On October 30-31, 2010, EngageMedia coordinated a “Plone Video Sprint” as part of the 2010 Plone conference in Bristol, UK.
What’s Plone and why am I reading about it here on EngageMedia you ask?
Plone is one the key pieces of software EngageMedia.org is built on, basically, it’s a system for building websites. EngageMedia adds another layer to Plone called Plumi, which gives you all the video features available on this site. Plumi is a free and open-source and used by around 20 other sites. Plone is used by many thousands.
In order to improve the video features of Plone, we put on a “sprint”. A sprint is a short period where programmers from different organisations work intensively together to solve common problems. After the conference there were 12 different sprint topics involving more than 100 hundred developers, video was one of those topics. EngageMedia also held a Budapest video sprint after the Plone conference last year.
- develop a statistics system to see hits, downloads, page views and more on videos
- bittorrent integration, so when you upload a video it is automatically seeded as a bittorrent file
- initial development of a system to easily publish videos from Plone/Plumi straight up to Facebook
From Plumi blog:
We had an extremely productive time at this year’s Plone video sprint. Over the 2 days we had 12 people who participated at one level or another.
A number of projects were either begun or moved forward considerably. These include
- a 0.1 alpha release of collective.piwik.flowplayer which enables stats on video plays and downloads
- a 0.1 alpha release of collective.piwik.now which allows users to see who else is on the site
- the development of collective.seed which adds torrent download support for Plone content
- updating of transcoding profiles for transcode.star
- an initial assessment of Plumi 3 migration to Plone 4, including migration to the new Sunburst theme
- research in the best html5 video player support in Plone and the various browsers
- updating of the video-feature-set listing that details the desired elements for full video functionality
- initial development to expand republisher to enabling publishing of videos from a Plone site to Facebook
Note that all this work is still rough and under construction, but we hope to have a lot of it working in EngageMedia over the coming 6 months. If you want to find out the full details and check the geeky stuff you can look at the wiki. If you are interested to get involved please feel free to join the project.
Stay tuned to EngageMedia.org or on the Plumi blog for development updates.
Thanks to the Open Society Institute for sponsoring the sprint and to all who participated.
