[silva-dev] Questions regarding Silva for presentation

[Kit BLAKE]

Hi Roman,

> I'm preparing a presentation about Silva for the upcoming  
> KiwiPycon.  A
> few questions have been raised, which I can't really answer.  I hope  
> to
> have more luck here :)
>
>    How does Silva rate against so-called
>    'enterprise-level' document management systems such as Alfresco?

The answer is an apples and oranges situation. Alfresco is really  
built for document management. It can also serve web sites. Silva was  
built for content management. It can also store documents.

However we don't recommend Silva (actually, the limitations are in  
Zope) for storing *large* numbers of documents. At least not out of  
the box. Various add-ons help to alleviate the storage problems, and  
the recent arrival of blob storage in Zope has made document storage  
more attractive.

A number of years ago Infrae wrote a Document Library application,  
which *is* a DMS, and integrates seamlessly with a Silva website using  
the OAI protocol:
http://infrae.com/products/documentlibrary

>    How do large organisations make use of Silva? (I do remember
>    installations at the ETH Zürich and the University of Rotterdam,  
> but
>    I'm not sure how extensive they were, or how far customised they  
> are
>    compared to the standard distribution.)

The organizations have taken varying approaches. ETH has a large  
installation with some 450 websites running in one Silva (each site  
has a separate url). ETH has in-house developers.

Most large organizations operate a ZEO cluster, sometimes with  
separation of concerns (such as editing or special instances for bot  
visits). All large organizations use caching, most often Squid.

All the orgs have customized skins. Most have custom content types,  
usually an extensions that integrates with an external data source,  
such as a course or user database. But some, like University College  
London, have also extended core content types like Silva News Network  
and made those available.

HTH, if you need more details let us know,

Kit

-- 
Kit BLAKE · Infrae · http://infrae.com/ + 31 10 243 7051