Why Upgrade?
Technology never stands still.
It’s tempting to think of technology investments as discrete expenditures that permanently solve a problem, but that would be a mistake. A new website that costs $25K, $50K, $100K or more feels like it should last forever. But technology ages and an organization’s needs evolve. Everyone is happy for a short while after the website is completed, but then they become less and less happy as it works less and less well.
A better approach is to not think of technology needs as being solved by big, herculean efforts that happen occasionally, but as an ongoing program that requires ongoing resources. This is what the University of Minnesota Press has done. Since their current website’s initial launch in 2011, they have:
- 2012: Added a searchable bibliography to the Test Division portion of the website
- 2015: Done a responsive redesign so that the website works seamlessly on mobile devices
- 2018: Upgraded the website’s e-commerce infrastructure with modern components providing improved PCI compliance
- Plus they’ve had a yearly support contract to fix bugs, add features, and keep up with minor version upgrades
This pattern of ongoing investment is typical of our clients. And because of technology changes that have occurred over the last few years, a new round of investments has become imperative: upgrades.
Since 2011 the Press website has been running on version 4 of the content management system Plone, and version 2 of Python, the programming language used to implement Plone. Those versions are nearing obsolescence.
- Plone 5 has been out since 2016, and Plone 6 is expected soon. When Plone 6 is released, the Plone security team will end official support for Plone 4.
- Python 3, a major, backwards-incompatible release with many new features, has been out since 2008. Official support for Python 2 ended January 1, 2020.
Because of this, it became essential for the Press – like other organizations that use Plone – to budget for major version upgrades of its website technology stack. This long-term investment will ensure that all technology components are stable, supported, and up to date.
The Plone 5 version upgrade will also provide benefits to users, editors, and website developers.
Users will see:
- Pages that render 15-20% faster due to a new templating engine
- Improved accessibility compliance
Editors and admins will see a number of new features under the hood:
- An improved editing toolbar
- The latest version of the WYSIWYG rich text editor (TinyMCE)
- Facebook OpenGraph meta tags and Twitter card support
- Bulk editing operations such as adding multiple files and images at once
- The ability to quickly find, sort, reorder, and select content items on the contents view
- Automatic CSRF (cross-site request forgery) protection integrated into the database layer
Website developers will be able to use:
- All the features in the latest Python
- Plone’s improved and easier to use content type framework, Dexterity, as well as other new features in the code
Visit Plone.com to read more about the advantages of Plone 5.
The good news is that this upgrade work can be done in phases – meaning the work can be budgeted over several years if necessary.
- A Plone 5.1 upgrade, which includes migrating Plone’s core content types to Dexterity.
- Migrating custom content types to Dexterity and replacing any add-ons that are not compatible with Plone 5.2.
- A Plone 5.2 and Python 3 upgrade.
Phases 1 and 2 must be done before phase 3 because the old content type framework (Archetypes) is not supported in Python 3.
The end result of this upgrade path is to open up a world of possibilities to organizations using Plone. Out of the box Plone 5.2 includes:
- plone.restapi, which supports the full set of Plone features (users, groups, roles, workflow, navigation, search, even breadcrumbs)
- Volto, a modern Javascript front end for Plone based on React
These new components are game changers. In particular, the REST API allows Plone to integrate easily with other systems and to operate as a headless CMS – with the content delivery front end decoupled from the back end.
Now that’s worth upgrading for.
Essential Plone Add-ons
If it’s fall, it must be time for the Plone Conference. This year the annual gathering took place in Ferrara, a beautiful small city in the north of Italy. The weather was perfect, the streets medieval, the party was in a real castle, and the food – well! The food was amazing. This is the traditional dish cappellacci di zucca al ragù, pasta stuffed with pumpkin in a meat sauce. Yes it tastes as good as it looks.
Following the tradition begun at the Barcelona conference and continued in Tokyo, we held a popularity contest to identify the best add-ons for Plone, Python’s open source CMS. Plone comes with tons of features out-of-the-box – like workflows, search, a multilingual UI, conformance to accessibility standards, and granular user roles and permissions – but it also offers an extensible platform for building new add-ons. Attendees nominated their favorites and the results were posted in the conference venue where people voted their top 5 using sticky dots.
Thirty-three add-ons were nominated, and the voting revealed a few that are particularly popular – notably for form generation and faceted search. Others included add-ons for document generation (Word, PDF, etc.), image cropping, taxonomies, authentication, and lazy loading. The full results can be found at the 2019 essential Plone add-ons page.
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