So, another year, and another film festival site to be built. For the Roze Filmdagen, the Amsterdam LGBTQ Film Festival, I create a new website every year. This year was the ‘superhero’ edition.
Of course, I wanted to use shiny new Plone 5, with the latest tech and features. So, how does that work in comparison to previous years?
- Creating a theme is almost embarrassingly easy these days. I followed the training docs and basically created a variety on Barceloneta. Using bobtemplates gives you much freedom, and it’s a joy to use LESS.
- One of the big challenges is how to present a grand total of 136 screenings in a way that is easy to navigate, filter and slice. I used the fabulous collective.isotope to show all movies in the programme so you can sort them by day, theme, sort of movie and other ways. That works also really well on mobile. Which, by the way, is rather vital to us. A staggering 71% of our site visitors are on mobile devices…
- Mosaic. Oh, mosaic. How I love thee. We really need a proper release soon. I was using it from git directly, but that is not something for the inexperienced integrator. But Mosaic makes editing complex pages a real joy.
It is also worth noting that one of my long-standing pet peeves, namely the insane way of formatting dates, can be completely addressed by using Patternslib, more specifically pat-moment. PAT-MOMENT ALL THE THINGS!!!! Finally, as an integrator, I have full say on how a date and time should be shown, and can make it say human-friendly time announcements as well. Love it.
My main take-aways:
- I’m needing far less add-ons than previous. Add an image to an event-like content type? Use a behaviour, done! And with Diazo and z3c.jbot, I can easily fix up templates the way I want.
- I actually love the resource registry. Adding javascript always was a hit-and-miss thing for me, as I’m an integrator and not a developer. Using bundles it becomes predictable. I know the docs on it could be improved (and they have been, since then), but really it helps to let go of the old patterns (no pun intented) and behaviours (oh this is not going well, now is it…) and embrace the new.
- If you’re going mobile-first, as you should, be aware. Safari on iOS is fast becoming the new Internet Explorer. And the Iphone 4 is the modern equivalent of the Windows XP computer. Dear Apple, if you are not allowing alternative browsers on your platform, could you please get your shit together and make sure Safari speaks some standards? Like, now?
All in all, for my purpose, Plone 5 passed the test with flying colours. OK, so it’s not a huge site. But it was completed, on budget (well, the budget is zero so that’s easy), in one weekend. Yay!
Most of all, visitors (all 9.500 people actually coming in to watch a movie, and the web visitors from abroad) were rather pleased.
So, is Plone a superhero? Well, that’s pushing it. But it sure made my job easier and more pleasant this year, and proves it scales quite well to small/medium tasks. And I should mention quite a few people in the ploniverse that are my personal heroes for making it happen. So thanks Nathan, various Erics, Ramon, Asko, Maurits, Philip and so many many more. Sorry I can’t mention you all, but you know who you are…
Plus, any site I can update with latest news while wearing 12 inch heels passes my ergonomic tests. Well, the shoes were not very ergonomic, but you get my drift…
