In the past few days, some readers (Yay! I have at least a couple) have inquired about the status of our Newspaper project. We have made some progress, though a release will probably not happen before a month or two.
Part of the reason for this delay is that we got a bit sidetracked with the recent presidential elections held here in Mexico. La Jornada, the newspaper that is paying for this project, needed to quickly create a web site dedicated to the elections and this took all the time away from Julius (the code name for our product).
On the positive side, we used Plone for this special site, along with part of the Julius skin, and successfully handled more than 50,000 visitors a day. So, Plone can be used for high volume sites all right. Best of all, we also took this oportunity to test some cutting edge stuff.
Anyway, even though we are behind schedule, the code that we have so far is available from our svn repository, so if you are interested it is possible to take a look at it right now. Check out our Trac server at http://julius.jornada.com.mx for details. The wiki is in Spanish, but the code is there.
Right now we have:
- Modules to convert HTML exported from QuarkXpress into NITF files.
- Code to import those files and create an "edition", which is made of articles and photos. The photos are correctly included inside their corresponding article and also are made available in an album for browsing the photos of the day (we use ATPhoto for this).
- Code to integrate all edition materials into a dynamic front page, powered by Composite Pack.
- Code to implement dynamic schemas for custom variations of the article content type (which, by the way, is based on PloneArticle). Users can create for example an 'interview' or an 'opinion piece' and add relevant fields to their custom types through the use of the ATSchemaEditor product.
- Code to manage an edition and its contents, including the beginnings of an API.
This code is structured as a 'newspaper' product. Inside the newspaper you can create 'editions' and custom article types. You can also import NITF files from a directory on the file system and create an edition from them. Inside every edition there is a composite page that is used as the front page for that day, with a variety of viewlets available for easy construction.
As part of the project we have also developed some simple 'support' products, which are also available from the repository in various degrees of completeness:
- TreeField and TreeWidget for Archetypes, practically ready for a 1.0 release.
- ZPDojo, a fork of the product with the same name available from plone.org. Our product upgrades ZPDojo to use the latest version of the Dojo Toolkit. We would like to contribute this to the original product authors, but so far we have received no response from them. I have written about this product before. I'd say this is at least ready for a beta release.
- ExternalSources, a product for including content from other sites or really any kind of source inside portlets or documents. External sources are small python scripts (file-based) that return information in HTML. This is still in its early stages.
As you will plainly see, most of the code is at best of alpha quality and there is no documentation, so you have been warned. Still, if you can, take a look and tell us what you think. Also, the code will be released under the GPL, so anyone can contribute and we'll be very happy to talk to you if you want to help.
Read: Progress on Plone for Newspapers
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