Building a Collaborative News Platform with Plone

In this presentation, Érico will introduce the tools and solutions used to build and maintain Pendect.com.
Plone is the core of a solution that integrates with Thumbor, DBpedia, ElasticSearch, IFTTT and Archive.org

Transcript

1. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
   Building a
   Collaborative News Platform
   with Plone
   Érico Andrei
   CTO & Co-Founder of Pendect
   ericof@pendect.com | @ericof
   

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2. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
   Introductions
   

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3. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
   Érico Andrei
   Brazilian, living in Berlin
   Open Source
   Python Software Foundation Fellow
   Plone Foundation Board Member
   Past
   Microsoft, Simples Consultoria, Rocket Internet, Wundertax
   

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4. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
   Pendect tl;dr
   TL;DR collaborative news platform
   Facts > Opinions
   launched in March / 2020, still in beta
   

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5. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
   Pendect
   Ashley Winkler
   Co-Founder • Design, Product, People
   Christoph Janke
   Co-Founder • Finances, Marketing, Quality
   Érico Andrei
   Co-Founder • Technology, Automation, Security
   

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6. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
   Planning
   Pendect
   

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7. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
   The idea
   Building a TL;DR news platform.
   Short cards > long articles
   Cards are submitted by our community (Pentributors)
   Cards metadata include: tags, people, organizations and locations
   Users can follow tags to create a personal feed
   For each new Card, we plant a tree
   

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8. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
   Technical Requirements
   Collaborative workflow
   Permission control
   Metadata and Categorization
   SEO friendly, Organic Growth
   Leverage external specialized services
   Open Source
   

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9. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
   Pendect
   Stack
   

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10. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Plone for Content Management System
    Most features out of the box
    Adapt instead of build from scratch
    Proven record with News Portals
    Friendly community with very smart people
    

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11. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    DBpedia for Metadata and Categorization
    Wikipedia dataset
    Spotlight to detect entities in texts
    Docker image to run locally -- but dataset is a bit
    outdated
    Sparql to DBpedia to retrieve additional info about entities
    

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12. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    And a bit of everything else
    Cloudflare, nginx, Varnish, HAProxy, Ansible
    Thumbor
    Sentry, Mailgun
    IFTTT, Zapier
    Gravatar
    Deepl, ScrappingHub, Archive.org (Wayback machine)
    

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13. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Building
    Pendect
    

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14. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Toolset & Add-ons
    Development speed thanks to some friends
    Python 3 Fstrings, Type Hints, Dataclasses
    Black, Isort, Flake8, PyCharm
    Not many Plone Add-ons
    souper.plone contentrules.slack
    collective.sentry collective.z3cform.datagridfield
    

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15. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Content types
    Default
    Folder, Document, Image, Collection
    Category
    Uses Collection behavior, but allows sub-objects
    Card
    Similar to a News Item, but with more categories
    

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16. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Adapting Plone
    Browser views
    Dashboard → My Feed
    Author Page → Pentributor Profile
    Image / Scale → Proxy to Thumbor
    Content Rules
    Actions: Slack, Email, Webhooks
    Triggers: Principal added to/removed from group
    

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17. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    New features
    Aggregator Pages
    Tags, People, Locations, Organizations
    Development with souper
    Follow Categories, Tags, People, Locations, Organizations
    and Pentributors
    Voting up, bookmarking
    

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18. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    DEO
    External Service
    Translation, auto summary, archiving
    Bridge to DBpedia Spotlight
    Developed with FastAPI  httpx
    Each endpoint has its own dependencies
    Hosted with DigitalOcean Apps Platform
    

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19. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Lessons learned
    Always create upgrade steps and be aware of registry configurations
    Plone training materials are the de facto documentation for Plone
    Plone theming + Resource Registries  JS development is my nightmare
    Plone lacks a simple and working async/delayed solution
    Webp images are not for all -- be careful with caching then
    

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20. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Future
    Steps
    

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21. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Next few weeks
    Contributions
    Translation and auto summary to all Pentributors
    Card Threads
    Similar to Twitter threads, leveraging content relations
    Search improvements
    Moving to ElasticSearch backend
    Move to RelStorage
    

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22. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Out of Beta
    Plone as headless CMS
    Volto and Mobile applications
    Content quality control
    Integrate LanguageTool submission forms
    Auto-tagging
    User management
    Move from default User Folder
    

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23. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    

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24. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    Thank
    you!
    

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25. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
    @ericof
    ericof@pendect.com
    pendect.com/pentributors/@ericof
    @pendecthq
    hello@pendect.com
    pendect.com/pentributors
    https://speakerdeck.com/ericof/building-a-collaborative-news-platform-with-plone
    

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