Large Files without the Trials

See the video recording from this talk at the Plone Symposium East 2010 conference.

The mission of the non-profit organization Bioneers is to provide environmental education and social connectivity through conferences, radio and television programs, books, and online materials. They engaged Jazkarta to build a file asset server based on Plone to help them organize, capture, and store multimedia and textual content. This project led us to make innovations in Plone's handling of massive multimedia files.

We developed a product that bypasses Plone and Zope and lets the web server front end handle large files directly - thereby avoiding the problem of stalling a Zope thread while hundreds of megabytes are being transferred. Uploads are handled within Apache by ModPorter, or alternatively the user can transfer files to an incoming area using their favorite FTP client. For downloads the web server directly serves the file content from ZODB blob storage after Plone has performed security checking. Versioning of large files is handled outside of CMFEditions, and copies are made only when necessary.

To make sense of the large number of image variants, we also created a way for Bioneers staff to designate a source image and record what other images are derived from it. We added image thumbnails to the default CMFEditions history view, and using jQuery provided lightbox behaviour so users can see relationships at a glance.