Talks

In this talk, we will dive deep into the Volto codebase and understand how all things wire up internally. How does it provide so much flexibility to a developer and how we can leverage more from it? I think that if we know how an underlying technology works we have less pain in the development of any project and a better understanding of the things which we want to achieve using that technology.

A travel through time and space in the University of Bologna Galaxy made of 2410 Plone sites.

We started our journey with Plone in 2010 on a pilot site, and after that we developed A LOTS of plone sites: for departments, main university website, museums, libraries, events, image repository, generic sites, degree programs, departments again...

We are going to show different projects where Plone was used with success, the needed customizations (both BE and FE) and migrations.

We will discuss one approach on how to tackle the development of a new Volto theme, transforming a design into a work plan.

Creating a theme for Plone from scratch was never that easy! The talk shows how to create simple but beautiful themes for Plone's Classic UI with different use cases in mind.

Brazil has some of the largest Plone implementations, and an active local community (PloneGov-Br).

This presentation will present the current state of Plone in the country, its current challenges and how PloneGov-Br provides support to the local community.

The way we build web and native applications becomes more modular, componentised, and organised from traffic management to adding newer features and maintaining UI consistency at the front end.
In this talk, I would like to walk through what its meant to write scalable code and achieve resilience in frontend applications by showcasing one of the use cases in our Volto projects.

This talk is about my experience developing a new theme for Volto, as a 2022 Google Summer of Code contributor who was a complete newcomer to Plone and Volto but had lots of React experience.

pip is the tool almost every Pythonista learns early to use. Plone 6 installs just with "pip install -c ... Plone".

But it needs more: Zope configuration, including existing or development of own add-ons, using newer package-versions, configuring RelStorage, CI-CD integration, building Docker images, deployment on Swarm or K8s, an ingress, some load balancing, caching, ...

The talk is not a tutorial but gives a 3000 foot view and acts as a starter to dig deeper.

At the start of the year 2022, there was no documentation for the release of Plone 6. Building and testing documentation required unsustainable maintenance of a complex system. Faced with the daunting task of producing documentation for Plone 6 before its release, the community rallied and responded with an enormous volunteer effort. This talk tells that story, describes the impressive result, and reveals the future of Plone 6 documentation.

EEA Faceted Navigation is one of the most popular Plone add-ons for more than a decade now. It started with Plone 2, then added support for Plone 3, Plone 4 and Plone 5. Is Plone 6 the end for EEA Faceted Navigation or it is a new beginning?

Slow tests suck. They are annoying and slow down you and your team. Hours and hours of engineer time is lost waiting for the CI to finish. I'll go through a number of approaches and principles to help you write fast tests.

As part of the Erasmus+ project "ITONBOARD", we developed a concept for a Blended Remote Internship with which we broke new ground. Like pieces of a mosaic, we collected pieces from different worlds and thus linked best practice examples from IT companies on the topic of remote work, knowledge about internships in general, internships in the context of Erasmus+, experiences with e-learning and finally scholarships for online student projects. We interviewed CEOs and employees of remote working companies. On the topic of e-learning and blended learning, we conducted interviews with teachers and students in the participating countries. For the scientific support of our concept, we were able to win Prof. Bernd Gössling from the University of Innsbruck, an expert in vocational learning, who drew our attention to important pedagogical aspects.

Quaive is a social intranet platform. It is a toolbox that you can use to organise how you work together internally, and it allows for people to connect. But it doesn't tell you how to use it - you get to find that out by yourself when applying it to your organisation. Here are a few stories what happened to people when they got quaive.

We are not in the docker-world yet, at least not for deploying sites. Last year we had to publish several Volto sites in production and needed some automated way to handle those deployments because Volto's build process takes so time. We have manged to build a CI-CD pipeline using Gitlab-CI and several other tools to release, build and publish volto addons and sites in an automated way. Earlier this year we published a blog-post explaining this process and this talk will be the extended version of the blog-post.

We would like to facilitate the work of developers to update and deploy our new versions of applications. So we know that they are used to create eggs and we decide to use the same way to deploy buildout than eggs. It’s the beginning of your journey.
In this talk, I will speak at least about Jenkins, Jenkinsfile, Git(hub), zest.releaser, Puppet, Docker and Plone.

Avec la version en cours de déploiement, c'est le conseil qui est mis à l'honneur avec la gestion des votes et des commissions. Le futur, c'est un travail orienté technologique afin de pouvoir passer dans la nouvelle version de Plone et de Python pour ensuite faire un travail de modernisation ergonomique. Pour deliberations.be, l'enjeu sera d'être prêt pour la mise en vigueur du décret pour les moyennes et petites communes.

L'application permet de dématérialiser et de centraliser les courriers entrants et sortants, qu'ils soient sous la forme papier ou email. Une fois les métadonnées associées à un élément, le service traitant peut assurer les suivi et traitement du courrier. L'application offre ainsi une meilleure traçabilité d'un courrier et de son traitement.

Le framework Hera a été développé et est maintenu par le Sigi, le pendant luxembourgeois d'iMio. Ce framework permet de développer des solutions en low code. Il a été pensé et conçu pour modéliser les activités administratives.

La présentation de la gestion des questions écrites des conseillers communaux vers le collège communal est le premier projet d'iMio dans cette nouvelle technologie et probablement pas le dernier !

La présentation portera sur les chatbots. Pour explorer ce vaste sujet, nous commencerons par définir les chatbots, comprendre leurs grands principes de fonctionnement, ainsi que les différentes formes qu’ils peuvent prendre.

Nous présenterons la méthodologie adoptée pour répondre à la création d’un chatbot, autour de grandes étapes clés.

Nous explorerons, enfin, plusieurs cas pratiques émanant de la mission réalisée pour la commune de Braine-l'Alleud, et finirons par une courte démonstration du chatbot.

This is the story of an inline migration of Plone 4.2 to Plone 5.2 on Python2, then Python 3, then Plone 6.

Bulk & individual control on Volto Content Rules and URL's redirects

mxdev is a utility that makes it easy to work with Python projects containing lots of packages, of which you only want to develop some. It works on top of stable constraints and uses the power of pip and git.

You learn

• why we need it/ what problems it solves,
• how it is used in your day to day work (based on Plone Backend),
• how it compares to zc.buildout
• how to extend it,
• the current state of development and what our future plans are.

Planned are 20 min talk and 10 min Q&A - prepare your questions!

Module Federation is a JavaScript technology based on webpack that handles dependency resolution and the loading/importing of modules, even if they come from external, remote bundles.

A bundle is a set of JavaScript modules which provides some functionality and can be run on its own.

A typical web project often includes multiple bundles to provide all the necessary JavaScript functionality.

In Plone, Module Federation helps us to prevent loading the same dependencies multiple times.

Think of a Plone add-on with a JavaScript bundle which uses Leaflet, Select2 and jQuery. Those dependencies are also used by the Plone core JavaScript bundle "Mockup" and other add-ons. These dependencies can - and should - be shared among the different bundles.

This talk explains the concepts behind Module Federation and how we use it in Plone to optimize loading speed.

Nick is a nearly headless CMS written in Node.js. Starting out as proof of concept it is now close to on par with the Plone REST API and works flawlessly with the Volto front-end. This talk will give an introduction to Nick, both from a developer and integrator perspective.

Find out how to level up recommendations to your website based on machine learning open source Python library scikit-learn. Now that we’ve tried its simple and efficient tools ourselves, we will show you hands-on how you can benefit from them. We developed a useful add-on for both Plone Classic and Plone Volto. Get smart content recommendations by using basic Natural Language Processing to integrate this content recommendation system which is accessible for everybody.

The average client has no idea what Plone is, and they don’t really care. They won’t trust something they’ve never heard of, and there are plenty of other solutions out there that claim to offer the same things.

Designers and developers, on the other hand, do care about Plone: an elegant, powerful, secure, scalable, flexible solution to clients’ content management dilemmas. However, clients generally don’t care about the technical stuff – they just want to be online. It’s our job to tell them why Plone is the way to go.

In this talk, we share what we’ve learned about selling Plone to people who don’t care over the last 15 years.

NucliaDB is a cloud native database, indexing vectors, text , paragraphs and relations. It combines searchability and eventual consistency with scalability and agility.

Besides Nuclia providing the conversion of unstructured data to a normalized format that NucliaDB is able to ingest, NucliaDB standalone is useful for lots of other use cases such:

• Providing searchability with already extracted data and vectors

• As a scalable storage layer for container based resource management

In this talk I'm going to explain how to use NucliaDB for your search project from zero to a search application on top, from monolithic to scalable solution. NucliaDB could be used as a backend for Plone/Guillotina/Volto for providing AI Search features

The upcoming final release of Plone 6 will provide a stable, battle tested UI architecture to build projects upon and which people already using previous versions of Volto could upgrade easily. Volto 16 will be the LTS version of Plone 6 final.

After this milestone, the community should continue evolving and catching up with the ever-changing "modern" JavaScript ecosystem. React 18, modern backend fetching both in client and in Server Side Rendering, newest routing engines, are some of the technology challenges ahead.

Other amazing features are in store for the times to come too. The evolution of Volto's UX/UI: Quanta design system. Slots, the evolution of classic portlets. And many more.

This demo covers how the automated release works on Plone 6 projects ( frontend and backend ) for the github.com/eea Volto add-ons and Python eggs.

On each release on frontend and backend projects, a text is extracted that contains all the relevant information using the changelog of the updated Volto add-ons, Python eggs and the Plone/Volto releases. The unified changelog is then saved on the release on GitHub, and can later be viewed in the control panel from volto-eea-kitkat addon.

The GitHub repositories eea/eea-website-frontend and eea/eea-website-backend will be used in the demo. The automation jobs are running in Jenkins.

With more than 7000 scientists and employees, the "Forschungszentrum Jülich" (FZJ), is one of the largest research institutions in Europe.

After 18 months of development, the main portal fz-juelich.de was relaunched with Plone in April 2022, together with 11 institute websites, 80 institute department websites, and hundreds of other FZJ websites.

All FZJ websites use the modern Plone 6 stack that consists of a Plone backend, Plone REST API and the new ReactJS-based Volto frontend.

During my 15+ experience as a Plone consultant, developer, trainer and project manager, the online software ecosystem has exploded into a complex but essential part of most organisations and their core processes. I have consulted quite a few organisations in the last few years where Plone has fallen out of grace of management and the responsible manager is looking for a replacement CMS.

Almost always (and there's not a milder way to put this) the reason is one of mis-management because of wrong expectations and assumptions about what is required nowadays and which organisational resources are required to operate a large CMS backed website besides the software itself. By the time I get involved it's almost always too late: it's easier to save your face as a manager by switching to another CMS and blame the software than admit you are responsible by not understanding and underfunding the context in which the software really can and will shine.

Actually: the responsible manager is often not to blame as well because it's the developers and integrators like me and the Plone community itself that does a poor job of giving context and guidance on a management level.

This talk is not only for said managers, but even more for integrators, developers and the Plone community at large providing Plone to clients.

Rai Way is the pioneer of broadcasting in Italy, it operates in the network infrastructure and services sector for broadcasters, telecommunications operators, private companies, and public administrations. Rai Way chose Plone as the CMS for their new website and their new hiring platform.

As the pandemic hit, everybody had to adapt. Those who could, switched to remote working even if their infrastructure wasn't ready for it. This affected people in very different ways, depending on their line of work, their socio-economic status, their home and family situation, their location, cultural background, and their access to technology. The results were, to be blunt, rather mixed. Some fault lines within our society were sharply accentuated, whereas there were also unexpected and expected positives for others. As we are still adapting to new realities, I want to take a nuanced look on what worked, what really didn't work and what could be ways to minimize negative impacts and retain some of the positives.

We will see how we can enhance the experience in navigating through our site of non-hierarchic content, especially for returning visitors. Together with well thought meta data and keywording, a search can guide your user through your site. We will use features of a search engines like Elasticsearch to grade up search results: Show the context of a search string in a result, searching fuzzy and with decompounding and stemming to tolerate typos and finding inflections of words.The content itself is fitted with links on meta data for accessing related content, and more. Beyond the search, the returning visitor has bookmarking at his diposal to save not only content but also search queries to bookmark his field of interest.But good user experience means also less clicks to find relevant content. So even strategies to avoid searches can increase the comfort for a user. One of these little helpers is a glossary turned into tooltips on content.

This talk introduces the Nuclia API and explains how to use it in Plone. The Nuclia API, with its open-source data base, is a unique solution to index unstructured data. Unlike ElasticSearch or Algolia which expect you to provide a structured JSON containing the data to be indexed, Nuclia accepts any unstructured data such as a file, a text, or a link to web page. Let's imagine your website references YouTube videos or hosts actual video files. Using the Nuclia API, you can have these videos fully indexed and searchable without any additional infrastructure. All text is extracted from the audio tracks, and key concepts like names, dates, places, etc., are identified and indexed. A customizable widget provides an out-of-the-box search widget that supports search suggestions, content preview, and direct jump to a given paragraph in a video ; and a JS SDK allow to use Nuclia directly from your own Volto components.

The Plone community has a strong tradition of software testing and continuous integration.

But what’s really happening during the half hour or so it takes to test a change to Plone, and is it serving us well?

I’ll review our current test processes, the history of how we got here, and point out some opportunities to make it even better.

The talk will be focused on testing Plone itself, but a lot of the techniques are also relevant to projects built on top of Plone, and to other web software.

Ways to optimize and use Plone to serve hundreds of logged-in users concurrently.

Plone 6 comes with two great UI options, in the this talk we will have a look at, what has changed in the good old classic UI. We will go over some new features like responsive images and what to pay attention to when upgrading from older versions of Plone.

Presentation of the adaptations of Plone 6 Classic to meet the needs of local governments for public sites. Including: complex pages, custom structure and layout, integration of partner sites, information sharing, multi-site search engine.