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Just switch to Plone and sleep easier at night. A little out of date figures, but in the time Joomla had 441 exploits, Plone had 9.

https://plone.org/products/plo...

-Matt

Plone does this kind of thing too, but there's an important distinction. CSS/JS that are required for an add-on to be functional still have to be under the GPL, whereas purely display CSS/JS/HTML (such as for themes) doesn't.

The way Plone themes are applied is by an XSL-based transform step, called diazo, so the themes in Plone will work on any website, regardless of backend. The only thing that needs doing is the source rules need updating to take account of different ids and classes.

Use Plone CMS. Scan your docs, upload w/ WebDAV. Tag via categories. Now that I've thought of this, I think I may go that route myself.. ;)

Surely the right place to ask for help highlighting the selling points and strengths of Plone is on the Plone Forums?

although according to their website ( http://plone.org/documentation/faq/name ) the CMS is, in fact, named after the late 90's electro band. They had a song in a Reese's cup commercial a while back: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPr16k7C3wo

• Mature
• Flexible
• Secure (with a proven track record)
• Cross platform
• Tons of third party extensions

Cons:

• Steep learning curve for developers and integrators
• Python, not PHP (so uncommon hosting requirements)
• Some say it's slow... (but have probably failed to correctly setup and optimize caching)

Funny, but unfair.

To get it up and running you just need to run the unified installer (also for Mac) and then point your browser to your chosen port. Administration is done with a simple and friendly GUI.

You don't need to install a LAMP stack and setup a database, so it's fast and pretty easy to get running; it's not the brutish beast you are depicting, so please don't spread FUD about a great piece of free software.

If this guy knows his way around a command-line, he might want to try installing it the "correct way" by using zc.buildout and PythonPaste, which is a bit more complicated but in no way mandatory.

In the past I've used Plone to do what you're asking. There are kits for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and *BSD and its open source.

Like anything there's a small learning curve but once you're past that creating new content is easy. Any uploaded files (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF, etc) are fully indexed for searching. It can integrate with Active Directory, LDAP, etc. It's extensible, skin-able and if the online documentation isn't enough there have been several books written about it (user guides and professional development).

I like it anyway.

Try Plone: it's cross-platform, open source and quite mature.

I recently helped implement an intranet document sharing portal for a big bank in my country and it works remarkably well. Just make sure you use iw.fss or zope blobs to store those big files. With a vanilla Plone site you get fully indexed PDF, Microsoft Word and Openoffice documents indexed right out of the box. You can access your Plone site through WebDAV and define some fine grained ACLs to set group and user permissions. Also, versioning and some great workflow functionality is there.

Ok, some may argue that Plone is actually a big and complex system, but the core functionality works straight away once it's installed and the Plone community is full of very helpful people. Worth a look.

The review is well timed. The book was from the beginning of the year, but since then the US Whitehouse has gone back to FOSS on its web site. It's using drupal. It's good to see more discussion of these tools. Everyone has heard of Drupal and plone and respect the capabilities. They are the heavy hitters like Apache2 for httpd.

What new FOSS CMS tools are corresponding to Lighttpd and nginx, ready and useful but not as visible as they could be?

Thanks I found the website http://plone.org/ is that it? I'll add it to my list for Sharepoint FOSS alternatives.

Why not make the same choice as the Irish government and kill off Sharepoint and switch to the open source Plone instead. A complete list of all Irish sites are here: Government and related websites, both Plone and non-Plone.

Disclaimer: I consulted for them on this project.

• it has a version history system, with diffs;
• it has a great workflow engine, which is flexible and customizable;
• it has a solid code project management suite.

You don't really need to customize anything as these extra features are available as plugins, which are easily installable. As a plus, you might feel the need to ditch Java for Python ;)

• it has a version history system, with diffs;
• it has a great workflow engine, which is flexible and customizable;
• it has a solid code project management suite.

You don't really need to customize anything as these extra features are available as plugins, which are easily installable. As a plus, you might feel the need to ditch Java for Python ;)

• it has a version history system, with diffs;
• it has a great workflow engine, which is flexible and customizable;
• it has a solid code project management suite.

You don't really need to customize anything as these extra features are available as plugins, which are easily installable. As a plus, you might feel the need to ditch Java for Python ;)

Salesforce.com is a pretty amazing platform for doing CRM that goes well beyond just donor management. As others have mentioned, the Salesforce Foundation makes it available from free-to-darn-cheap. It has good Outlook/Office integration, and unlike most other solutions Salesforce has an really solid Web Services API that makes it possible to integrate with all kinds of other systems, notably including Plone, the open-source CMS system that many nonprofits use. ONE/Northwest, the nonprofit I work for, has done a ton of work in this area, and has had great success at delivering powerful, easy-to-use solutions to mid-sized environmental nonprofits.

There are plenty of examples of web services running on Open Source for 'enterprise' use - groupware, CRM, accounting, the works. Some of these packages are very good.

Its hard to be specific/determine what you're trying to do without knowing more specifics as to what you're looking for. Of the groupware projects I'm aware of, I know the following have a fair amount of support/use:

* Plone CMS
* OBM
* eGroupWare
* Drupal
* Typo3

Of these, I know that Plone, Drupal, and Typo3 are all "platforms" for developing, managing, and extending content. I seem to recall either eGroupWare or OpenGroupWare extend/integrate with MS Office products. No, it's not going to be the level of integration that Sharepoint stuff offers, but it's something to mention, at any rate (and isn't going to have the massive licensing costs + perpetual lock-in that a MS solution has*).

Plone, in particular, has a lot of support and corporate/"enterprise" use. From their site:

Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 200 core developers and more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. The project has been actively developed since 2001, is available in more than 40 languages, and has the best security track record of any major CMS.
It is owned by the Plone Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, and is available for all major operating systems.
Sources: CVE and Ohloh.

That alone is impressive enough; but also consider some of the notable companies which utilize Plone in/for a variety of purposes:

Akamai (yeah, that Akamai - the guys who load balance Microsoft web servers)

Nokia (QT Software stuff)

MyCity ("real time monitoring system for Cities, Towns, Districts or utilities. It makes use of the GPRS service offered by the various GSM network operators")

Discover Magazine

Novell, Inc. (for enterprise services)

NASAScience (public site for NASA's Science Mission Directorate)

FSF (yeah, those hippies)

universities, university science/it departments, hospitals, public/government sites... the list goes on.

Those are notable company names, and at least in the case of Akamai, Novell and Nokia, everyone in IT should know about them. They're also some fairly diverse (and expansive) implementations using the same central CMS - and they're not shackled to a single software backend, able to run on any OS and server combination they could imagine.

* The cost factor associated with MS solution lock-in is a big consideration, bigger than just a simple argument of something like "OpenOffice vs. MS Office". With a web-based, top-level technology like this, it's much, much more important to keep the technologies used "open" - because it is the top-level interface to all your data. You can not move away from a closed package on the backend without moving the entire system, at once, to something open (more often than not, with MS). You're basically stuck with that stack unless you want to start over; there's no ability to independently consider parts of the stack and replace them, as there often is with open systems.

Plone (http://plone.org) is a CMS that you can use to setup a portal or intranet with features similar as Google Docs. In fact, there's a module that let you write math using latex format: http://plone.org/products/latex-math-image

Plone is not only open source, but has a strong support from its community as any successful FLOSS project and also professional provided by a network of business and people in more than 60 countries as you can check in http://plone.net/

Have you tried Plone? http://plone.org/

Zope is an open source application server specializing in content management, intranets, and custom web applications. Zope is written in Python and has a large, global community of developers and companies. http://zope.org/

It is a ready to use server that even without any programming you can start-up your web project just by uploading your documents to it. And with programming you can can achieve same power as with Django - or even more if you check how many products (ready to use components and frameworks) you can find at http://www.zope.org/Products.

Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on Python and the Zope application server. Plone is easy, flexible, and gives you a system for web content that is ideal for projects, communities, websites and intranets. http://plone.org/

Plone opens even more ways and power for you - it is a ready to use portal and it is a framework for writing portal applications. And again, check how many products it offers and compare it to Django: http://plone.org/products.

Zope is an open source application server specializing in content management, intranets, and custom web applications. Zope is written in Python and has a large, global community of developers and companies. http://zope.org/

It is a ready to use server that even without any programming you can start-up your web project just by uploading your documents to it. And with programming you can can achieve same power as with Django - or even more if you check how many products (ready to use components and frameworks) you can find at http://www.zope.org/Products.

Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on Python and the Zope application server. Plone is easy, flexible, and gives you a system for web content that is ideal for projects, communities, websites and intranets. http://plone.org/

Plone opens even more ways and power for you - it is a ready to use portal and it is a framework for writing portal applications. And again, check how many products it offers and compare it to Django: http://plone.org/products.

Still, if you're writing system software

(e.g. a web server,

I tend to agree, but the folks at Plone and Zope would probably disagree. That's easily one of the most powerful CMS packages, with the only competitor in the same league being Typo3. On the other hand, Django recommends bog-standard Apache.

daemon control software,

I have no idea why you think daemon control software needs the performance of C/C++.

filesystem indexer, etc)

I've actually written a filesystem indexer in Python as part of an image management program (think ACDSee). Obviously the hashing algorithms and performance critical parts are written in C/C++, but there is no reason not to write the rest in Python. You spend most time waiting for the disk I/O...

or large desktop software (Photoshop, Microsoft Word, KDE),

Again, the only one of those that shouldn't be written in Python is KDE (parts of it could be). Image-handling code should be written in C/C++, but the GUI doesn't need to be. My (currently unreleased, but fully-functional) image management program is faster than ACDSee, which has more to do with loading the GUI without blocking waiting for the image to load than it does with using C++. It also uses less memory because I only load the thumbnails that are displayed on screen into memory... Actually it blows the old-school application ACDSee out of the water for performance. Again, for image manipulation, I would use a C/C++ coded image library such as ImageMagick, which has bindings for Python.

then it would be madness to choose Ruby/Python over C++.

Not hardly.

Plone maybe?

Plone is a content management framework that works hand-in-hand and sits on top of Zope, a widely-used Open Source web application server and development system.

[snip]

Zope itself is written in Python, an easy-to-learn, widely-used and supported Open Source programming language. Python can be used to add new features to Plone, and used to understand or make changes to the way that Zope and Plone work.

As an 'expert' system administrator (albeit unpaid) I have four servers. One is running Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, one is running Microsoft Window Server 2003, one is running Ubuntu Linux 5.10 (Server), and the other is running Apple OS X Server (10.4).

I can tell you now that when I first started my company, although I was a major advocate of Linux, I soon found that I did not have the time to maintain a then Gentoo or custom LFS distribution, Debian was far too heavy to pick up, and Slackware felt a little dated. So I took a look at Microsoft Windows Small Business Server 2003, liked what I saw, and bought a Dell PowerEdge 400SC with an OEM install.

At first Small Business Server was a breath of fresh air. It was easy to maintain, with a full complement of features, having been bundled with Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft SQL Server, and Window Sharepoint Services. I actually enjoyed - yes, enjoyed - using it.

Until backup stated to fail. Until my tape drive disappeared. Until the sharepoint website database got corrupted. Until exchange monitoring failed. Until the POP connector started to thrash the CPU. Until the Windows Update website failed to check for updates.

These things happened. I'm not saying that they wouldn't happed with another system, but that is not the point, since they happened to me, and that caused me grief, and time, and money to resolve. I ended up trying to build a new system based on Microsoft Windows Server 2003, since I already had Microsoft specific data (files and tables), but this proved even more difficult to maintain.

I struggled for eighteen months, and then decided to build an Ubuntu 5.10 server. I use Ubuntu on one of my laptop, and had gently learnt the apt- way, and liked it. I set up a server with similar features to the Small Business Server, using Postfix, MySQL, and Plone, and even went some ways to transferring my sharepoint data. It works. It hasn't failed yet.

I bet the guys who took part in the survey only set up a server, installed some applications, and patched it. I bet they didn't try running a business for 18-months, just to see what it was really like.

I must say that we recently purchased an Apple PowerMac, and were so impressed we are now looking at completely switching, hence the OS X Server. It is a dream to install and configure, but we are going to run it for several months until we are satisfied that it can do the job.

The author should submit the original text with no formatting. The editor and publisher should feed it into a CMS that provides access to multiple versions of the content for copy editors, editors, marketing, IT staffers and the rest. Of the many CMS's available, here are two that handle workflows.

Plone

Silva

Plone is great if it is a good fit between the requirements and developing custom document types within a CMS framework. The architecture is highly layered. The low level way of developing under plone has a non-trivial learning curve to it. The high level way is to use what is known as plone archetypes which makes it really easy to create custom document types. The skinning of the custom types becomes very easy using Zope's METAL technology which is a very cool page templating system.

I have discussed plone previously here and here.

I have been using it and developing apps for it for the past three years. There is a learning curve but it is worth it. There are some great videos about how easy Plone is to work with on the plone site:

http://plone.org/about/movies

I think the plone documentation, gives a good overview of exactly what plone is and what it does.

Its probably http://plone.org./ Its an OSS CMS based on Zope.

> The overall effect is that if you try to write something complicated in Python, everything goes along just great until you hit some library bug that can't easily be fixed. Or you discover that you need racks of servers to compensate for the painfully slow implementation.

> That's why Python hasn't even replaced Perl, over fifteen years into the deployment of Python.

You mean something complicated like a feature-rich Content Management System such as Plone?

http://plone.org/

Plone has been known to replace racks of servers of commercial CMSes with a single server. And those commercial CMSes are written in things like Java and C++. Python has very little competition from Perl in the feature-rich CMS space.

Personally, I've known a lot of developers who switched from Python to Perl (myself included). I've never met a single person who has made the transition in the other direction.

Java is as popular as Windows. But think who uses Windows in the first place.

I'll let the videos speak: http://plone.org/about/movies ("Better Web App Development")

Plone comes to mind as another open source CMS.

What do you mean by aggregator? An RSS feed?

As for CMSs, I know that Plone and EZPublish can accept/convert ODF files, and I just found HippoCMS, an Apache Caccon-based CMS, through a quick Google search for "ODF CMS."

2. If you know Office you must learn OpenOffice. Office is taught in every school I know of.

Open Office is more like MS-Office 2003 than MS-Office 2007 is like MS-Office 2003. It will be easier and cost less to train a company to use Open Office than it would be to train them to use MS-Office 2007.

5. Sharepoint. I haven't seen anything as easy to use from the FOSS community.

You should try plone which better, easier, and more customizable than Sharepoint.

If you're interested in Python Web development, you'll find a host of network and Web specific frameworks. I suggest checking out Twisted, Zope, Plone, and Django for examples. You may also find some other goodies when you explore the Python Cheese Shop.

Of course, no mention of Python can pass by without someone bringing up Ruby on Rails, so I'll just do that right now. :) However, I have no experience with it whatsoever, so I'll withhold any opinion.

Zope. - What Rails wants to be when it grows up.

Also be sure to check out Plone, Symfony, Django, CakePHP, Prado and Turbogears before you blindly join the overhyped Rails bandwagon.

Plone is a powerful, extensible, easy to use CMS that will probably get you a good portion of the way there.

I'm a big fan of http://plone.org/ which is a CMS that sits on top of the http://www.zope.org/ application server. All of which is OSS. I can't speak to OSS CRM but others here have. There are plenty of fantastic server side developer productivity boosting OSS software out there.

• Try http://jakarta.apache.org/ for lots of Java libraries.
• I find http://www.springframework.org/ is a great framework extension for Java.
• I like spring better, but http://www.hibernate.org/ provides an ORM for both Java and .NET developers.
• If you are working in Perl, then http://www.cpan.org/ is the place for you.

When it comes to client side software there is a huge amount of great OSS apps.

• I believe that http://sourceforge.net/projects/ganttproject/ is great for project management.
• I have used http://sourceforge.net/projects/freemind/ for years and know it to be a great mind mapping tool.
• I believe that http://live.gnome.org/Dia/ is a great diagramming tool.
• I'm a big fan of http://www.umlet.com/ and find it to be very useful for creating UML diagrams.
• I switched from sodipodi to http://www.inkscape.org/ which is fantastic for drawing vector images.
• I am also a big fan of http://www.gimp.org/ which is used to draw raster images.

I have used all of these projects for years and would most definitely label them as quality, winner OSS.

He could have covered his points in 1/4 of the time and made them more accessible to the general public

I think it's worth keeping in mind that the speech we all listened to was an invited keynote address at the Plone Conference in Seattle. His audience was a bunch of free-software experts (Plone is a FLOSS content management system). Making his talk 'more general and accessible' would have bored the audience. The intention of the talk was to remind some free-software developers of the 'why' of free software, and to encourage them to 'keep at it' because they are part of something good and something that can really help the world.

So again, keeping in mind the context I think it was a very good speech and very well-targetted. Admitedly you can't just show this video to someone who has never heard of Free Sofware (there are too many obscure references, acronyms, etc.), but that wasn't the point. For many slashdotters, however, I imagine the content hits very close to home and was quite interesting. I enjoyed it, at any rate.

A friend in the free software community has transcribed this talk:http://plone.org/events/conferences/seattle-2 006/.

I prefer Fedora, my co-worker prefers Slackware - and we are equally productive. Supporting as many distros as possible would be a great goal - if you keep it as a completely seperate installation and don't try to "integrate" it into the host OS (I'm thinking of some Samsung printer drivers as a particularly bad example).

For example, Plone ships with its own version of Python and Zope to keep the host OS's versions of either from breaking the application, and lets you update the host OS independently of the application. This is a good thing.

He missed ZOPE, with such add-ons as the Plone content management system, becomes very competitive in the RIA space. Zope uses the object database ZODB. Zope is written mostly in Python - and uses python as its development language of choice (although you can use others).

Been using it for years -- it is stable as a rock, and Version 3 is looking very cool. If you love Python, then Zope is the development framework to use imho.

I am now in the proces of rolling our several more Plone sites on my own, with the help of a large and helpful Plone commmunity.

Designed to scale well, themable (CSS-based), and good caching options (squid and the new CacheFu).

I have found Plone to provide a great foundation to build upon.

I am now in the proces of rolling our several more Plone sites on my own, with the help of a large and helpful Plone commmunity.

Designed to scale well, themable (CSS-based), and good caching options (squid and the new CacheFu).

I have found Plone to provide a great foundation to build upon.

I am now in the proces of rolling our several more Plone sites on my own, with the help of a large and helpful Plone commmunity.

Designed to scale well, themable (CSS-based), and good caching options (squid and the new CacheFu).

I have found Plone to provide a great foundation to build upon.

And the costs are similar to other Open Source packages -- paying your own people to read the source, rather than paying some other big company to do it for you.

The original poster was considering sharepoint but found it lacking. I would totally agree that plone might be just what the original poster is looking for. It is easy to integrate your own apps into this CMS by writing your own document types (called archetypes) and skinning them using TAL. Aggregate, navigation, or reporting pages can be easily cooked up with a little python script and skinned by TAL.

I don't understand why this is on Slashdot. The author of the article writes an interesting comparision between the modern ease of PHP and the primitive simplicity of BASIC but fails to mention that PHP is one of the most accepted web development languages in the world, as well as one of the fastest, and used greatly by professionals around the world. He claims the language itself was made too easy to use, and without specific example, claims that it is that ease which is ruining the programmer's ability to write better code; "become wizards" in his own words. It's this subscription to a sort of 1980s programmer mantra that everything must be difficult in order for it to be powerful that is clouding up the opinions of a lot programmers around the world today. What makes this article even less respectable is his follow-up on alternatives, where he cities both Zope 2/3 and Plone as viable and intelligent alternatives; anybody who has used any of these technologies knows that, while they are more complicated than PHP, they themselves aim to beat even the ease of PHP, and they're unprofessionally slow to process: even the offical Plone site is very slow day in and day out. Excellent opinion, sir.

Who hasn't had to deal with this?
I ended up using plone with the zWiki product and a versioning product (CMFEditions is your best bet). Plone/Zope provides a very powerul platform to start with, adding a few products on top of this and you have what you need, and then some.
There are tons of add-on products, like defect trackers, calendars, source control integration, also a few project management products you can plug-in as well, though I never bothered with such things.
It also supports FTP and WebDAV access for mass file upload, and there are products to make it easier to use various types of docs, be they word or open office.
Anyway, I've used it for a few years now and I couldn't be happier with it - we just keep using it for more purposes.

Sounds like Theo doesn't know about the Plone community, which just wrapped up their week-long "Archipelago Sprint" on a Norwegian island to drive forward development of the next major release of the most kick-ass open-source CMS on the planet.