new 2.5 site for Legal Assistance for Seniors

Paul Everitt paul at agendaless.com
Mon Aug 20 22:58:04 UTC 2007


Hi Kai, thanks for the info.  Do you mind creating an entry for this  
in Plone.net?

Also, I wonder if the folks on this list would like to help make a  
push to document important NGO sites and players for Plone.net, as  
well as refine the categories we're using.

--Paul

On Aug 20, 2007, at 6:07 PM, Kai Harris wrote:

> Hi all,
> I'm pleased to announce Legal Assistance for Seniors' new Plone 2.5.3
> based website: http://www.lashicap.org.  It replaces a small Frontpage
> "brochure" type site.  We developed it mostly in-house with some
> assistance from Dan Thomas at OIS Online.  I thought I'd share some of
> my experiences learning and integrating Plone.
>
> We developed this site nearly exactly coinciding with the Plone 2.5
> release cycle.  We began using Plone as an intranet site with the 2.1
> release and decided to develop our external site with Plone also right
> before Plone 2.5.0  was released.  And now we've finished within a few
> days of Plone 3.0.  Development took such a long time because I was
> learning Plone on the fly, developing the website is a small part of
> my job at Legal Assistance for Seniors, and I used Dan primarily as a
> resource when I got stuck on a problem.  If I was starting now, with
> all I have learned, this site would have taken a quarter of the time!
>
> Description of the site:
>
> Combination external and intranet site.  Staff login with their Active
> Directory credentials to view intranet content.  Staff editors are
> responsible for different sections and can add and edit pages on their
> own.
>
> Primary goal of this new site was (1) to more effectively engage our
> online audience by providing more ways to "hook" them – eNewsletter,
> online donations, online event registration, requesting service
> online.  (2) make the website more part of staff's everyday workflow
> by combining the intranet and external websites.  And (3) keep content
> up to date by delegating responsibility from "the web guy" to
> development, any staff who want to write news items, and "the web
> guy."
>
> External ASP providers: Groundspring for online donations,
> VerticalResponse for eNewsletters, RegOnline for online event
> registration and management, Salesforce as a CRM and donor database.
>
> We're using the following products: CMFContentPanels, EasyBlog,
> PloneFormGen, PloneLDAP Connector, Placeful Workflow, PloneExFile,
> RedirectionTool, AnalyticsforPlone, DIYPloneStyle.
>
> What works well:
>
> PloneFormGen – what an amazing product.  It took some training for our
> staff editors to understand, but now they are all able to edit and add
> their own forms on the website.  We haven't done anything too fancy
> with this product yet, but will be exploring an integration with
> Salesforce in the future.
>
> Full text indexing with PloneExFile - very important for the intranet
> portion of the site.  We use it to index uploaded Word, Excel and PDF
> files.
>
> Redirection tool – This is a great tool to ensure that other websites
> linking inside our site do not get 404 errors, we simply redirect all
> pages of our old Frontpage site to the new location in Plone.  Really
> cool.
>
> Community Education Presentation content type – copy of Event with
> customized page template.  This content type pulls the body of
> 'related items' into the view to create a hybrid view between the
> Document that describes the presentation and this particular instance
> of the presentation being given.
> http://www.lashicap.org/services/community-education-presentations/ 
> scheduled-presentations
>
> Elements we struggled with:
>
> Active Directory LDAP - groups and users are managed in AD.  Plone
> roles mapped to AD groups works seamlessly.  Getting AD working well
> was a challenge, we never did get it working completely correctly
> until the PloneLDAP product was released.  Works great now though.
>
> Page compositing with CMFContentPanels is very powerful, but the UI is
> horrible.  I am the only person on staff who really understands how to
> use ContentPanels.  I really like that ability to create zpt macros to
> create new views of content items, but haven't figured out how to
> register these with ContentPanels so the view is pickable in the UI.
> Instead, one must navigate to the content item, select zpt macro, and
> type in the correct path to the zpt view.
>
> Adding straight html or flash from Groundspring, Vertical Response, or
> RegOnline is difficult.  Kupu filters out necessary tags.  I can add
> plain text portlets and Content Panels, but sometimes I really want to
> add html or flash content from an external website to a Page, Event,
> or other Kupu based content item.  I haven't totally figured this out
> yet.
>
> Issues for the future:
>
> Integration with SQL db – pull Community Education Presentations
> straight from our MS SQL database to eliminate double data entry.
> Single Sign On with Active Directory credentials.
> LinguaPlone and multiple languages
> Salesforce integration, especially with PloneFormGen
> Google Maps mashup with Community Education Presentation content type.
> Migration to Plone 3 – probably wait for 3.5, I'm too tired now!
>             ContentPanels to Collage or other compositing solution
>             EasyBlog – heavily customized
>
> Congratulations for making it this far!  I've really enjoyed building
> this site and have learned a ton.  Though I haven't posted too often
> to this group, it has been an invaluable resource along with
> Plone-Users.
>
> Kai Harris
> Operations Manager
> Legal Assistance for Seniors
> www.lashicap.org
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