Latest from Valentine Web Systems

Jeeves Information Systems has Valentine Plone hosting

2012-01-05T01:31:08+01:00

Plone hosting

Recently several cheap Plone hosting alternatives have made their way out on the market, and one of the better we like is Ploud, which is incredible fast and beautiful. We may start our own soon, just need to talk to Alan about licensing the code first :) There are manyPlone hosting providers listed, and starting yesterday we are one too! We now host the Plone sites of Jeeves Information Systems. Our hosting is, for now, aimed for customers who want a full Plone service provider.

Plone hosting to scale

Our hosting is a mix of normal servers and cloud based on Amazon. You as a customer can decide how much you need in order to have your site up and going. We combine the cloud option with normal hosting so you can get extra resources when you need them. Our servers are spread all over the world and located in different data centers by several different companies. This way we can make sure that we always have some servers up somewhere. For more information contact Sasha Vincic.

Is cheap Plone hosting what Plone needs?

Cheap Plone hosting will attract new types of users. Plone's upgrade history hasn't been pretty, as most Plone sites are large and have a lot of custom code. This is a problem that also exists in Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress and other systems that are growing; but in controlled environment like Ploud.com and Wordpress.com users get a great experience since the hoster controls what is available. We think this is a good way of showing users what is available and making them start using Plone. Maybe we'll start our own Ploud :) We might if it will benefit Plone and the community. What do you think?

INCF: Upgrade our site to Plone 4.1 in one week

2011-08-19T01:00:00

Upgrade to Plone 4.1

That was about all they said to us during our first meeting, and they finished by saying that we have 40 hours to do it. They wanted us to take their Plone 3 site which we had never touched and uppgrade it to Plone 4.1 in one week.(Swedish) From our experience we knew that this would be a very difficult challenge to pull off. They said: Surprise us!

We accepted the challenge

We didn't, however, need to start from the beginning. They already had a buildout with an upgrade to Plone 4 which they had already started. In the end we managed to surpass both our and their expectations with flying colours. We had a working Plone 4.1 site up and running after one week!

We deliver Plone services to INCF

INCF were satisfied(Swedish) and decided to continue with our collaboration. We want to thank INCF for their confidence, and to also take the opportunity to thank Metamatrix for letting us be a subcontractor of Plone services.

Do you need a website provider?

Do you need an enthusiastic, knowledgeable and reliable website provider and e-commerce provider who can follow your development long term? Contact Valentine Web Systems for a quotation.

Sipri – upgrade and secure our Plone site

2011-08-18T21:40:00

Upgrade to Plone 4.1

We would like to thank Sipri for entrusting their confidence in us to secure and upgrade their website to Plone 4.1. We had just begin to find our feet after upgrading another site to Plone 4.1, so we felt quite confident in being able to finish the task in one week. See below what the client thought and read more about Valentine and Sipri(SV).

Dear Sasha and Pawel,

It seems that everything works fine now and the website is much faster than ever before.
Of course there will always be one or two things that need to be corrected.

Everything went very smoothly and I really appreciate the good work both of you did for us.
I hope in the future you will also be able to assist us with our website work.

Have a well deserved vacation.
Best regards,
Gerd
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Gerd Hagmeyer-Gaverus
Director
Facts Databases and Early Warning Programme
Director
Information Technology Department

STOCKHOLM INTERNATIONAL
PEACE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Plone conference with Django and Pyramid

2011-07-31T23:55:00

Plone – CMS for web

Plone was released nine years ago, and it was the most secure, beautiful NoSQL CMS and the only one available to that date. Today it is still beautiful, fast and the most secure web CMS. It is going to be very interesting to hear about the plans for Plone, with exciting elements such as Deco and Diazo.

Pyramid – Django

Many Plone developers are using the Pyramid/Django frameworks to create advanced products online; this year there will be a related technology track and I heard that Daniel Greenfeld will talk about Django. Paul Evert is also giving a lecture on Pyramid for humans.

Multilingual sites

If accepted, I for one will give a talk about managing multilingual sites with caveats and tips. It is a non-technical talk which I also gave in 2009 and 2010 which presents use cases from multilingual sites and possible solutions to them. If you have any tips to improve the talk, add a comment or send an email to me.

We build websites

2011-04-04T11:20:00

Your Plone supplier

We build multilingual, safe portals based on Plone. No design is too complex, and no demands are impossible. The impossible just takes a little more time.

Long experience

Fast, high-quality delivery

Long-term client relationships

Ask for a quotation now!

Call Sasha Vinčić at 0708 840 660 or by e-mail.

Jeeves Information Systems AB

"In May 2010 we launched a new website which we've worked with intensively since the turn of the year. The new website has simple management of press releases, more multimedia as well as a powerful and easy-to-use system for multilingual management for the local partner sites. During the whole development process we cooperated closely with Valentine Web Systems who showed strong commitment and they've been very helpful. Sasha and Per at Valentine are very knowledgeable and creative, and they will not give up until they find the best solution. They know how to combine their technical know-how with a good understanding of their customer's needs.

Thanks for a great job!"
Cecilia Kullberg
Jeeves Information Systems

Plone – safe content management

Plone is one of the biggest CMS's that comes with many functions straight from installation. Plone is suited for everything from medium-sized to large websites and portals, both extranet and intranet. It is well prepared to handle several languages and many users. Plone doesn't use a SQL and has proved to be the safest CMS time and time again. Download the brochure about Plone.

Python is in our blood

2011-03-31T23:55:00+02:00

We build web applications, websites and e-commerce solutions with Python.

Book your developer now!

Call Sasha Vinčić at 0708 840 660 or send an e-mail.

We build applications with the framework Django.

We build applications with the framework Pyramid (formerly repoze.bfg).

Google app engine

We build applications for Google app engine. Both with Django and Pyramid.

Plone is the most secure CMS

2011-02-08T09:50:00

Most secure open source CMS

Plone has proven to be secure before and updated statistics from the CVE database show that Plone is still the most secure CMS. Bellow we see the last five years of statistics and I let them speak for themselves.

CMS vulnerabilities

CMS	2006	2007	2008	2009	2010
Drupal	39	37	107	126	44
Joomla	72	66	66	76	95
Plone	3	1	6	1	1
Wordpress	18	63	66	27	13

Plone vulnerability process

Plone is secure but still it has not managed to have zero security issues one year and probably nobody will manage that but there is a big difference on how to handle the found vulnerabilities. Today was the big patch Tuesday or ploneaggedon like some called it on twitter. Even with vulnerability like this Plone shows that is is mature and has a process for handling them. The security team announced the upcoming patch one week in advanced before the patch and details were made public. This gave all the Plone companies possibility to plan upgrade and downtime for their customers. Great work security team and sweet dreams.

Do you want safe e-commerce?

2011-02-02T23:50:00

Safe e-commerce

We define safe e-commerce as "a digital financial transaction where the sender and recipient both can feel safe". This means that the shop knows that the vital client information they handle can't fall into the wrong hands through unauthorised access to computer systems. Moreover, the end client can feel safe in the fact that the shop handles the information with the highest level of security possible.

Big systems built on sandmark

The popular and big systems Magento and osCommerce are built on the sandmark PHP. Independent of how skilled the programmers are, and how big the systems are, it is impossible to disregard the fact that PHP is the language that has the most security gaps. Google built everything based on solid grounds, and for the exact same reason we use Python.

We create safe solutions based on safe systems

In order to guarantee safe e-commerce solutions we work with Plone and Python. That makes it possible for us to avoid the security risks connected to other systems, and to focus on developing nice and profitable web shops that fit our clients' needs. We build solutions for the future and our goal is to always be one step ahead with security.

Do you want to know more?

Contact Sasha Vinčić for more information.

or fill in the online form

Phone: +46 708 840 660

Plone 4 theming with Diazo is simple

2011-01-19T10:05:00

Diazo theming is fast

We recently started an upgrade to Plone 4 of our website. After few days everything was done except the theme. To avoid delays and get our website up and running as fast as possible we decided to go with XDV/Diazo since we already used it for a python e-commerce and Plone with a shop. We took our old theme and converted it to a static html/css and applied some simple rules. Within couple hours we had a Diazo theme that looked the same as before but we did manage to add some mobile css.

Lessframework - CSS3 and HTML5

To learn some CSS3 and mobile skinning we tried out the Lessframework

project. A simple CSS3 and HTML5 project that shows you how to define different stylesheets for different resolutions.We also looked at mFabrik but it didn't fit our timeschedule this time.

Diazo/XDV is getting adopted

We wanted to write more about how we did the theming here but Aclark.net beat us so we'll just link to them :)

Time to rethink the web

After reading the excellent presentation by Bryan Rieger. We already know what other steps we need to do to make our website mobile friendly. This presentation tells us that the mobile internet is much bigger then iPhone and Android, it definitely convinced me that my argument "the other mobile users do not use internet" is wrong so our ecommerce solutions will be ready for the mobile industry.

Do you want Plone 4 site or a mobile solution?

Contact Sasha Vinčić at +46708 840 660 or online form.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

2010-12-22T11:05:00+01:00

Plone, GAE, HTML5

The year started with business as usual with our main customer EEA and with overtime we also managed to redesign Jeeves Information System's multilingual websites, all with Plone. I, Sasha went to the Lovely Snow Sprint where the topic this year was Google App Engine. It was a perfect place to meet friends and learn something new. Together with Jens W. Klein from Bluedynamics and Nick Johnson from Google we created TweetEngine for sharing twitter accounts. After the Snow Sprint I was very inspired to do more projects so we decided to take 2 days a month to do none customer work and Per Thulin really let his creativity flow. We put all our projects on http://labs.valentinewebsystems.se/ . During summer Frederik Jeppsson joined us and helped us evaluate python e-commerce systems and migrate lavendeldockor.se from EasyShop to LFS.

Father and we won the tender

After summer the changes started. I became a father. Per Thulin decided to start his own company so I decided to leave the office and move to the open space at Malmö Arena at St.Gertrud. Together with Eau de Web in Romania we won the tender at EEA! But after more then 6 years I decided that it was time for me to do some new projects so for the new work at EEA I found a replacement for me.

The launch at EU parliament

During the year our biggest project was SOER 2010 and a subproject SENSE for the European state of environment report. But before the launch of SOER 2010 at EU parliament in Brussels I also went to Plone Conference 2010. At the Plone Conference 2010 I gave two talks, External E-commerce and Plone playing along and Managing multilingual sites.

New year, new opportunities

Now few days left of the year I must say it has been a good year, a lot of work, met interesting people in the SENSE project and I am looking forward to the new year with a lot of new interesting projects and opportunities.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from a cold and snowy Sweden!

References

TweetEngine

Lavendeldockor.se

SOER 2010 - European Environment Agency

Jeeves

The European environment – state and outlook 2010 (powered by Plone)

2010-12-02T21:04:20+01:00

SOER 2010

"SOER 2010 provides a set of assessments of the current state of Europe's environment, its likely future state, what is being done and what could be done to improve it, how global megatrends might affect future trends… and more."

Source: EEA - SOER 2010 website

Plone powers the environment

In this project Plone plays a big role since it is EEA's main CMS for the public website. The SOER report is today a sub site with content from EU and neighborhood countries. Two third of the countries uploaded content manually through Plone CMS and 1/3 through RDF feeds as part of the SENSE project. The 13 SENSE countries used their own CMSs where Plone was one of them in at least 3 countries. Most of them used the eea.soer/eea.rdfmarshaller products developed by us for EEA but Italy also had own products for their Plone site.

From static paper to full traceability

The goal of the SENSE project was to give countries more control over their content and possibility to update it continuously and give the readers full traceability to data sources. This has not fully been achieved but it is on it good way and discussions have started in many countries how to make the underlying data available to the public.

Now when the report is launched the discussions are already going on how to continue the work with many other 'sharing information' projects like INSPIRE and SEIS. We hope that more RDF and Linkeddata projects will be the outcome of this.

RDF and Linkeddata in Plone

For this project two products were developed, eea.rdfmarshaller which is a generic RDF marshaller (export only as of today) for any Archetype content. You just add /@@rdf to the url or use a RDF browser which sends correct Accept headers and you will get the content as RDF. With this approach we have enabled any Plone site to speak RDF and we can easy create connections between Linkeddata RDF storages or Plone sites powered by eea.rdfmarshaller.

RDF marshaller allows custom adapters which were utilized in eea.soer to generate specific RDF output in the SOER/SENSE project.

Make websites and make difference

I, Sasha Vincic have been working with EEA for over 6 years and recently I decided that it is time for me and my company to find new projects. The environment, economy and health are important topics and listening to Prof. Jacqueline McGlade, Executive Director of the EEA, Janez Potočnik, European Commissioner for the Environment and specially Jo Leinen, Chairman of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety i was inspired and proud of have been part of the web team at EEA for so many years. Last time I was this inspired this much was at the Eben Moglen's keynote at Plone conference 2006 where he talked about how open source really can make difference in the world. Time to make some difference.

The European environment – state and outlook 2010 (powered by Plone)

Plone with external web services

2010-11-16T00:40:34+01:00

The clear sign of mature product is when you realize it can't do everything and it is much better to use the best tool for the job then reinvent and try to shoehorn everything into Plone.

Restful search

Calvin Hendryx-Parker from Six Feet Up told us how they have integrated Solr into Plone. In his talk Enterprise Search in Plone using Solr he explains how alm.solrindex plays very well with ZCatalog and you don't have to do any changes to your code, just install it as a normal ZCatalog index.

David Glick from Groundwire went through the technical aspects of how to use web services from Zope/Plone. In his talk The Art of Integrating Plone with web services he mentions REST, XML-RPC, and SOAP. The interesting thing is that Zope has had XML-RPC support over 10 years! You have been able to provide and consume web services with Zope and Plone for many years.

Diazo the theming service

Me, Sasha Vinčić did a presentation External E-commerce and Plone playing along where I presented how you can use external e-commerce and I also mentioned that you can look at the theme as a service. With the tools Deliverance and Diazo(former XDV) we are able to see it as a service. As with many services we get the benefits of being able to exchange it and reuse it across other services. Easier and faster Plone theming with Deliverance and xdv by Nate Aune, Jazkarta and Theming with XDV by Laurence Rowe and Diazo will be the default theming in Plone 5 indicates that this is the way to go, see themes a service.

How do you use web services with Plone or provide them from Plone/Zope?

E-commerce and Plone as web services

2010-11-01T13:35:00+01:00

Plone CMS or framework

Plone is a CMS not a framework and trying to shoehorn products as add ons is not always the best option. E-commerce are big and complex systems and not simple plugins.

Today we have EasyShop GetPaid and PCommerce which are installable into Plone. None of them is perfect and almost all of them are abandoned or have very little development. When they are installed they are hard to remove because your Plone CMS has become a product inventory, a order management and customer management system. Keeping this out of Plone will make your Plone experience much better.

Service Oriented Architecture

SOA has been around for a while and we use web services like Google Maps everyday. When you create or need new functions for your website think API - web service. This way you can use the best tool for the job or an existing tool like e-commerce system.

Beneﬁts beside the best tool for the job is that your Plone site is easier to upgrade because the CMS is not polluted with a complex system. You also have the flexibility to exchange services when needed or choose to host some of them in the cloud.

E-commerce and theme as a service

When we looked for the e-commerce system we had the requirements that it should be python, it should have a good open source license and be actively developed. We could only find two python e-commerce systems, Lightning Fast Shop - LFS and Satchmo both based on Django. In our case study, Lavendeldockor we choose LFS because it was clean, small and fast. We also implemented the theme with XDV so we could reuse it for both Plone and LFS.

Plone conference 2010 presentation and further information

For more information you can watch the Plone conference presentation about External E-commerce and Plone play along or contact Sasha Vinčić at +46708 840 660 or online form.

External E-commerce and plone playing along

View more presentations from vincic.

Time-based publishing in Plone with higher security

2010-08-23T23:50:00+02:00

Plone's powerful workflow system let you control security of each object in each state. With time-base publishing you want a new document to appear first when the effective date has been reached. In some cases you need to keep the document safe and protected from public before the effective date is reached. With Plone standard workflow the document that is in published state has already permissions which allows public to access it if they know the url even if it should be published in the future. In most cases this is enough since Plone will hide the document from searches and listings but in some cases it would be a disaster if someone accessed a document before the intended time, i.e stock market information.

Add an automatic transition to your workflow that is triggered if the publish date is in the future. Make it go from 'published' state to "Published (future)" which should have the same permissions as the Private state. Then use the zope built in cron like system to call a simple script that finds all content in 'Publshed (future)' state with publish date before now and publishes them.

This way you will avoid security by obscurity, i.e having accessible content laying around on your websites even though it should be protected.

Need help with Plone?

Contact Sasha Vinčić at +46708 840 660 or online form.

Do you want to know more about Plone?

Read in the Plone brochure (Swedish) or contact us

Python based eCommerce System - technical comparison

2010-07-12T13:18:36+02:00

GetPaid

License: ZPL

Technologies: Python 2.4, Plone 3.x (Plone 4 support in beta)

Extendability: Skin layers, portlets

Listed sites/users: 16

Can be run in Google App Engine: No (Plone/Zope is not compatible)

Complete solution, add-on for Plone.

Features: Donations, pay-to-publish, any content "buyable", discounts, UPS shipping (with real-time shipping charge calculation), good documentation, tests(!), getpaid products are available in a multitude of languages and all products are tagged with translatable text-ids.

EasyShop

License: GPL

Familiar technologies: Python 2.4, Plone 3.2.5

Extendability: Skin layers, portlets

Listed sites/users: A handful (most being migrated to LFS?)

Can be run in Google App Engine: No (Plone/Zope is not compatible)

Complete solution, add-on for Plone.

Lightning Fast Shop

License: BSD

Technologies: Python 2.6, jQuery, jQuery UI, TinyMCE, Django

Extendability: Product templates, portlets

Listed sites/users: 11 http://www.getlfs.com/live-shops

Can be run in Google App Engine: No (Python 2.6 can't be run)

Easy to set up, clean management interface, functional shop out of the box and well thought out design. Snappy performance!

Satchmo

License: BSD

Familiar technologies: Python, Django 1.2.1

Extendability: Very high

Listed sites/users: At least 67

Can be run in Google App Engine: No

Satchmo is a complete web shop like the rest. The admin interface works fine, is snappy but is a little bit cluttered and asks tons of questions.

Conclusion

All the tested solutions are functional out of the box. The two Plone based solutions have an advantage in having a tool chain that is familiar to us, but the Django based ones have better performance. LFS stands out because it also looks good out of the box

What is your experience?

Please send us comments and tell us your ecommerce experience. Which system is your favorite?

Links

http://www.plonegetpaid.com/
http://www.geteasyshop.com/
http://wiki.github.com/ned14/Easyshop/starttoendtutorial
http://bitbucket.org/diefenbach/lfs-buildout-development
http://www.getlfs.com/week-lfs-42
http://www.satchmoproject.com/