The Big Green Button: Turning Plone into a dynamic site factory (Carlos de la Guardia)

Plone is a great CMS but is it the best product to actually deliver the content?

Carlos dreams of “the big green button”: export a Plone site as a static HTML site with the push of a single button. Plone is a great CMS, but is not necessarily the best way to deliver the content to the users. One of the problems of Plone is that it isn’t very fast. Performance cannot originate from caching alone. Logged in users also need to have quick response.

By using Content Mirror, you can have your content automatically stored in a database layer. This allows you to get to your data without having to use Plone, while all the data is still maintained by Plone.

Now the content is out, we need to present it. This is where WSGI comes in. This allows us to use different pieces of Python software and connect them. The Python community sees Zope/Plone a bit as ‘unpythonic’. By using Repoze we can make stuff that can also be used by the Python community through WSGI, without having to use Zope. This should bring us a bit closer to the Python community. The repoze.bfg framework can use the ZODB, page templates, while still being a simple framework.

Deliverance is a WSGI ‘fake frontend’ to make the technology in the back look nice. Not just Zope/Plone output, but any HTML. This way one doesn’t have to have any knowledge about the technology (page templates, skins, etc.) to create a look-and-feel of a site. You just have to worry about the front end.

As Carlos demonstrated: using repoze.bfg and deliverance as a front end for the Plone site is fast!