Plumi

Plumi was a Free Software video-sharing content management system based on Plone and produced by EngageMedia in collaboration with Unweb.me.

From the Plumi blog:

“Plumi enables you to create your own sophisticated video-sharing site. It includes a beautiful adaptive skin using Diazo, server-side transcoding of most video formats, upload progress bar, thumbnail extraction, HTML5 video playback and embedding, subtitles using Amara, large file uploading via FTP, social media integration, threaded commenting and user feedback forms, customised user-profiles and a range of other useful features.

There are few FOSS CMS options that allow you to create your own video-sharing website; almost all mainstream video-sharing sites keep their distribution platform under lock and key. Plumi is one contribution to creating a truly democratic media.”

History

Plumi began development in 2005 with the aim of creating a fully-functional, community-controlled, and open-source video content management system. There was nothing in the marketplace that could equal that challenge at that time. Plumi was launched in October 2006 at the This Is Not Art festival in Newcastle, Australia.

Development began on version 3.x of the Plone CMS with programming by Dave Fregon and Andrew Nicholson, with project management and product design by Anna Helme and Andrew Lowenthal.

Numerous organisations implemented Plumi on their video sites, including labour organisers in South Korea, the World Social Forum, and Critical Commons, a project lead by Steve Anderson at the University of Southern California. We took Plumi to Plone conferences and sprints around the world, and collaborated with other media projects on free and open source software (FOSS), including the Foundations of Open Media Standards and Software (FOMS) conference and the Open Video Conference.

In 2010, Dimitris Moriatis, Markos Gogoulos, Christos Psaltis, Mike Murakis, and others from Unweb.me migrated Plumi to Plone 4.x and built an entirely new interface, with product-management from Anna Helme and EngageMedia. This put EngageMedia in a good position for many years to come.

However, Plumi’s light slowly faded as people moved to more modern frameworks such as Django. Plumi became difficult and expensive to maintain. Happily, some of our previous developers had begun work on MediaCMS – a Django-based media distribution platform that EngageMedia now partners on. EngageMedia moved to this new platform in June 2020.

Features

VISUAL THEME

  • Fresh Skin: Customise Plumi to look however you like, using the Diazo framework. Right out of the box, you will be pleased to see a  contemporary skin, easy to use and pretty to look at.
  • Mobile Friendly, Adaptive Layout: The layout is designed to adapt to different screen sizes, and videos will play back on Android and iOS devices.

UPLOADING VIDEOS

  • Video Upload Form: Add a video using our simple drag and drop widget, watch the upload progress bar, and add metadata to your video, including the title, description, tags, categories, and an open-content licence.
  • Auto Transcoding of Any Format: Plumi automatically transcodes most video codecs to webm and mp4, and automatically generates a thumbnail (or attach a custum thumbnail image).
  • Open Content Licensing: You can add a Creative Commons or other licence, making it easy to choose how others may distribute your work.
  • Resumable Uploads via FTP: Users can log in via FTP and upload videos. This is very helpful with slow and/or unreliable internet connections, and for users uploading very large files.

BROWSING VIDEOS

  • Taxonomy and Templates: Users can classify videos by genre, country, topic, and keywords. Templates are also available to view videos by genre, country, topic, tags, and video language, or by each user. Developers can customise the taxonomy system to your own needs.
  • Advanced Search: Use Plone’s powerful search function to find videos and other content, and filter your results via advanced search.
  • RSS Feeds: RSS1, RSS2, and video podcast feeds are generated for every user, genre, country, topic, keyword, search, and video collection, and for the latest videos.

COMMUNITY FEATURES

  • Profiles: Users can register, add their bio and a thumbnail, add their interests (which will group them with users of the same interests), or add a PayPal account as a virtual tip-jar. A user’s profile lists all the videos and other content they have added, plus a link to their own personal video podcast.
  • Users and Groups: Plone has a powerful groups functionality that can be customised to manage content among users, such as when working on content privately as a group. You can also manage roles for different users.

SITE ADMINISTRATION

  • Moderation & Workflow: Control the publishing of videos, news, events, and comments. Site administrators or editors receive email notifications to let them know when content is ready to moderate.
  • Admin Panel: Use the Plone site admin panel to add or remove, and configure add-on Plone products (modules).

Unweb.me was an Athens-based software development company providing innovative information systems that addressed real-world problems. The company also delivered user-friendly and highly secure applications, and supported clients during the entire life cycle of each product, based on free and open-source software and agile development practices.

Blog Archive

The truth of internet video’s future

Anna Helme 27/05/2019

Plumi is pondering what kind of contributions we could make to address the spread of “deep fake” video and disinformation (“fake news”) via video-sharing and social media platforms.

SEE ALL PLUMI POSTS

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