We just launched Snowleopard.org
Aug 17th, 2005 by Jon Stahl
My brilliant colleagues at ONE/Northwest and our talented collaborators at LightSky Designs and RagingWeb just helped Snow Leopard Trust launch their new website.
It’s a beautiful site, with a ton of great content and some eye-popping photos of these magnificent cats and the communities they live among. Some notable features from a technical point of view:
Like all of the websites we do, Snowleopard.org is powered by Plone, the most powerful and easy-to-use open-source content management system around. Plone makes it easy for Snow Leopard Trust staff to maintain a large, complex site.
This was our first major site with “full-on” e-commerce functionality. Snow Leopard Trust helps build sustainable economies in the communities that live in snow leopard country, and they sell a bunch of beautiful handicrafts through their new online store. We implemented the store with ZenCart, a popular open-source e-commerce applicaiton, which were able to seamlessly integrate with the main Plone-powered site using Zope’s MySQL database adapter.
We built a simple e-card feature that lets site visitors send online cards built around some of Snow Leopard Trust’s incredible photos.
We also helped Snow Leopard Trust put their photos to good use by building a simple slideshow module. We adapted Plone’s default ATPhotoAlbum functionality and cross-fertilzed that with slideshow features from Oxfam America’s Plone-powered site.
As with many projects, the requirements changed and expanded over the 12 months that elapsed between our first conversation and this week’s launch. Fortunately, Plone’s Archetypes framework and ATContentTypes made it easy for us to accomodate Snow Leopard Trust’s evolving ambitions and increasing sophistication even as the project was already underway.
Check it out. It’s a beatiful site that really showcases what can happen when you put best-of-breed tools into the hands of people who are doing great work on the ground.
Sure is purty, jon. You’re my favorite Plonevangelists.
Good work, as usual. I like the slideshow, too. Wonder how easy that is for folks inside the organization to manage, add to, etc.
Photo management comes up again and again. I’m currently looking around for a rather full-full featured Photo Gallery system for a large group with many thousand photos.
Aw, shucks, Ted.
Adding/managing photos is Plone-easy — the photo galery is a very thin wrapper around ordinary ATPhoto objects, which are part of the Plone core, and thus fully managable using all the usual Plone-foo that we love so much.
Plone 2.1’s new Archetypes based photo objects should provide the foundation for a robustly scalable photo gallery (BTreeFolders can handle hundreds of thousands of objects, with filesystem storage), but it’s pretty “thin” in terms of whiz-bang chrome. The best standalone photo gallery app I know is Gallery (http://gallery.menalto.com), which has lots of whiz bang. Downside: doesn’t integrate super-tight any CMSes you’d actually want to use.
Thats a very nice site!!
I’m using Plone for a collection of Non Profit sites and am interested in implementing an online shop. Ultimately i’d like to use a plone based solution but using an integrated Zen Cart could be an option too.
I’m just at the stages of investigating this but how deeply did you integrate Zen Cart into Plone? I haven’t looked at Zen Cart much but have installed and tried to configure OSCommerce (which Zen is based on) so have an idea of the database structure.
Do you use Plone to add products and is the user database shared or is it mainly a cosmetic thing?
Thanks
Ben
Ben-
Thanks.
The ZenCart integration is (fairly) superficial. No user database sharing, and products are added/managed through ZenCart’s UI. I think we wrapped the Snowleopard look around the ZenCart UI, though.
And, our one “clever” integration trick is that if you abandon you cart and go back to the main (Plone) Snowleopard site, it uses a cookie to remind you that you still have a cart waiting for you.