Plone, Drupal Coexistence in Higher Ed (PSM14 Recap)

This is a recap of Calvin Parker's presentation at the Plone Symposium Midwest 2014

CONTENT IS KING

Everyone in marketing has become obsessed with content marketing, and the demand for more people in more departments to have a way to create content has driven the creation of more websites.

Fast Forward

The problem with this rapid explosion of content across organizations is many websites have been rapidly created on different platforms with not central strategy.

Plone & Drupal have a 70% Coexistence in Higher Ed

Because of this we have seen that, as recent as March of 2014, about 70% of every U.S. university that uses Plone also uses Drupal to some level.

How Do you Control Web Branding, Content & Infrastructure?

Consolidating is an option

Some organizations choose the obvious approach of trying to consolidate all of their websites onto a single platform. This can work and we even have a solution for it called WebUnity, but it can also be expensive and time consuming. You have to:

Evaluate CMSs and vendors
Migrate all your content and themes
Deal with Bit Rot
Train everyone on the new system

This can also be demotivating and polarizing when people refuse to change.

There is another option: Integration!

Keep all your content and websites in their existing CMS
Connect those sites so they can syndicate and track content

UCLA Case Study

Large University with a central IT department, but all of the content management is done independently by the various departments. Integration via a tool like PushHub allows them to have independent teams share content across sites and keep the content up to date as it changes or is retracted.

What is PushHub?

PushHub is a content syndication system built with:

Pyramid w/ ZODB
Redis
Feedparser
Solr

It uses the Pubsubhubbub standard from Google.

PHP - I can't believe I'm about to do this...

PushHub can easily be called from PHP based CMSs like Drupal and WordPress, as well as from Plone. See slides 18-21 above for sample code.

Demo

You can easily create content across several Plone and Drupal websites.

When creating content, simply publish and share to PushHub
Then on another site you can search PushHub and select content to show up in a related articles widget or other content areas
You can control if just the title shows up or an extract
You can even copy an entire article from one site to the other and keep it in sync and with the canonical source marked correctly for SEO
When you update the master copy, all other copies get a notification and update instantly

See the slides for examples or the webinar recording on the link below.

Plone, Drupal Coexistence in Higher Ed (PSM14 Recap)

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