IICD new website in plone 2.5

[Nynke Kruiderink]

Hello All,

I just wanted to let you all know that IICD (www.iicd.org) has just
recently launched our upgraded and restyled website in plone 2.5. Below
is a summary of some of the major improvements and challenges in case it
can trigger ideas for your own website or if you have tips/ideas.

Some new elements:

We have a video gallery. We don't have the resources for a streaming
webserver so we upload our videos on google or youtube and the plone cms
allows us to organize our videos and embed them in our website. We just
add the ID from google or youtube into the video item entry. I'd like to
examine if we can make use of some of the functionalities in Plumi for
our gallery (thanks for the notification). The code for our gallery
should be made available so anyone interested please contact me
directly. The next step is to offer both low bandwidth and high
bandwidth versions of the videos as our target group is also located in
bandwidth-challenged areas of the world.

We are able to manage our portlets without any extensive technical
knowledge of plone. We can include them site wide, or in specific
folders, and we can insert smart folders into them. 

The portlet management functionality plus the use of CMF content panels
has given us non-techies a lot of freedom to determine where we show
what and how. It's liberating compared to the old situation! :> 

We're also using lingua plone. For those who don't know this, lingua
plone allows you to translate each page directly and users can switch
between languages yet stay in the same location on the website. Also a
great improvement to the old situation where we had a separate plone
instance/cms per language! One problem we're facing with this though is
getting the portlets and content panels to switch languages as well. 

Some issues we are dealing with:

In the old plone cms we were able to search and find html code. This was
useful for site management purposes. For example if an external document
or web page we linked to had moved, we could search for the old URL and
update it. In the new search this isn't possible (yet). Anyone know or
have tips how to make this possible? Is it as simple as changing some
settings of the search or is it more complex?

The use of resolveuid is new for us. It's a great functionality, but we
need to adapt our old content to implement this (this is also where
searching for HTML code would be useful). It also seems to
malfunctioning somewhat. Images inserted with the internal linking
functionality (resoulveuid) have the tendency to disappear after a
certain amount of time. They show up fine in the kupu, but once saved,
whoosh, gone. Sometimes it takes longer for them to disappear. I heard
this might be related to Python Imaging Library or indexing of the
images?
At a presentation on plone 3.0 hosted by Goldmund, Wyldebeast and
Wunderliebe I learned that reverse integrity will be available in plone
3.0, based on resolveuid, exciting! Although I'd like to take a
'breather' before upgrading again. :>

As mentioned above, we use lingua plone, which is great for translating
the content item being viewed, but the portlets don't switch languages.
Composite pages with content panels are also challenging (I've been
told) to change with a global language flag. It's being worked on
although I'm not sure were we'll end up. We wanted a more industry
standard plone instance than what we had, and these changes may be
moving us away from this goal.

When making large changes in a website, also changes in content
location, one of the challenges is not to loose your visitors which
enter your website via bookmarks or old links (we have alot of those).
Initially the idea was to offer an "intelligent" 404 page not found
which automatically did a search on the URL trying to be accessed to
offer the visitor options/suggestions.
The project suffered somewhat in the planning (as so often occurs) and
in the end we needed to make painful prioritizations in order to go live
before a certain date. Offering an intelligent 404 page not found result
was one of the functionalities which was postponed. A shame, I hope our
visitors forgive us. 
In the old website I was able to insert a command to redirect, in the
properties field of an item I think it was. This is unavailable to me
now. Anyone know if this is an add-on which can be implemented easily?

That's it for now. I have another question but will post it separately.

Sincerely,
Nynke



Ms. Nynke Kruiderink
Officer Knowledge Sharing
International Institute for Communication and Development (IICD)
P.O. Box 11586, 2502 AN The Hague, The Netherlands
Visitors: Raamweg 5, 2596 HL, The Hague, The Netherlands
tel:+31 (0)70 311 7311 Fax:+31 (0)70 311 7322
www.iicd.org
www.iconnect-online.org
www.dgroups.org  
www.itrainonline.org
 
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