Plone and COVID-19

These days are tough and challenging for all of us. COVID-19 affects everyone across the globe. The Coronavirus hits every country differently. Fortunately, Germany seems to be better prepared than other countries. However, there will be a huge fallout from this crisis and many things will not be the same as they were for a while. So, please #stayathome and stay safe.

But let me tell you a small success story around Plone and COVID-19.

We are running the portal Onkopedia (www.onkopedia.com) for over a decade where the medical guidelines for oncology and hematology for Germany, Austria and Switzerland are published. The portal contains treatment guidelines for over 60 diseases which also includes medical studies, protocols, certifications and information about individuals drugs and active components. With the growing Corona crisis in Europe, high-risk patients with pre-existing conditions like cancer came into the focus. There was an urgent need for providing COVID-19 specific information for most diseases to the public.

The Onkopedia portal was always running and powered by Plone (nowadays running on Plone 5.2, Python 3). Within two or three days we had to extend our data model for COVID-19 in order to provide the functionality required to publish the COVID-19 information specific for each disease. With the help of the whole Onkopedia development team, we were able to to roll out the necessary Onkopedia update within a very short time from of three days. The required changes affected the Plone data model for the guidelines and a bunch of UI aspects like a new COVID-19 section and individual markers in guideline documents for referencing the related COVID-19 information in the COVID-19 master guideline.

As a result, we managed to roll out the new COVID-19 section on onkopedia.com (German only) yesterday with individual COVID-19 content for over 40 different diseases.

Key success factors: Plone and a great team (Abstract Technology, Practice Innovation, AppWeeve)

Thank you all for making this happen and for contributing in the fight with COVID-19.