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Interview with Francesco Ciriaci, Reflab
The interview, led by Ofer Weisglass, explores the Zope and Plone world in Europe, and the present and the future of the projects and the business around these powerful technologies. Reflab is part of Zope Europe since beginning 2003.
Interview – Reflab, Italy – Francesco Ciriaci - Ofer Weisglass, Israël – October 2004
The Interview Was on IRC – 8/10/2004
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OferW |
Please introduce yourself and your company |
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Ciriaci |
My name is Francesco Ciriaci and I am a developer and consultant working in Reflab |
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OferW |
Could you tell us a little about Reflab? |
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Ciriaci |
Reflab is an associate studio providing high level expertise in Zope/Plone in Europe (and beyond). Reflab is located in Pisa, Italy. |
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OferW |
Can you tell the history of Reflab with Zope and Plone? |
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Ciriaci |
Reflab was born in 2001 from the association of Zope expert developers to provide knowledge and expertise to other Zope Service Providers and Large Zope Accounts. We have been working with Zope since 1999.... and with Plone 2 years before that. (before 1.1). We are totally committed to Zope and Plone and we release it as free software with almost every piece of software we develop. |
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OferW |
What is going on with open source, Zope and Plone in Italy? |
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Ciriaci
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Open source is going mainstream in Italy right now. It's a very positive situation. |
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Ciriaci |
Plone is growing like in every other country... fast! |
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OferW |
I am happy about that. |
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Ciriaci |
We have a good Zope community, still a bit "young", but growing |
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OferW |
What makes Zope/Plone different from other technologies |
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Ciriaci |
It is very easy and fast to deploy. It's agile to customize (Python rules) moreover is has a lot of the "infrastructure" needed to build "enterprise-class" CMS i.e. multilingual, i18n, versioning and workflow, ... and it is sexy ;) |
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OferW |
Can you tell us about Reflab projects with Zope/Plone? |
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Ciriaci |
We work mainly on a Plone-based CMS right now.... Reflab mainly helps other companies and "large Zope accounts", so we have the opportunity to work with and see, a lot of different Zope/Plone projects. We have also some projects that are almost only "ours", the most important being the Reflow workflow engine, We are putting a lot of work into improving Plone for Document Management. |
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OferW |
You have listed many projects in one sentence! |
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Ciriaci |
(yes, maybe too many :) ) |
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OferW |
Now I am sure you have a lot of work to do :) |
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Ciriaci |
Hehehe |
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OferW |
What is the reflow workfow engine? |
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Ciriaci |
Reflow is a porting of Openflow into Plone, it's an activity based workflow engine for Zope |
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OferW |
What is PloneCampus? |
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Ciriaci |
PloneCampus is a project financed by the University of Bari, a verticalization of Plone for university portals (and intranets later) It helps publish all the academic activities of the university on the web and it offers tools to students and teachers to collaborate and exchange information. |
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OferW |
How long have you been working on this project? |
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Ciriaci |
About 8 months (but simultaneously, we are working on about 8 other projects) |
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OferW |
Has Plone met your expectations? |
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Ciriaci |
Plone has met our expectations completely, except for some minor trouble we had with release management. |
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OferW |
Can you tell us more about the development process of PloneCampus |
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Ciriaci |
Well, we worked closely with the team at the university to define a first raw schema of the information and of the workflows (at the beginning) using Plone and Archetypes. We could deliver a first working prototype after only 2 weeks. |
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OferW |
That's great |
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Ciriaci |
We
collected a lot of feedback, improve the contents and workflows
and fin ally address usability of the system. I would say that
80% of the work we did was: |
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OferW |
From your experience, most successful Plone projects are like that? |
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Ciriaci |
Well, these are the most "profitable" in my experience. |
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OferW |
What do you think about the Plone community? |
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Ciriaci |
The Plone community is Plone's real strength. |
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OferW |
I agree with that :) |
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Ciriaci |
It
is incredibly open and alive.... |
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OferW |
Could you say a few words on the last Plone conference? |
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Ciriaci |
It
was the more successful conference I've ever been to, from a
business perspective and it's the most open to non community
members. |
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OferW |
Could you tell us what Reflab presented there? What were the talks on? |
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Ciriaci |
Sure! :) we presented both PloneCampus and a Document Management system for Quality certification (based on Plone, of course) |
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OferW |
Could you say a few words about the document management system? |
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Ciriaci |
DMS is quite different to what Plone does by default, but we believe Plone can be an excellent starting point for DMS, especially because it combines good usability with Zope features like external editor, webdav access, versioning.... Plone is aimed mainly at web sites (community or intranet) and the focus is more on collaboration. DMS is more oriented toward binary objects classification, versioning, retrival and so on ... these are quite different things, from the user's point of view. |
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OferW |
What keeps you motivated to work on Plone? |
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Ciriaci |
The community, the fast development, the success it has had. |
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OferW |
What advice would you provide to those being introduced to Plone? |
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Ciriaci |
Just because it "looks" nice and easy, do not think you can work on it without reading documentation, books, how-tos.... and listening to expert advice ;) |
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OferW |
Plone is very young in Israel, can you say anything to the people from Israel? |
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Ciriaci |
Try it once, start to deploy a simple site with it... you will just love it thereafter. |
Links
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Reflab - http://www.reflab.it Plonecampus - http://campus.lex.uniba.it/Giurisprudenza Plone Conference 2004 - http://plone.org/events/conferences/2 Plone - www.plone.org Zope - www.zope.org Zope Europe Association - www.zope-europe.org |
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Contact Details Reflab di Di
Somma, Lemmi e Ciriaci Francesco Ciriaci - francesco@reflab.it Ofer Weisglass – ofer@plone.org.il |
