The Omnivore Perspective

Paul Roeland

@polyester

Define "Omnivore"...

  • lots of systems
  • build, maintain, renovate, revive, put to sleep
  • average lifetime > 3y

Systems?

  • Plone, Quaive
  • Wordpress, Drupal(7/8)
  • Wagtail, Mezzanine
  • Ghost, Pagekit, Sulu
  • Grav, Hugo
  • CiviCRM, Mailchimp, Odoo

The Good

  • No ballast
  • Trends I like
  • Good practice

The Bad

  • Developer centric, consultantware
  • Brochureware (see this post)
  • "does it scale..."

The Ugly

  • The worst ideas resurface
  • These people don't work in real organizations, do they?
  • One way street / datagrave
  • Security is an afterthought...

What Plone has

  • Placeful
  • Collections (MOAR!!)
  • Workflow
  • Content Rules

Plone's Happy Place

  • Long-term content
  • Skilled editors
  • Commitment from org
  • Power users

Be a captain!

... or a villain

And that makes Plone...

Content life

  • 20% writing outside
    (email, Word files, googledocs)
  • 5% getting into CMS
  • 75% re-arrange, re-use, refer, tag, archive

Content types

  • Text & Image
  • Embed
  • Snippets & results
  • Office & PDF

Composite pages

  • Hard problem
  • Remember: be a captain!
  • WHAT, not HOW
  • smarter minions

Subsites

  • Folder, Composite + Theme
  • Limited nav
    handmade is good enough
  • Too big: You're doing it wrong!

WYSIWYG

WISIMLNWYWG

What I See Is Most Likely Not What You Will Get

Diff'rent shores...

  • MarkDown: limited, but that's a strength
  • with preview
  • and embed

Stop assuming

  • "Left column". really?
  • Be the director!
  • Prio; displayhint; alt;

Forms

  • all are 💩
  • when dev-tools 💔 siteadmin-tools: 😭
  • focus on end-user
  • geeky interface for creating: FINE

System setup

  • Repeatability
  • Containers are here to stay
  • "there should be ONE obvious way..."
  • (OK, two... and dev-tools)

Configuration

  • Readability counts
  • Once in a blue moon...
  • TTW: theming override, vocabulary, templates
  • ... but no JS

Don't reinvent wheels

“There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things.
-- Phil Karlton
(and off-by-one errors) ”

Integrate

Rest vs GraphQL

Wishlist: user

  • TinyMCE -> Markdown + raw
  • Tiles & layout recipes
  • Embed made easy

Gimme more...

  • Smart media handling
  • Consistency in UI
  • Cleverer Collections

Teamplayer

  • Import / Export as core
  • Rest AND GraphQL
  • Office integration when needed
  • although security is hard...

System...

  • XML -> YAML
  • One Zope, One Plone
  • CLI

system continued

  • Roundtrip config
  • Function > form (for power users)
  • Warn when updates needed

MAKE IT SO

@polyester