[NGO] Re: Plone MultiSite?

[Martin Aspeli]

Shaun Hills wrote:
> I missed Ploneability, but I noticed there was some discussion around Plone
> MultiSite. Having had a bit of a look at the code and docs (ahem ;) it seems
> like it's a product for pushing content from a central "editing" instance out to
> multiple other Plone sites. Is this a fair summary? Is there anything else it
> does that I'm missing?
> 
> I have a reason for asking. We at NHS CFH run a fairly large but ultimately
> quite bog-standard Plone site. And we're starting to hit two limitations of
> Plone's out-of-the-box publishing model. Firstly content is all "up front" on
> your site, and live the minute the owner hits "save". Risky. So we made a minor
> customisation to default all new content to "Private"; at least then if it's WIP
> it can't be found by users. But this has an unfortunate side-effect when users
> forget to publish their content - they'll create a hyperlink to it which will
> work just fine when they're logged in. But as soon as an anonymous user hits the
> link, they're prompted for a login.
> 
> I think we need to get away from the current system and put in some kind of
> staging or editing --> production propagation mechanism. Is this the kind of
> problem MultiSite is intended to solve? Or should I be looking at one of the
> other staging frameworks?

You may also want to check out EnSimpleStaging, and the tutorial I wrote 
with Alan (as in, he told me what was going on, I translated it into 
language that people could understand, I've never actually used 
EnSimpleStaging in production - but Enfold code tends to be good) on 
plone.org/documentation/tutorial/staged-site.

I'm not quite sure what the overlap is with PMS or when one is more 
appropriate than the other, but it seems to address your use case. It's 
a bit awkward to set up, though (and could use some polish, if you want 
to contribute :-))

Martin