Why Discover Magazine Chose Plone

Firstly, I am honored to have been asked to present at the 5th annual Plone Conference, this year to be held in Naples, Italy. I have never been to Italy, so I am particularly excited.

My presentation title is "Plone for Media" and here is the summary:

Plone is an outstanding choice as a platform for media websites. Newspapers, magazines and radio stations have all chosen to deploy on Plone for its ease-of-use, advanced feature set, open standards, accessibility, multi-lingual capabilities, and high scalability.

This session will discuss the elements needed for media sites and how Plone (along with many well-supported add-on products) meets those needs. Features such as video streaming, blogging, podcasting, ad serving and RSS will be discussed. Attendees will learn best practices in approaching the development and structure of media websites using Plone.

Discover Magazine (DISCOVERmagazine.com), a leading US science magazine that recently re-launched its website on Plone will be used as a case study.

If anybody has a specific interest on what I should cover, please let me know.

For a preview of what we did with Discover, I just published a highly-detailed case study on Plone.net. Some of the key highlights:

• DISCOVER chose Plone for its rich feature set, development community, ease-of-use, reputation and economics.
• Before Plone, it took DISCOVER up to three weeks to publish a magazine issue online. With Plone, that has been cut to as few as three days.
• Streaming video, blogs, podcasts, RSS feeds and photo galleries are enabled and integrated by Plone.
• Integration of social networking sites like Digg and Reddit has resulted in an increase in site traffic of nearly 70%.
• Any site content can be made "Subscriber-only" by DISCOVER editors.
• Plone automatically generates related articles for each of the thousands of articles on the site. No manual intervention is required.
• Thousands of articles were successfully and automatically migrated from DISCOVER's old CMS into Plone with no loss of inbound links.
• DISCOVERmagazine.com is a high-traffic site that performs extremely well under heavy load.

Comments

[Martin Aspeli]

Scott, I can't praise you enough for that case study on plone.net. It's really excellent: exactly the right tone and level of detail, and it makes a very strong case for Plone. Thank you!

[Gerry Kirk]

Great write-up, Scott. I hope in future we can showcase case studies like these so more people can find the good nuggets.

[Robert D.]

Great coverage on Plone. I am actually working on a CMS-based site for a client at the moment -- after reading this and several other posts of yours, I will definitely consider it. Good luck at the conference!

PS: Could you add an RSS icon to your subscribe link? It took me about a minute to find it on your site. The ones available www.feedicons.com have done the job for me.