Book Image

Plone 3 Multimedia

By : Tom Gross
Book Image

Plone 3 Multimedia

By: Tom Gross

Overview of this book

<p>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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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.<br /><br />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. <br /><br />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.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Plone 3 Multimedia
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Preface
Syndication Formats
Index

Chapter 9. Advanced Storage

Multimedia files tend to be very large—even with clever codecs, which shrink audio, video, and image data enormously. Every database serves its purpose. Relational databases (such as PostgresSQL or MySQL) are good for tabular-structured data with many relations. Object databases (such as the ZODB) are especially good at mapping complex data structures. The advantage of NOSQL databases (such as CouchDB or MongoDB) is their scalability and their concurrency model. The best storage for files or BLOBs (Binary Large Objects) is still the filesystem.

In this chapter, we will see how Plone stores files and images. The default way is to put them into the ZODB like everything else. This is good because everything is handled in one place: the data storage, the transaction machinery, and the global permission system. Unfortunately, the ZODB is not very efficient for file storage. In this chapter we try to find more efficient storage techniques.

Generally speaking, there are...