Arkestra at DjangoCon Europe 2012

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‗ Arkestra

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Daniele Procida Cardiff University School of Medicine

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How should a CMS best publish information for an organisation?

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Arkestra is my attempt to answer the question ... based on about 10 years’ experience as a user ... of sites from very small ones to very large ones

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WordPress Website Baker Percussion Rhythmyx Plone Wikis Drupal Freeway Joomla! ModX phpWebSite Typo3 HTML and server-side includes DreamWeaver ...amongst others I’ve tried and used

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What typically happens you have to repeat yourself data get wasted & lost content & presentation become inconsistent information in templates gets broken & petriﬁes information ages, withers & dies users play fast & loose the larger the site the worse the problems

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No happy medium there’s not enough freedom users can’t do what they need to there’s too much freedom users can easily do things they shouldn’t ... at the same time

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Everything is horrible

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Arkestra’s solution: Create a model of the real world

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Information, not just data we want information, not useless stupid data templates don’t hold information semantic modelling of real-world relationships use semantics to inform output and assist the user

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Organisations generally want to publish information about themselves need to be contacted have members ... who occupy roles stand in relation to other organisations ...and have others within them ... and are parts of others hold events have news ... and so on

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SCHOOL OF MEDICINE IS AN ORGANISATION

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SCHOOL OF MEDICINE CANCER & GENETICS INFECTION & IMMUNITY MEDICAL EDUCATION EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE PSYCHOLOGY & NEUROSCIENCE CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY HAS OTHER ORGANISATIONS WITHIN IT

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CARDIFF UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF MEDICINE CANCER & GENETICS INFECTION & IMMUNITY MEDICAL EDUCATION EXPERIMENTAL MEDICINE PSYCHOLOGY & NEUROSCIENCE CLINICAL EPIDEMIOLOGY PHYSICS MUSIC MATHEMATICS LAW BIOSCIENCES ARCHITECTURE PSYCHOLOGY EUROPEAN STUDIES COMPUTER SCIENCE ENGINEERING DENTISTRY OPTOMETRY CHEMISTRY ARCHEOLOGY AND IS PART OF A LARGER ORGANISATION

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Entities an organisation School of Medicine a part of an organisation Institute of Infection & Immunity Research Ofﬁce a group of other entities Research institutes Administrative & support ofﬁces a collection of people Web editors

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studentships vacancies events news pages places people roles entities Entities & the rest of the world

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PAGES ENTITIES

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Arkestra’s guiding principle: Don’t waste people’s time

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Don’t re-enter, re-use Make everything re-usable and re-use it Make it easier to re-use than re-enter

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Integration with django CMS

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django CMS & Arkestra django CMS & Arkestra grew up together have been developed alongside each other portions of django CMS conceived as part of Arkestra integration with pages, placeholders/plugins, menus

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The Semantic Presentation Editor

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create complex, ﬂexible, multiple-column layouts produce well-structured semantic HTML need no HTML/CSS skills Choose only two

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create complex, ﬂexible, multiple-column layouts produce well-structured semantic HTML need no HTML/CSS skills Have all three!

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designs & layouts are not baked in to templates we need only a few, simple, templates it frees & constrains users it encourages good practice it produces decent output it’s easy to use it makes modifying site templates easier it makes pages inspectable by the system

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developed by Luke Plant not just for Arkestra, but any django CMS instance bitbucket.org/spookylukey/semanticeditor Development & application

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At the School of Medicine: How Django & Arkestra worked for us

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Some numbers 4000 pages a day about 10000 pages of content 1383 manually-created (django CMS) pages 1879 people in 2392 roles across 180 entities 504 news articles and 711 events 2582 plugins (links, images, news, events, etc) around 40 web editors

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Everything is great

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Conceiving Arkestra Knowing less & thinking more

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What I knew about programming

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September 2008: heard about Python & Django April/May 2009: took a 5-day Python/Django course May 2009: understood the concept of a model May 2009: started working on Arkestra July 2009: understood the concept of a method December 2009: Arkestra launched to our users March 2010: our Arkestra site went live! March 2012: Arkestra ﬁt for public consumption

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The user’s perspective think like a user suffer like a user be a user

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And now

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Development continues

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Who’s using Arkestra? Cardiff University School of Medicine Iceland Academy of the Arts Cell Medica Ltd (medical research company) The Laugharne Weekend (literature/music festival) ... plus several of my own

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Thanks to Python and Django, I stopped being a frustrated and resentful user of horrible, badly- designed web CMS software that I could do nothing about.

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Now I am the fulﬁlled and happy author of a system that behaves pleasantly and people enjoy using.

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And it does what I imagined it could do.

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‗ Arkestra Daniele Procida daniele@vurt.org evildmp on github, irc.freenode.net, etc arkestra-project.org