Frequently Asked Questions

1. Why "Plumi"?

We spent a lot of time thinking of many different names to use for the software before settling on Plumi. It is a shortening and concatenation of Plone and Lumiere.

Plumi is also another name for the beautiful flower commonly known as the Frangipani, or less commonly, Plumeria. And who doesn't want to share a name with a beautiful flower?

2. You used to say Plumi was GPL, now you say Plumi is Free Software. What changed?

Plumi represents a lot of work by the Engagemedia collective, but we didn't write all of the code.

One of our developers correctly pointed out that some of the software that goes into Plumi is licensed under the Zope Public License, other parts of the software is licensed under the GPL. Hence we thought it best to refer to Plumi as Free Software (or FOSS). It should be noted that we may look at the Affero Public License for use with future releases of Plumi.

3. If you are FLOSS, why don't you use OGG/If you are GPL, why do you only embed proprietary formats?

Plumi does support Ogg. You can upload Ogg and download Ogg.

Currently the FOSS implementation of Indytube (Flowplayer/ffmpeg) that we are using only supports transcoding to Flash. We would like to release an Ogg version of this soon, but there is a certain amount of development to do amongst many other development priorities.

We are currently working on an R&D project into FOSS codecs that is essentially about improving support of Ogg in our system, and in other popular systems such as Drupal.

We are investigating the Cortado Java Applet, as well as the VLC plugin amongst other things.

4. Does Plumi use file system storage?

Plumi uses the ExternalStorage product, so yes, the media files stay in the file system. Its only been tested with Plone 2.5.x at this stage, but we are currently looking for funding to make it compatible with Plone3 this year.

5. How much RAM/CPU etc. do I need to run a Plumi site?

Ah, we don't know. It seems to work on Lachlan's home box and Andycat's laptop. But we only do testing. Depends on traffic, and number of videos really, doesn't it?

6. Commenting doesn't seem to be working?

If you experience missing preferences and remove tags on the comments, you may have to install the PlumiSkin package =after= the comments package or even reinstall the PlumiSkin package. We have found this helps.