Plumi

Plumi is a free software video sharing content management system based on Plone and primarily developed by the Asia-Pacific based EngageMedia, the Greece based Unweb.me consultancy, and others.^[1][2] Plumi allows users to create a video sharing site by adding it to an existing Plone instance. The software includes a wide array of functionality to facilitate video distribution and community creation.^[3][4]

Plumi is one project that aims to help establish "community controlled, noncommercial, free and open source alternatives" to commercial video sites such as YouTube.^[5] It is designed to allow communities and "citizen publishers create their own video-sharing communities out of the box"^[6] It is also designed to be more accessible to non-profit groups and independent journalists, given it is available as free-software without cost.^[7]

History

Plumi for Plone 2

Plumi was first developed for Plone 2 by EngageMedia, with the first stable version released in September 2007, produced by EngageMedia and developed primarily by Andy Nicholson of Infinite Recursion and Dave Fregon of NetAxxs.^[8][9]

The second major release occurred on February 8, 2008. By this time several organisations and projects had installed Plumi to create their own video-sharing websites, including the World Social Forum TV, Bonn University Africa on TV and CabTube.^[10]

Plumi for Plone 3

Version 3.0 of Plumi is based on Plone 3 and was deployed on May 19, 2010.^[11] The latest production version is 3.1.2 that was released at the end of November, 2010.^[12]

Plumi for Plone 4

Development on migration to Plone 4 began in October 2010, with a 4.0b1 beta released in late November^[13] and a release candidate for 4.0 released in early December.^[14]

A final stable release of Plumi 4.0 for Plone 4.0 was released on January 17, 2011.^[15] This version includes bug fixes and improvements to ensure a stable release primarily focused on rebasing Plumi on Plone 4, in addition to other improvements and re-factoring of Plumi including new production and development buildouts located inside the plumi.app egg, updating the caching system, cleanup of installation code and moving parts to GenericSetup, replacing older products with newer and better maintained products or removing dependencies and other improvements. FFmpeg and codecs required by the transcoding framework are also now included in the buildout which means a simpler installation process.

A beta of Plumi 4.3 was released on December 4, 2011.^[16] The beta includes updating to Plone 4.1.2, support for 16:9 video transcoding, WebM transcoding, replacement of Flowplayer with mediaelement.js HTML5 player, video language added to metadata and support for the Amara (formerly Universal Subtitles) platform. A final version of 4.3 was released in January 2012.^[17]

Plumi 4.3.1 Final was released in April 2012.^[18] This includes minor improvements to the backend and user interface.

Plumi 4.5 Final was released in January 2013.^[19] 4.5-final is a big stable production-ready release, including big improvements in both the user-interface and the back-end. Major changes in 4.5 centered around the creation of a new Plumi skin using Diazo, replacing Gunicorn with uWSGI, implementation of Amara subtitling engine and a video upload progress bar. Other improvements included removing views/downloads from the iframe for embedding, update to latest mediaelement.js and fixing of fullscreen playback. 4.5-final includes some changes after the beta include numerous improvements to the new Plumi skin, re-ordered user menu, removal of callouts folder and improved video upload stability. See changelog here ^[20]

Features

Plumi enables you to create your own sophisticated video-sharing site. It includes a beautiful adaptive skin using Diazo, server-side transcoding of most video formats, upload progress bar, thumbnail extraction, HTML5 video playback and embedding, subtitles using Amara, large file uploading via FTP, social media integration, threaded commenting and user feedback forms, customised user profiles and a range of other useful features.

The latest version of Plumi is packaged with Plone 4.x. Developers have the option to run a buildout to create either a development or production environment using Plumi.

On top of the out-of-the-box Plone functionality Plumi adds the following features:^[3][21]

• Video Uploading/Download
  • Upload video in any format (over HTTP)
  • Video upload progress indicator and Ajax form to add metadata during upload
  • Large video file uploads via FTP (automatically added to Plone site)
  • Expanded video metadata set (Director, Producer, Date Produced etc.)
• Video Transcoding and Playback using Transcode Star
  • Automatic server-side transcoding to MP4 H.264 and WebM (configurable) via FFmpeg
  • Embedded HTML5 video playback via mediaelement.js
  • Playback in high and low resolution
  • Automatic thumbnail extraction
  • Auto extraction of video duration
• User interface / theme
  • Adaptive mobile/tablet friendly theme with video playback on iOS and Android devices, built using Diazo
  • Custom templates for browsing videos - topic, country, genre, video language, tags
  • Enhanced author page (user profile) including latest videos, news & events and personal latest videos vodcast feed
  • Member folder to share other files
  • Content moderation and video publishing workflow (configurable)
• Language and Translations
  • Integration with Universal Subtitles - viewing and adding of subtitles via video player
  • Indonesian translation of Plumi and Plone interface
  • Built in internationalisation via LinguaPlone
• Classification, Licensing and Ratings
  • Taxonomy system into country, genre and topic
  • Content licensing including Creative Commons licensing (through their API), the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) or you can add custom licenses or use traditional copyright
• RSS, Social Media and Discussion
  • RSS feeds with media enclosures (or "vodcasts") created automatically based on taxonomy items - e.g. country, genre, member, topic or through creating custom smart folders
  • Threaded commenting
  • Share content via Social Networks
• Back-end
  • Multiple load-balanced Zope instances using Zeo-clusters managed using Supervisor
  • Caching via Varnish
  • Nginx / Gunicorn

Development

Plumi is a community based free software project. It is developed by people/companies from all around the world using the following technologies in order to carry out work in a collaborative fashion as well as to communicate:^[22]

• mailing lists; those are also carried on Gmane
• an IRC channel (#plumi) at irc.freenode.net
• a ticketing system - http://plumi.org/report/3
• a software configuration management system
• Ohloh tracking and measurement

References

External links

• Official website
• Plone.org product page
• video.indymedia is dead - long live independent online video networks!
• Plumi — free software video sharing platform
• Content Management Software - Plumi (0.1)
• Linux Softpedia page for Plumi
• Plumi page on P2P Foundation
• Critical Commons site created using Plumi