A talk about issues specific to intranet sites.

An intranet site is a different beast than a publicly available internet site. Differences are

• High percentage logged in users
• Large(r) number of contributors
• Simpler, more trusting, workflows
• Re-use of content (e.g. for print)

When creating an intranet site, one should have a different mindset than when creating a internet site.

Tips related to content creation:

• Use the presentation mode to create "powerpoint" type content.
• Plone can generate a table of contents for you and previous/next links, which will make large documents easier to navigate.
• You can prepare 'template' collections which other contributers can re-use. By adding specialised views for the collection, the client can use collections more often and have the result they need with minimal, one-off solutions. Collections can also be used to populate a portlet.
• Since the 'default page' construct can be quite confusing, it may be beneficial to add a folderish type which also allows for a chunk of text. By having this content type, most of the default page problems can be avoided.
• Use content rules! (You can, e.g. abuse the content rules to send an email when an object is added to remind the user to actually submit a page. Or use the notification action to help user when they have created their first item.) See collective.contentrules.mail that provides sophisticated features for sending mail in a content rule.

Content managment

• Images and files have no own workflow, but inherrit the workflow of the folder they are in.
• Intranets are probably served best by another workflow then an internet site. (Allowing owners to edit published pages for instance.)
• You can even ask yourself the question whether you even need different workflow states... You can, for instance, use a single state workflow.
• Another approach is using a "pending" state signalling the owner asks for help on a content item.
• The owner of the item is probably the best person to decide whether content should be published just internally or world wide.
• The product DCWorkflowGraph van be used to visualise the workflow in a help section.
• By using Placeful Workflow you can e.g. limit a strict workflow to a certain part of the site.

Add-on products often used

• PloneFormGen
• Poi; intended for software but can be used in other contexts as well
• plone.contentrating

Theming

• When theming, keep in mind that add-on products can leverage e.g. the document actions.
• The body HTML tag has a class name with the id of the item.
• CSSManager

Deployment

• Single sign on can be very useful for intranets.

See http://plonebootcamps.com/resources/intranets.pdf/view for the handouts of the presentation.