plonewars.com

Webdesigners know a lot about webpages and how to design and build
them. On the other side there are the web content management systems
that know how to maintain content. Those CMSs do make it harder to
change the interface.

It is based on an idea of Paul Everitt, so by definition it has XSLT
at the heart of it. It divides “content” and “theme”. Templating still
has a place on the CMS/content side of things, it are the looks that
are to be separated out. The output of the content part is: html. The
output of the theme part is: html and css.

Deliverance takes the html of the content part and the html+css of the
theme part and hooks them up together based upon a mapping. Did we
mention XSLT? Basically you grab identifiable chunks out of the
content and inject them into the theme’s html.

You can have deliverance running as either a proxy server or as
wsgi. It has both a python and an xslt transformation engine, the xslt
one is twice as fast at the moment. The python transformation engine
does mean that you can do all python can do to the content that comes
out of it eventually.

Deliverance has a couple of xml files that are loaded by a top-level
rule xml file that defines which html items to grab from the source
and where to inject them in the theme. You can even grab bits and
pieces from different files. The demo he showed was to put plone.org’s
content in burningman’s website. A comment he got was “you’re helping
phishing sites”

A real example: http://openplans.org/projects/topp-the-organization is
the content, http://topp.openplans.org is the site that gets created
out of it. They also use it for some other sites, mixing the theme of
the actual site with the openplans.org content management stuff.

According to what I heard, it seemed that Limi liked the approach and
that a variant of this approach might end up as the default way to

Nate Aune gave a second demonstration. He deals a lot with small
artists that have a small html-only website designed by the proverbial
nephew. After a while, they want something more, but can’t as they
don’t have a CMS. In cases like this, deliverance can allow you to
manage your content in plone, while reusing the original html site’s
layout.

There are a couple of challenges. In a way, a lot of double work is
being done. Plone renders a complete page, but afterwards most of it
gets cut away. A way to handle this is to make the plone interface
much more lightweight.

Rob showed a possible upcoming openplans
architecture
where deliverance is placed right up in front.