Drupal recently became a winner of CNet’s Webware 100 award in the publishing category. Drupal is a Free and Open Source Web Content Management software and a web application framework. It is highly used and has been included in the Google Summer of Code (SoC) project. The Google SoC reference’s Drupal as being the poster child for Web 2.0 community driven web site software. I will describe and demonstrate some of the major features of the software as well as some of the limitations. Some specific features we’ll look at are the Content Construction Kit, Views, Taxonomy, and some Content Management functions.

Drupal adheres to some good content management practices. During the discussion we will look and modify some configuration areas for the more technical savvy as well as look at the content managers and content authors interfaces. Although, a computer isn’t required if you bring you laptop you will be able to log on to the site and manage content.

Podcasting and Publishing Multimedia Content with a Web Content Management System: Exploring the Multimedia Features of Plone

Speaker: Nate Aune
Time: 4:45 PM - 5:45 PM Date: November 26

Track: Demonstration & Web Technology

Plone is a flexible open source content management system that is being used by Motorola, Nokia, NASA, Disney, HP, eBay and the Free Software Foundation. PloneMultimedia is a suite of add-on Plone components which make it easy to publish audio/video files and generate podcast feeds.

This talk will demonstrate some of the unique features of PloneMultimedia and discuss case studies where Plone is successfully being used in an artist community to share music and video files.

When a user uploads an audio/video file to the Plone-based website, the metadata (album, artist, producer, etc.) is automatically extracted from the file. Not only does this save the user from tedious data entry, but this metadata is also indexed using Plone’s powerful search tool, so the content is readily searchable.

Plone has the concept of Smart Folders - saved searches that return a list of content based on criteria the site admin specifies. This makes it very easy for non-technical users to generate lists of multimedia content (i.e. all MP3s with genre ‘jazz’).

Using Plone’s built-in workflow engine, the multimedia content can be submitted for review, and approved by a moderator. This ensures that inappropriate user-generated content can be rejected instead of being inadvertently published.

Plone also has many collaborative features which help to foster participation and online community. Users can submit their own multimedia content and comment, rate and tag other users’ content.

Attend this session to learn more!