The Mountaineers: Scaling the Heights With Plone

In this talk given at the 2014 Plone Conference in Bristol, we describe our project to create a new website for The Mountaineers.

Picture yourself at a non-profit with 50,000 active members and hundreds of volunteers. Your website has become dated and convoluted and needs to be replaced. You need the new site to support complex course registrations - multiple activities per course, multiple roles per activity, multiple people per registration, waitlisting, payments - without seeming complex. You need it to be easy for leaders to create new activities, for volunteers to volunteer, for members to sign up and donate, and for everyone to find what they're looking for in your vast portfolio of knowledge.

This is the story of The Mountaineers' journey to a new Plone site, which launched May 5 after more than a year of development by a Jazkarta team consisting of David Glick, Cris Ewing, and Carlos de la Guardia. We'll describe some of the highlights, including:

  • Handling rosters with collective.workspace
  • Optimizing membrane-based users
  • Using Stripe to process payments
  • Using Celery as a message queue with Plone
  • Our process for designing content types and getting content imported
  • Pulling everything together with Solr-powered faceted search

You can watch a video of this talk on on Vimeo.

View more presentations from Jazkarta, Inc.