State of the restart of the Plone Community marketing material repository

Communications Team
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Hi together,
Today we finished our 2 years International Python Brochure project for the PSF - It is already printed! You will get initial copies at the PyCon in Montreal, and we can ship small amounts for the WPD. Leaving former responsibilities for local conferences and associations a little bit behind, I am back to push stuff for Plone again!

Can we share a current state of our marketing media resources soon?

I would like to be involved again in shared production of new professional marketing material for Plone and organising media, files, examples supporting a constant Plone Brand Experience.

Having still an archive of almost everything that was created in the past, I would like to focus "new" stuff, that takes Plone ahead.

We can meet in Sorrento at the PLOG or maybe give a quick shot for WPD stuff as well.

Cu again

Armin Stross-Radschinski

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Thanks, Armin!

In the spirit of this being an open source project, I'd really like to see those wind up in a public place (github?). Too often in the past, we've hidden things behind a "If people know we're going to promote Plone, then it's totally not going to work!" excuse, which is just silly. It's led to horrible communication, little to no progress, and a lot of infighting. I think we're all better than that, and it ends now.

We have an opportunity here to use the momentum and excitement around Plone 5 to really help build up our community and userbase, but to do that we need to start showing off. 2014 is going to be all about evangelism.

Elizabeth Leddy is working on finalizing plone.com. She and Trish Ang started from scratch and have created something that I think is going to be great for us. They're going to need the rest of us to start creating content though. These are opportunities to show off the projects you've worked on and highlight the technologies in Plone that made them possible.

Christina McNeill is going to be leading a team of editors and writers. One of their first tasks is going to be to interview Plone companies about these projects so that we can continue to fill out the verticals on plone.com. They'll also be generating news articles and regular updates on development and community progress.

When we've brought the community up to speed, when we've reached out to developers, designers, content creators and told them what we can do, then we can start to wonder what the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies think of us, but I expect we'll realize that they were never our true targets after all.

At the conference in Brazil, I met a developer who told me:

"Whenever we hire someone new, I show them one of Sean Kelly's videos so that they know just how great this system is and they say 'Wow, Archetypes is outstanding!' and then I have to try to explain everything that's changed since 2006."

That. Exactly that.

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People send me marketing material all the time and one issue I never know how to address is "where do we put it all?". If someone has an idea where stuff is already and can say "IT ALL GOES HERE >>>>" I will blindly follow.

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The more content contributors, the merrier! Let me know if you're interested. I guarantee I will follow up with you!

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I come back on this soon. So we do not have a new repo / concept yet - right! If not, I have one!

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The official Plone marketing materials repo lives here: https://github.com/plone/marketing-materials

Please contribute! It currently only has information about attending conferences, cribbed from Liz Leddy's notes. But it is available for all types of marketing materials - posters, brochures, templates for stickers, poster or banner source materials...really anything that relates to Plone marketing.

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https://help.github.com/articles/what-is-my-disk-quota explains why a sustainable repo for media files cannot live on github. We need a concept and namespaces. I can provide this (and avoid overengineering.) It needs similar approaches like we use for normal Plone packages but should not lock out media professionals (we needs them!). git-annex is a way out of this by using a bare repo on github and sync the files locally, which is an excellent solution for graphics artists and printed media with large binary files. (My dropbox was killed during PyCon.DE by others. So we need to look for a more reliable service to host the binaries and keep them in safe sync.

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" :wink:

http://www.coactivate.org/projects/plone-marketing/contributed-marketing-materials

(mostly out of date, but put here for posterity and to show that we did have at one point in time a centralised collection of marketing material)

-Matt

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Yes we had it, and we used it and contributed and it is still working. Why not start to use a Plone Instance we own for storing results only again.

We can keep all the resulting PDF or image, text material in Plone and reference the source repositories as necessary. Maybe we end up with something like Plone Software Center (hides).

The benefit of coactivate was, that we could act agile independent from the foundation and contribute. The control freak approach killed this. Today we should adapt the new approaches for the Plone docs and look for proper licenses based on CC4.0-BY (and NOT SA-NC!) .

The only issue I still see with github is that it is not well suitable for large media binaries and not designer friendly. By the way: today another customer killed my Dropbox, so keep away from these services. We need to have a sustainable solution. All suggestions welcome.

I have not finished my git-annex evaluation, but it is promising for handling media files. On the website https://git-annex.branchable.com/ you find an overview what the differences between git-annex and e.g. dropbox are and a comparison to other similar technologies: https://git-annex.branchable.com/not/ . Any experience out there?

For now I am happy to use git (github) myself, but with no structure it will end up as a mess. If we use one repo per media solution we should declare a namespace for repos, but do not use "marketing" but "media".

If we can support translated versions and different formats we need also to provide some metadata which Plone version is covered or what target audience is aimed at. Managing this in a github repo only without overview is a nightmare.

If we have strong points to vote against an overview on Plone related media on Plone.org/com we can put these overviews into a subsection of the Plone documentation, where it makes absolutely sense together with the brand manual etc. But remember that we need to avoid to draw away the communications, marketing and media people not familiar with sphinx, github etc.

My suggestion would be to have repos like:

plone.media.poster0032
plone.media.flyer0002/en-us
plone.media.expobanner0002/en-int

We just register them incrementally on github and go for it. It is a good compromise for readability and order.

Donts:
plone.media.folder0003/plone5/de should be avoided, since it hops one level.
better use another
plone.media.folder0004/de and define a standard how to write a manifest file or use tags to tag this.

Inside the repo we should have the same rules for folder/file structures like we have with sourcecode. Graphic artists know this from "collect for print service" scripts. I think they can follow those rules, given by the source programs.

We internally use a system similar to this since over 20 years and it simply works, even without a database!

I would like to help out with docs or cooperation on this, lets get in touch again. I am in Sorrento and happy for feedback.

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Hey Plone Buzz Drummers,
not infecting the goal to have the latest stuff available on Plone.org and linked from Plone.com, we need to keep track of our history and old versions (my point of view).

It seems that the sprit of git annex is now reaching github as well.

Github LFS seems to be the way to go to have a repo of our history online and safe local copies. On our Flagship sites we just need the latest shiny stuff. But master files need more workflow to work together successful on multi language versions etc.

We need to take blockers out of our collaborative work on marketing communication material. Until we have a more streamlined brand concept we still have events like WPD we need to feed with merchandise.

-- Armin

[1] https://github.com/blog/1986-announcing-git-large-file-storage-lfs

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Hi Armin—for some reason, this entire conversation just came into my email TODAY. So, not ignoring you, just need a bit of time to catch up on the conversation!

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Update: https://git-lfs.github.com/

An open source Git extension for versioning large files is now available.

Git Large File Storage (LFS) replaces large files such as audio samples, videos, datasets, and graphics with text pointers inside Git, while storing the file contents on a remote server like GitHub.com or GitHub Enterprise.

@tkimnguyen @tkimnguyen more here later... (I tried a scrape of the old marketing stuff at coactivate.org using httrack for historic purposes, but it seems not complete. I will give it another try with proper cookies...)