• Description - Plone4Artists is a project to build a portal for artist community websites.
• Proposer - Nate Aune (natea at jazkarta.com)
• Status - Awaiting feedback (view the demo)

Contents

1. Definitions
2. Motivation
3. Assumptions
4. Proposal / Implementation / Deliverables
5. Risks
6. Time line
7. Participants

1. Definitions

MP3

the most popular audio format

2. Motivation

Artists are increasingly using the internet to promote their music and network with other like-minded musicians, and it is now imperative that artists learn how to leverage the technology and use it most effectively.

There are many sites that offer bands an online portfolio for a fee or free. However, there are several limiting factors which make these sites unable to provide any real value for the artist.

• too commercial with lots of banner ads and unwanted promotions for products that are not directly related to the artist or the artists community
• too general trying to cover every possible genre and are therefore unable to attract a targeted audience and cater to a niche market.
• too limiting in the number of songs you can upload, pages you can create, layout of the pages, etc. They take the "cookie cutter" approach which makes it easy to create a portfolio, but they tend to all look the same and artists quickly outgrow them.

With the demise of mp3.com, there are now millions of "refuges" who do not have a web home. This presents a huge opportunity for the Plone community to reach out to the artists and provide them with a freely downloadable tool that they can use to build their own grassroots portals catering to niche genres.

Plone4Artists is an initiative to provide these artist communities with a portal that works out-of-the-box and which can be modified as they wish. Plone is ideally positioned to provide such a portal framework because it is open source and already has a rich array of add-on modules.

3. Assumptions

It is impossible to create a portal framework that caters to every possible need, so we will instead focus on building the basic infrastructure and providing commonly needed products in the Plone4Artists package.

It is expected that the users of the Plone4Artist package will need to customize it for their specific needs. This includes tasks such as any special workflow and skinning of the site's look.

Since there are many products mentioned in this document, we will not attempt to go into any great detail on the products, but leave those discussions for the development wiki.

4. Proposal / Implementation / Deliverables

The goal of this project is to provide an infrastructure and collection of products that meet the needs of an artist portal website. Eventually the goal is to make a Plone package using customization policy to install common products and configure them. Below are brief descriptions of the components and products that could be included in the Plone4Artist package:

Please see the Development wiki for a complete list of features.

7. Risk Factors

The changing nature of CMFPloneTypes?, PloneGroupRoster? and CMFMember? makes it risky to implement a solution now until these products stabilize.

8. Time line

Development will start in mid-February during the Snow Sprint and continue if there is enough interest in the project.

9. Participants

Add your name below if you are interested in getting involved on this project. Also, be sure to join as a member of this site and sign up for one of the development teams.

Nate Aune, Copenhagen, Denmark

Musician and Project coordinator and architect.

Paul Kavsek, Vienna

runs a small music project studio in Vienna, Plone snow-sprint member mailto:paul.kavsek@aon.at

Rodrigo Villaça, São Paulo - Brazil

musician and programer, i can translate it to portuguese and help with development mailto:rodrigo@dataclipping.net

KnowNet?, Bangor, Wales

we have a small project to build a musicians' community website for the North Wales area. An early demo of the site is up at http://www.tirnagog.net/ , and the project should be waking up within a month or two. The requirements for our project are identical to the ones you listed above, so we'd be happy to contribute developer effort.