This document summarizes a project to create a content management system for a large online retailer in Italy to manage marketing content across multiple brands and sites. The system needed to integrate existing content, provide speed, flexibility, and coherence. The solution involved aggregating content in Plone and using Genshi templating to publish content across sites. It also featured primary content organized as folders with composition of objects and multicast publication. Lessons learned included defining functional areas clearly and having multiple presentation layers while managing as a single system.

1. fitting
in a custom stack

2. Who am I
● Simone Deponti
● Python/Plone developer @
Abstract
● simone.deponti@abstract.it

3. The customer
● Largest on-line retailer in Italy
● Several brands

4. The initial situation
March of the Cart
Catalog empire
Marketing kingdom
...and a lot of small Imperial cities

5. The problem
● Need to manage “marketing” content
● To integrate already existing content
● Stand alone

6. The problem (2)
● “Large theatre of operations”
● Must maintain good relations with
“neighbouring states”
● Parallel universes (multisite)

7. What do we need?
Speed
Flexibility
Coherence

8. I better clarify...

9. Speed
● No
● Repetitive tasks
● “useless” steps
● Yes
● One click one kill

10. Flexibility
● Marketing is not accounting
● Creatives
● Exception is routine
● Knowledged users
● Web is their work
● Possesses skills (that we can leverage)

11. Coherence
● Few base concepts
● Stick to them!
● Fast training

12. The solution
● “Aggregated” content
● “multicast” publication
● Information Architecture CMS != IA Site

13. The solution (2)
● Primary content
● Page is folder
● Object “composition”
● Templating (Genshi)

14. The solution (3)
● “primary” content
● Explicit positioning of root element
● Site-level multicast
● Internal structure follows Plone IA

15. The solution (4)
● Several content types
● “Standalone” or providing interfaces
to internal WS
● Can be used within “primary” content

16. Lessons learned
● Plone's structure is optimal to manage content
● Presenting content is an altogether different
story
● In the presentation layer, multiple is good, while
managing, it's a <CENSORED>

17. Lessons learned
● Integration is simple if functional area are well
defined and grouped
● Several ways:
● Webservice
● SQL
● Etc etc

18. Challenges
● Know the stack
● Automated refresh
● Componentize, componentize, componentize

19. And then?
● You can always do better
● Still too many useless steps
● Fine grained security
● UI polishing

20. Cast
● Plone
● Genshi
● SQLAlchemy
● PostgreSQL
● SOLR