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

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
2. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com Introductions
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
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
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
6. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com Planning Pendect
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
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
9. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com Pendect Stack
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
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Wikipedia dataset Spotlight to detect entities in texts Docker image to run locally -- but dataset is a bit outdated Sparql to DBpedia to retrieve additional info about entities
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)
13. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com Building Pendect
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
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
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
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
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
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
20. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com Future Steps
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
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
23. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com
24. Érico Andrei | @ericof | ericof@pendect.com | pendect.com Thank you!
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