Book review: Plone 3 Multimedia
Plone 3 Multimedia cover
Nice to see another Plone book landed in my mailbox. This time is Plone 3 Multimedia, writem by Tom Gross. There is also a sample chapter avaliable on packpub site.
Whole book just about Plone and multimedia. Are there really so much to talk about? Is there more aspects to cover then Plone4Artists packages and maybe Plumi? Book is targeting Plone integrators, which are the biggest part of Plone community, so there is definetly a market if the book explains the topic right ofcourse. With Plone 4rc1 out just few days ago I fear book is a little outdated, but lets see ...
Chapters 2-5: Image, Audio, Video and Flash
After introductiory chapter you dive streight into dealing with why this book is all about. Multimedia. For each multimedia type it shows how core Plone is handling it them and then how and with which addon can you extend the Plone's default functionality. At the end of every chapter it also shows how to represent multimedia in HTML5. To quickly recap the addons mentions in this chapters, I'll just draw the listing:
| Multimedia vs. Plone addons | |
|---|---|
| Image | p4a.ploneimage, collective.plonetruegallery |
| Audio | p4a.ploneaudio, collective.flowplayer |
| Video | p4a.plonevideo, p4a.plonevideoembed, collective.flowplayer, Plumi |
Personaly I don't have much experienced with audiio and video, but for images I have some. I'm suprised that product Products.ImageEditor was missed out. Well, I understand not everything can be in the book. Also chapter on Plumi - which is receiving quite some attention lately - could be more extended, since Plumi provides quite rich and useful set of features.
Chapters 6-10: Categorisation, Syndication, Mass upload, Storage, Caching
Multimedia in Plone is not only multimedia as content type, but also all the things around it. Again for each section it describes what comes out-of-the box with Plone and then shows how to extend this functionality with addons. Again, like before, I'll list them:
| | Additonal addons |
|---|---|
| Categorisation | Products.PloneGlossary, p4a.plonetagging, plone.contentratings, Products.Maps, collective.virtualtreecategories, collective.categorizing, qi.portlet.TagClouds, collective.contentlicensing |
| Syndication | Products.fatsyndication, Vice |
| Mass upload | collective.uploadify, Products.PloneFlashUpload, atreal.massloader, EnfoldDesktop |
| Storage | ExternalStorage, FileSystemStorage, plone.app.blob, Reflecto |
| Caching | CacheFu |
Conclusion
If you are infront of the task to integrate multimedia with Plone then this book will definetly give you a boost in your project. There are ofcourse more products then the one listed above, but you can quickly find yourself lost among them. That's why goal oriented guides like this will definetly make your job easier. A lot of things explained in the book are also true in upcoming Plone4 and also with there is a initiative to make plone4artists pack ready for Plone4.
Overall the book is not that nicely written, but to be honest I really don't care about that. Example and links that it provides, tougth me some new stuff and help me remember some which I forgot. Book will also give you valuble examples and how to easily adjust Plone. If you are integrator, you should definetly make a room for this book.
P.S. This blog post was written using Firefox 4b2 and its the shit. So if I didn't convince you to buy a book, then I dare you to leave your slow Chrome and reclain the web again :)