Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Multimedia provides us with stunning interactive user experiences and many design options, but it requires discipline and knowledge to utilize it effectively so that we do not alienate our audiences. By providing an overview of multimedia content together with a practical focus on how to process it in the web context, this book will be your ideal partner when turning your Plone site into a full-featured multimedia Internet presence.

From watermarked images, integrated Silverlight-applications over geotagged content and rich podcasts to protected video-on-demand solutions this book provides a rich repository of tools and techniques to add full multimedia power to Plone. This step-by-step guide will show you how to collaborate with many external web resources to build a powerful interactive Plone site that perfectly meet your needs.

Multimedia data is a very important part of the Internet, considering the amount of storage and bandwidth taken. This book will show you how to turn your multimedia data in valuable multimedia content by using the mature and extensible open source CMS Plone.

With its content-centric approach Plone allows specialized use-case scenarios for image, audio, video, Flash and Silverlight applications. The initial chapters focus on managing image, audio, video, and flash content for your Plone website. We then plunge into content control and syndication.

The book will show you how to structure your content by tagging, rating, and geolocating. It will give you insights on how to upload, store, and serve your multimedia content in an effective way.

What you will learn from this book

• Include photos, movies, audio, and Flash-applications into your Plone site to make it more interactive and user-friendly
• Create a podcast with multimedia content stored in Plone for broadcasting news
• Geolocate the real-world geographic location of an Internet-connected computer or mobile device
• Rate and license your content with Plone
• Upload your content to Plone with the help of easy-to-use drag and drop options
• Provide video-on-demand with Plone and Red5 to allow users to select and watch video content
• Create an engaging and interactive user experience by including powerful Silverlight web and mobile applications into Plone
• Get to grips with categorization, syndication, upload, storage, and serving of multimedia content
• Set up a professional photo site with watermarked images and develop an interactive gallery
• Integrate videos and images from external providers such as Youtube, Yahoo video, Picasa, flickr, and so on
• Learn about the video and audio formats best suited for web publishing

Approach

This book is written in a tutorial style where you work through examples that describe how you can create multimedia applications using Plone and integrate your existing multimedia resources into your website. It also tells you how to use multimedia effectively giving many ideas and best practices.

Who this book is written for

This book is for Plone integrators who want to extend the core of Plone with multimedia features. It gives no introduction to Plone and readers should know how to set up a Plone site using a buildout. The book can be read and understood well without being a Python developer, though some examples have Python code included.