aleksander. I'd like to, well, as I just mentioned, we just did, well, mostly me because at the time the team was very small. We're a bit bigger now.

But we postponed the Plone 5 migration because we wanted to go live with the new intranet. And we actually looked at a lot of companies to see what they were offering because apparently

the intranet market is incredibly huge and you can find many companies with all sorts of solutions. But since the university had a very specific design made by an agency on how they wanted it, it involved teams, more like topics and channels.

And they wanted all the information on the intranet to be accessible but customized depending on which person is logged in. So if I am logged in, it will read my information and automatically give me, for example, the news depending on the type of staff I am.

So I'm not a professor. I'm ATPD, administrative and technical staff. It's an old name. But it has those weird staff categories and you have different groups you belong to or different campuses or different locations. And the way we built it or they wanted to build it is the person who logs in gets sort of a portal functionality.

So I will get the news from depending on the group I'm in, the location I'm in, the specific channel I belong to that is also managed by a lot of other people. So we have a lot of working on the organizational stuff.

But our challenge as the VMS team or me as a developer was to integrate all that with the person who is logged in. So now we have a very we managed to actually do that because of clone. Because we had already integrated the full authentication and authorization for our people.

And luckily when we are logged in, that's using Shibboleth. So based on all those attributes, we could link that to the different organizations and groups that the other people made. And they set up a whole system of creating news, like the news portals you have in Dresden.

So they now each have their different topics and channels and public managers and channel managers. And the clone system just integrates all that news all on one big clone site and shows you just the news that is custom made for you depending on your information and the teams and channels that are available to you.

So that was a very complex setup. But actually once we figured out how to do it, it was amazing how easily pluggable that was inside the clone system infrastructure that we had already set up.

So I thought it would take me like ages, but in the end, full programming time was for one developer, half a year, two a year, including doing all the organizational stuff and doing the meetings.

So that was, I was very happy that we could do that so easily and plug that into what we had. Yeah, that intranet thing is really interesting. Which one of you did have a clone intranets in use?

We have, and Alexander, you had a clone intranet and Peter, did you have an intranet? Not really, we had integrated in our website, we call it internal pages or something like that.

It's not really an intranet, it is what we needed to, because we don't have an intranet yet. The intranet project is starting these days. I was still looking for a project manager, I think. And it's open so there's no, there still will be a discussion which system to use.

I think if Plone will be chosen, we have the problem that we will in the future be responsible for that as well. And normally you don't get extra resources, so you're screwed majorly.

Maybe this will go another way, but there are other systems which have already been looked at and it's open which one will be chosen.

So there's a project doing this, which will start as soon as the project manages. But this internal pages thing, there's a lot of integration of other servers which do, so that we have a DOM

-based integration where our server requests pages from other servers, which are, I think it's some Microsoft solution, ASP, or something. And there's like the telephone number system of a search database and some other things

that are really old that have been there before Plone, before we started with Plone. And they got integrated just so you can have some are just overviews, some are searchable things. And it's integrated not as an iframe because the other servers are only internally accessible and we reintegrate on a DOM level.

But we will have a super duper new intranet in three to 10 years, I guess.

Good luck with that. What about Alexander? Did you have an intranet and what will be your Plone case highlight? So yes, we do have several intranets for the different departments or study groups and so on.

But the most important one are our, we call it Tsof intranets, which is the central university administration. And they do also have an extranet for all the scientists and other members in the university where all the

data are, well, just readable from inside the university with your login and all the information and some additional boards. That is really the facing technology for us. The thing was there as we started in 2013.

The problem was the then team for Internet services just know their content management system, which was a Java

based static exporting system, which is perfectly fine if you have like our university, thousands of small information centric websites. But as soon as you want to have any live content, direct contribution, so blogging, pin boards, pollings or something like

that, or even the integration with search where the people see the different content only if they are allowed to do it.

That's very hard. And that's where, if you're looking into the Plone stack, Plone is really a strong technology. So for us, we do have two content management systems integrated with each other. The one makes just static site exports.

And for example, on the landing page of the intranet, we do have probably 70% of the front page comes from the static site. And we inject that we're edge sites include. So with the Plone stack where you just have edge site includes in varnish snippets from the Plone site.

And on the other hand, all the pages like the blog, the polls, the pin boards and so on and the search pages uses one special page of generated by the other content management as the template for

the ISO so that if they change the navigation, it directly get updated for all the other pages and so on. So there are a lot of the technologies and benefits from the Plone world that helps you if

you're looking into the old style of web development where you have static sites or server side technologies. If we're looking into the future, where JavaScript is taking more and more over and you get into the place that you have some kind of single page application, either in React, Angular view or something like that, where you can make the composition

on the client side and get the data from different systems that might seems where other systems can also use those applications.

Advantages or those systems. But what we have seen, for example, if you're looking into search engines, solar, elastic search or others, they do not have a permission system. So if you have an integrated search over different portals and you should be able to see all the content you are allowed to see, then you need something in between that can handle that.

And if you're looking just into it so that the other content management system pushes their content into the search with their ACL list and Plone just uses the ACL list like intern and then going over their portal system, distributing the search results, you can have all the technology.

So there's lots of knowledge and especially security related ideas in the Plone and Soap world that are still necessary for the future of the web, even if we go complete the client side.

So there are things where probably the editor experience in systems like WordPress might be easier for users on small sites. But on the other side, if you're looking into large organizations like university where corporate design and specialized

views are very important and you have workflows for publishing news on the major site and so on. There are a lot of the things where Plone is still cutting edge on top of the

business and I think that's very interesting to see for the future how the systems will change. Yeah. We will have a round of future predictions today and let's get back to that.

I think it's up to date with the modern feature requests like last year we integrated it to automatic speech detection system in Finnish, which was like no other universities have that kind of functionality.

So I find that like you can build a Plone site, start with a set of features you need now, but the features you will need in 10 years, you can in 10 years, you can come back

and integrate that to Plone since something about the framework or how it's built inherently so powerful and pluggable. And I think that that kind of thing is important for universities where the system always isn't like you build it

for one year or two years, but you need to use it for 10 years to get the benefits from it. So I think that in general is the maybe the most important case or feature here. From that, I'd like to have the short round of if you have would highlight that maybe the

two or three most important features in Plone that you have found the most useful during the years. And if I would start, I maybe would highlight the permission management system that's been really useful.

And then the robots nest and flexibility. I would have more but maybe if I take it down to three, what about you guys? If you pick three most important features of Plone ecosystem.

Alexander. I just follow you directly because the very fine grained permission system is, I guess one of the core elements of Plone. And normally if you're looking into a standard Plone, you have the system on an

object level, but it even goes down to the attribute level in different workflow states. So you can say in the private state, you're allowed to change the specific attribute on a content type on another workflow level. So you're not allowed to change the main text, but you still can update, for

example, another information like texts or something like that, which is very common to have. So that's the fine grained permission system. And the other one is the workflow system, because all the time you're looking into it, you normally have some kind of workflow into your organization.

If you're something larger like university or a corporation or something. And most of the content management systems just bring a two-step don't show or show workflow.

And we have everything for moderation, for showing art on time, showing it between a certain timeframe, pushing it to a certain groups or users to look over before publishing it and so on.

And I think that's really one of the key benefits to have that workflow system in Plone Core. All right. Thank you. What about Kim? I have to follow what you said, Rico Peko, before about the, for me, it's the plugability.

I mean, we've been working with it for 10 years. We also, we have had the same content also for over 10 years. So everything that was migrated into Plone is, unless it was deleted, obviously still inside the system. And it's not to say we've never had issues with it as the developers, but for

the users, they have kept their content and have been able to edit it for forever. And in between all those years, we have been able to slowly add or customize all the features that were asked from us by usually marketing services.

Like we fully changed the layout, which means we could just integrate that and keep all the content. We could add things like a full blown intranet or change the full way that the intranet works without the users feeling any pain from that.

We could add, for instance, we have a way for people to add stuff, pages for the researchers that integrates with publications and projects from the various backends. And we could just add all those features and fine tune those features, change all those features all while we had no downtime doing that.

We could all do that behind the scenes, change the plugins, change add-ons, even upgrade Plone entirely. And that is, to be able to do that is very impressive.

Yeah, the same goes for us. We have one big thing in the future will be our switch to Plone 5, to Dexterity and then to Python 3. And if this all goes smooth inside the running system without a lot of downtime, then Plone is a wonderland.

This is wonderful that something like this is possible. And you can, even if you still have the code somewhere, you could install a Plone 2 and you could run all the migrations up to 5.2 right now.

It would work. So this is really great. Security is one of the major things for a university, I think, because we are public. You have public pages, you don't want to be hacked. You don't want to have big banners from activities, things, organizations, I don't know, on your start page.

So security is really, really important. And Plone just doesn't have so many security issues like other systems have, and they get fixed. This is really wonderful. It's easy to install the hotfixes and keep up to date.

And so this is one really huge thing, I think, which when you've been with Plone for a long time, you don't know what can and does happen in the rest of the world with a lot of systems. So we also have other servers running other systems for small websites, project websites and other stuff, and they get hacked.

And they get attacked. And Plone is just wonderful on that page. Extensibility or plugability is really one huge thing we use.

We had overdone it in the old system. We couldn't easily migrate because there was a really huge layer between Plone and our own things, which was just not usable anymore for newer Plone versions.

So we had to do a hot migration with getting all the content out of the old site and putting it into the new site. And we used that hot cut to reorganize everything, which was good. And now we have it organized in a way that will hopefully be viable for a long time.

So all the other steps from now on will be small changes here and there and again, and not hard cuts like the one in 2016. Our colleagues, we have a decentralized editorial system with decentralized editorial groups and permissions.

But there's two or three colleagues with us directly who are doing support and helping, educating the editors. And they said working copies is a really nice thing, which is really good in Plone because there's, together with the publication workflows,

because there's a lot of hierarchical workings where, I don't know, some editors edit the page, but they can publish it.

So the reviewer will review everything and publish it then. But there's also groups where everyone is chief editor and can edit everything. But you don't want to edit and directly publish to the web.

So your page is already published and you need to create a working copy, edit your working copy, show it to someone, discuss it, change it again, and then put it back onto the public page. This is a nice system directly from Plone. Yeah, and the simple publication workflow that you can have editors and chief editors, editors in chief.

And so students who are working for you can change content, but they can't publish directly. And there's someone who has, some editor in chief who has to review the content and then publish it.

This is also something we use, but it's nice that the groups can decide whether they want to have the review workflow completely with reviews or whether they want to have reviewer permissions for everyone and just work in a not so hierarchical setup.

This is really good to be able to, you are not committed to either one or the other workflow, but you can just use the workflow that suits you. Yeah.

Thank you. I forgot to mention one really important feature, which is the general usability of Plone as a content management system. It's kind of obvious, but it is really usable and users like it. But also another thing, and this leads us to the final question and round.

How do you see the future of Plone or content management systems, or maybe the Plone, what does the future hold? And the community that's building and maintaining Plone.

So that kind of discussion to this last round. Feel free to open your ideas.

I think, well, it's a bit difficult because it's a what will happen in the future thing. And since we're working with web technology, that's very difficult because it changes a lot. What I do think is that the whole gem stack working, well, headless CMS thing is going to get bigger and bigger the next few years.

We haven't used it that much, but it's becoming so easy to do little small applications in front-end technologies. And what I'm really looking forward to, I think at our university, but with Plone being used as a headless CMS.

So we have a lot of people putting a lot of content into the web, and all that content is also provided with images and metadata, like tagging. And I see, well, I think that our content that we have as a web management

system at the university, for example, will be used as another big pool of business data. So as a data service that will provide data for other applications or application teams that can build stuff on top of it.

For example, if we have every department and faculty has news items they are creating that are related to certain topics or we could build a full-blown news application on top of that. Because you will have all the news items of the whole university, and they will be tagged or have a lot of content where AI can find you interesting news items on things.

You can do the same for events, even have a big media library. I just see a lot of applications that can be built on top of Plone being used as a back-end API, I don't know how to call it.

All right. That's a valid point then. What about Alexander? I'm thinking more in a completely different direction from this point. As we start with our introduction, we have seen that most of

our institutions started around 2004 getting centralized websites with all information-centric tools. There was also the time of the VCRG 1.0, so Web Content Accessibility

Guidelines, which is very important for public institutions like universities and governments and so on. Another thing was happening by that time. With the mid-2000s, web technologies were still a very uncommon thing for the normal persons out there.

They might serve some websites. They did not build websites and so on. And late or mid-2010s, end of 2010s, the web is the core technology for all communications and marketing around the world.

I do see a big difference coming up between the United States and Europe, especially in the universities world.

In America, the universities get a lot of the money via fundraising and alumni personnel. That still reconnects with the university and everything, so it's all about marketing.

You see it already in the term of digital experience management, which is a very American-focused term because everything in the web goes around this marketing. And Europe is still more on the information side because also the media in Europe are more objective in some ways, not opinion-based.

So universities publish facts and not so much marketing information. So there's the difference between there and how to focus on that technology. That's the one thing.

And I guess we will see with much more technology and more growth in rapidly marketing-focused areas because that's where the company is getting the money to develop the things. And that will make it a bit harder for universities to work information-centric.

But on the other hand, there's one thing from the history. So if we're looking in the programming languages, PHP was the language for websites. Now it's really decreasing. JavaScript has taken over most of the things in it.

Python, started in 1991, was a very universal language for all different kinds. And the first major application on it that really took off was Zope.

And it was, in some cases, till the mid-2000s, the killer application for Python. And the application on Zope is Plone. So the Python world has started with Plone and Zope Foundation and the ideas involved from it.

It has now become the major learning language in universities and for teaching programming. And Python has such a capability of integrating things from different technologies. And Plone, therefore, is more like a framework also for content integration.

So we can easily plug in all the Python libraries to make some data visualization, to have integration with other systems and so on. So all the things that's now slowly getting via the rest world into JavaScript for some places.

We already had and can involve and we already have our lessons learned, what works and what don't work. And that's, I think, is the really benefit for the Plone community. So working with new people, with the new ideas, but also with the hard-learned lessons from the past and the technologies to work on.

They see a bright future for the next 20 years of the Plone community and so on. We are now, well, Plone will become this year 20 years old.

So, yeah, the first 20 years were successful. And I guess the next 20 years will also be maybe a smaller community, but also a very active and enjoyable family. Yes. Thank you, Aleksander. And what about Peter? Yeah, I agree. My main points have already been mentioned.

One is accessibility, which is one of our main topics from a development point of view. We had done a lot of accessibility stuff in the old system, which was on top of Plone.

Then we came to Plone 4 and we learned that there was already a lot of things in there. But we extended Plone so much that we had to do a lot of accessibility work on top again. And we hope that we will find more time to include ourselves more in the community to contribute, especially on the accessibility topic.

For example, we have one colleague right now who's visibly impaired. Is this the name? I don't know the right term.

It's not me. Sorry. But this is really a huge benefit because he knows the problems, he has those problems. You don't discuss accessibility and things that you can improve just in theory, but you have someone who is directly affected. Thank you. Sorry.

So accessibility and with the new regulations in Europe, accessibility was a strong point and it will be an even more huge topic for us.

We are right now looking hard on Volto and we think Volto is the way, but for us it will be a long way until we arrive there.

But it is the future, I think. Thank you. I want to highlight three things. One, which is the active community and really friendly one which keeps on putting and working on Plone also in the future.

And the second one is the very powerful REST API which allows to plug in onto the other system in the future also. And the third one is the new React-based frontend called Volto, which is the basis for Plone 6 later this year.

So even if Plone is like mature, it's still modern. So best of both worlds. All right. Thank you, guys. This has been a real pleasure for me. And so I will end this broadcast. Thank you. Bye-bye.