Plone @ K.U.Leuven

Peter Jacobs

World Plone Day 27/04/2011

Software systems @ ICTS

• ICTS = Central IT department for the university• Administration: SAP• E-learning: Blackboard, QMP, Mediawiki, Wordpress• Collaboration and e-mail: MS Exchange,MS Sharepoint

Portal Server• User/group directories: LDAP and MS AD• Custom web applications: LAMP• Intranet, extranet, internet websites: Plone

Central web landscape

Groupware

Admin. en Educational Portal

Web-sites

Focus on

Information

Focus onspecific domains

Focus op

collaboration

WMS requirements

• High availability => fail-over and disaster recovery• Must be ready for peak loads• Use virtual machines with VMWare ESX• Use existing technologies

– Apache for HTTP(S), Shibboleth, loadbalancing– Caching => mod_cache, Squid– Repository on redundant hardware

• ZEO => RelStorage with Oracle

Some numbers from 2007

• Number of accounts on the central web-servers– 1050 (700 active in 2007 with 700.000 uploads)

• Number of subsites and domains– 940 subsites with own webmaster– 240 domains (150 non-K.U.Leuven like alma.be,

jeannedevos.org, …)

• Number of hits (7 day statistics)– Total accesses: 50.000.000– Total Traffic: 180 GB – Average of 75 hits/sec (between 10h and 16h: 175 hits/sec )

• Goal: move as much as possible to Plone

Architectural setup

Integration with backend repositories

• Faculty and Staff information from SAP– SOAP webservices (ZSI)– Custom Zope application

• Publications repository DSpace (Lirias)– SOAP webservices

• MS SharePoint Portal Server / Active Directory– ?

• Many others– Focus on standard interchange protocols– Or just an iframe

Users, groups, access restrictions

• Essential functionality• Plone has good support!• No local users in Plone• Shibboleth: authentication (+ user/group info)• LDAP: lists + user info ( + group info)• Towards Identity and Access Management

People

• ICTS WMS group:• Kim Paulissen, Yulia Kallistratova, Peter Jacobs, Jan Van

Hees• With help from Plone experts:

• Godefroid Chapelle, Laurent Lasudry, Jean-François Roche, Wouter Vanden Hove, Marc Vanderstraeten

• First goal: help us get up to speed• Later: develop specific packages

• In collaboration with other teams:• ICTS Linux system support group• ICTS Datacenter• ICTS Network group• ICTS Security group• Local admins in faculties and central service groups

Clean development with packages

AuthN&AuthZSiteDelegation

kuleuven.theme_default

kuleuven.fck

kuleuven.sitedelegation

Huisstijl - feature

kuleuven.XXX - own package

kuleuven.config_shibboleth

- dependency

Products.Tableless

Products.FCKeditor

VisualEditor

kuleuven.metadata_default

archetypes.schemaextender

Theming (huisstijl)kuleuven.config_ldap

BiLinguility

kuleuven.patches

collective.monkeypatcher

Forms

PloneFormGen

kuleuven.policy_defaultSubSite

kuleuven.substieroot

patches

Multiple upload

collective.uploadify

kuleuven.portlets

yyy.zzz - ext. packageGlobal f&replace

collective.searchandreplace

collective.weightedportlets

Development practises

+ local egg server

Future

• Upgrade to Plone 4.x• Integrate more external repositories• Move to new loadbalancer and webcache• Add more K.U.Leuven websites• Improve Plone-site As A Service