Domain: plone.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to plone.org.
Comments · 181
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Plone just held a week-long sprint
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.
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you're not alone doing this
Theo de Raadt was quoted as saying 'I don't think anybody else does this, developers suspend their lives for a week to focus entirely on just development.'
For just one project that does this often, see http://plone.org/events/sprints
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Re:Irony
No, I don't. But I know a documentation site that does:
http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/ldap-in-wind ows -
My employer requires that I care!Contrary to some earlier posts, saying "my own stuff I care, but at work, it just has to work" -- it's my employer's policy that all our sites should be fully valid XHTML/CSS. Therefore, any site I make, must pass. Well, I say "must" - in practice nobody superior to me actually checks these things as far as I know, but I damn well make them valid anyway.
In practice - our main website actually doesn't validate! Our (proprietary) content management system munges code, so that even if I enter valid xhtml, it doesn't come out valid at all. This should be fixed in the next update hopefully... although even then it will take a huge overhaul to bring our vast website into 100% standards compliance. Until then, at least all our non-CMS microsites are valid. I've also helped persuade them to use Plone as the basis for our new intranet, partly because it adheres to pretty much every web standard under the sun.
Even if they didn't have this policy (and outside work, where I'm under no such direction), I still care. Why? Well... hmmm... frankly, I think it's about a typical geek trait as much as anything. Confused?
Basically, although one could reel off the supposed reasons why standards are all good (cross browser rendering, accessibility, etc), but there are counter-arguments to these anyway. (Cross browser rendering? Barely any browsers REALLY support all the standards, and the hugely dominant one doesn't do so at all. So the pragmatist could argue standards aren't the de facto route to platform-independent equivalent rendering. Accesibility? It's doubtless possible to follow standards and be inaccessible, and vice versa...)
No, if anything, the real reason I love sticking to standards is that good old geek habit of enjoying a challenge. Let's face it - it's easy to make a site that looks good in one browser and sucks in the rest. It's easy to make a site that looks good if you just do the whole bastard thing in flash. It's easy to make a site that looks good across all browsers if you ignore the standards and fill your markup and CSS with hacks. But make a site that looks good across all browsers, using the onion skin of gracefully degrading web technologies (Server side language of choice->XHTML->CSS->JS) and nothing more, and all 100% standards compliant?
Now that's a real challenge
;-)I'd link you to my employer's site, or some of the standards-based microsites I've done, but it's a charity, and I don't want to land them with a bandwidth bill
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Re:CMS Systems
No, there have historically been very few security holes with CPS, Plone, Silva, or any of the other Zope-based CMSs out there. In fact, there have been very few security holes with Zope.
All that being said, there are a few sites that have built their own CMS on top of Zope (it has a decent CMF built into it, so it's far from impossible to roll one's own). The two biggest profile ones are probably Boston.com and Saugus.net, but I'm sure there are plenty of others.
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Python
I'm always wondering why Python is left out from this kind of conversations.
Python is the best language I've ever worked with. It's very human friendly, no need to learn/read/write hieroglyphs, like in Ruby or Perl. Very compact, no need to write a pages of text to print Hello World, like in Java. It's very oo, supports multiple inheritance, what makes code reuse a reality. Has a wide range of modules, a wonderful application server, called Zope, a code generator, that eats UML and many many features, to make it an outstanding choice. -
To add to the parent's idea...
Consider a workflow-type approach, like what exists in Plone. Changes go through an approval process by one or more people. You could sophisticate it, make the waiting-for-approval changes visible so that people can comment, help with citing sources, refute false claims, etc.
I think it might work for wikipedia. It does mean, however, that each article would have one or more people that "own" it and are responsible for keeping up with submitted changes. -
Re:www.OpenSourceCMS.com invaluable"I found the http://www.opensourcecms.com/ site to be invaluable when choosing a replacement CMS"
But they only show a subset of CMS's. According ot the site:
"There are a number of reasons why many CMS's aren't featured at opensourceCMS.com. The main reason being we only deal with php/mysql systems. If it's not php/mysql it won't be featured here. Also, if the system requires php5 it won't be featured here, yet. " (OpenSourceCMSSo the name is misleading, as there are several excellent/powerful Open source CMS options that are not listed here becuase they are not written with PHP. Things like Plone or Liferay.
These are examples of robust, high-quality, Open Source CMS's that you will not find at that site. And it is seems a mistake for most people, when asking the question "What is the best Open Source CMS" to only consider "the best Open Source CMS's written in PHP 4."
IMHO
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Zope-Based CMS Products
There's been an ongoing discussion about this same topic over at Macintouch.
Personally I'm a fan of the Zope / CMF series of content management systems; the built-in CMF is quite powerful and flexible (and actually fairly efficient -- don't be fooled by the slowness of some CMSs built on top).
There are many such systems. There are some in private use (like Boston.com and Saugus.net. There are also some commercial options (like Icoya). Most though are free and open source, like Plone, Infrae Silva, and Nuxeo CPS. Each has its own focus and tends to do certain things better than the others. Each has its own special plug-ins and extensions, but since they all utilize the same underlying base framework, it's usually a doable thing (although typically not trivial) to port a product from one to another.
The capabilities of Zope's built-in CMF are also good enough that it's not at all unreasonable to fashion one's own CMS on top of it if none of the existing products seem to suit one's own particular needs.
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Re:ZOPE has some of this
For Zope, try Zwiki. With Zwiki under Plone (which runs under Zope; it is like an onion),which will take care of access control, at an overhead cost, though. I haven't played with it much in a year or so, and I cannot recall how fine grained the access controls are (I think it is wiki-level, not page-level access). For page level / group access, you would probably need multiple wikis, although you'd need to check the docs for certain. You can always just use a Plone site instead of a wiki (Plone offers full WYSIWYG editing, access control, tracking of revisions, rollback, etc). Zwiki - Access Control and membership. Plone also has some docs on zwiki, link to a plone/zwiki demo.
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What does Tapestry have that Zope/Plone doesn't?
Z Object Publishing Environment (ZOPE) http://www.zope.org/ and its derivative Plone http://www.plone.org/ seem like they have all this and more. Like they are a whole universe. What does Tapestry have that Zope/Plone doesn't? -- IV
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Re:correction
This resource looks good on the surface, but if you look at their requirements, they *only* feature PHP4/MySQL systems. For example, Plone (http://plone.org/ is one of the most mature and successful open source content management systems (and yes, I do work with it), and is not mentioned on the site. Who knows what other good systems are not featured there? In my mind, it makes this a pretty useless web site for all but the narrowest of searches.
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Re:Visual-Studio is a great IDE, Visual-Python = gWell there's always PyDev for Eclipse
I tried PyDev for Eclipse but couldn't get the debugging to work. When I installed plone, I found PythonWin in the program files menu. That's the best editor/debugger that I have found for python development so far. It is much faster than Eclipse. Statement completion is spotty for those who like that sort of thing. PythonWin is also Windows only whereas PyDev for Eclipse is cross platform. PythonWin can edit/debug any python program. It is not really tied to plone.
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I know one group that seems to get accessibilityhttp://plone.org/accessibility-info
The plone folks have spent some real time & energy on accessibility as well as standard based design. The nice part is this leads the way for anyone building their own site with plone to get to these standards quickly - esp. in their latest release.
If you are trying to tackle accessibility, I recommend using plone, or at least looking at their code (you wouldn't be the first to use plone 'code' outside plone - I remember wikipedia css crediting plone... http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.c
s s?5 )Not only do they have hotkeys and use valid xhtml and css, they also explain all this, list the (numeric based) keys, differences between browsers, and link this info from every page (upper right) as prominently as the site-map and contact links.
(And no, I am not a plone committer/member, just an occasional user.)
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They may also want to change ..
They may also want to change their website icon while they are at it.
http://www.osm.org/favicon.ico
http://plone.org/favicon.ico -
Here are my facts...
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. -
Open Source Content Management
At least osm is running a Open Source Content Management Systems, Plone. There are a ton of other systems running Plone as well - a list is available del.icio.us
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Speaking as someone working in the AT industry ...
... and also someone who loves open source, I have come to the same conclusion myself -- that Open Source has a way to go before it can stand shoulder to shoulder with its proprietary counterparts. The fact is, open source is already at a disadvantage when it comes to accessibility -- because so many of the accessibility features out there are being pushed by the vendor (making them effectively proprietary).
Consider Flash. It is, as some of you may be surprised to know, accessible -- but only when used with a Microsoft toolchain. That's right; for users with special needs to use Flash, it has to be being rendered through Macromedia's plugin (obviously), in MSIE, to one of a very limited group of screen readers only available for Windows (JAWS, WindowEyes, one or two others) and all on, you might have guessed by now, Windows platforms only. Even the Macintosh -- which is natively considerably more accessible than Windows (or any other OS, essentially) doesn't support accessible flash.
We've all heard the rumours of Microsoft releasing its "Flash Killer" application; maybe it will be natively more accessible than Flash, but then where will that leave open source and operating systems besides Windows? Does anyone think Microsoft cares about the greater good enough to want to make the spec -- much less the product -- available for any other operating system?
Now consider Adobe Acrobat. Version 7 is chock full of accessibility features that revolve around the new tagged document structure. How many apps currently generate tagged documents? Not many. Again, Adobe has partnered with Microsoft so that just about every Office product will generate tagged PDF. There are one or two other desktop publishing packages that do it. OpenOffice managed to squeak tagged PDF 2.0 into their product (and good on them for doing it) but the support is minimalistic; it is an attempt at addressing the problem but is shy of the mark as far as users with special needs go.
Never mind that OpenDocument is anyway readable on free operating systems; users with disabilities generally wouldn't touch Linux with a ten-foot pole because the screen reader software available for it is also somewhat lacking where it counts; consider JAWS by Freedom Scientific, where they employ dozens of employees to do nothing more all day long than write key mappings and shortcut-features to applications. Guess which browser is better supported in JAWS -- MSIE, or Firefox? Guess how good the custom support for OpenOffice.org is in JAWS? You would be correct to guess it is non-existent. These people have invested thousands (and in many cases, over the USD $10,000 mark) in technologies to allow them to use computers to do their jobs or just live; it's unfair enough to have something continue to be inaccessible to them, but considerably worse (and understandably frustrating) to have something be accessible then have it taken away for the benefit of others.
The only potential saving grace in the browser market is the release of Opera for free; since it has better innate accessibility features than either Firefox or MSIE (which has virtually none) there may be some mass migration to these systems. HTML is inherently one of the most accessible forms of markup available today because of its strong, structural meaning and the fact that it is one of the very few languages that are completely open, appropriate for most uses, and heavily wide-spread.
Several opens-source projects have already made accessibility an important part of their web projects; for example, Plone and especially Atutor are star examples of how you can build a great application and still have it accessible to users with disabilities by design.
I would like to congratulate all authors and participants on those projects and others who work at making open source software accessible to everyone, not just the enabled majority. I would like to encourage everyone else to do some re
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Hornet (was Re:no sql?)
Archetypes does not handle Object-Relational mapping well, and shouldn't be used to store relational data regardless- The ZODB was not designed for large numbers of objects, and most certainly doesn't handle relational data well.
Try Hornet (http://www.plone.org/products/hornet). It stores everything directly in a relational database, works with ZODB transaction (So it commits and rolls back at the same time, keeping ACID complience), and uses lazy iteration to handle millions of rows without a problem. Plus, As far as any regular zope app is concerned, you can treat it as a normal folder/object in Zope/Plone whatever.
Theres no excuse to ever store relational data in the ZODB again :) -
Re:no sql?It shows a high level of abstraction when you access the DB by simply loading/persisting objects [...]
Last time we used an object-to-sql mapper was quite some time ago, so my info might be outdated:
We attempted to create objects (in Python) to store a lot of attributes ( > 30 ). The design explicitly asked for a "flat" database.
All this happened inside Zope/Plone, so we tried out the Archetypes, which come with a hand attributes (or better PropertySheet) to SQL mapper. But the code was that ugly, it created a single SQL insert/update statement for each property (attribute) even if it did not change.
This resulted in an extremely long running "save" operation that you could simply throw the code out of the project ... . The data is now stored in the Zopes own ZODB and gets archived after a while in a SQL DB.
For archiving purposes a hand-crafted SQL statement is used that runs lightning fast :-) .
On the other hand, I have seen Java code querying an SQL DB using the Oracles TopLink product to abstract the underlying database. The code was so gross, you simply felt the urge to go and wash yourself after looking at it.
The result of this experience is:- If you want to concentrate on your object oriented approach, stick to databases that can handle objects, like the ZODB (usable w/o Zope if you like).
- If you have to access mass-data from legacy systems (like e.g. master product data), you have to program SQL, since nothing is faster than that. Make sure the results can be converted into something like a list of dictionaries so handling of the results is more natural in an object oriented manner.
- Every good programmer should be able to switch between programming languages and be able to access data stored in legacy systems as well. Sometimes the data comes only via an ODBC connector from an old AS/400, but if that is the source of the master data, you have to live with it.
- SQL databases are not the primary choice to store objects and/or tree like structures. They were designed it the "good ole' times" when everybody though that relational databases were cool. Sometimes it can be much more useful to store a tree in an object persistent storage and put the node data into an SQL DB (for performance).
- For debugging: If you use SQL code in your project you can actually print out the statements before they get send over to the database so you can simply copy them from your logfile (you have a logfile, do you ?) and run them manually to see if they produce the outcome you want. This is often more useful than enabling query logging on the server since digging through thousands of lines of log-messages can be rather time consuming.
- For designing: You can build your queries step by step in a "Query Analyzer" using some example data and then embed the results into your code (including the exchange of fixed teststring with variable names).
- For performance: You might know that you have to run a query 3000 times in a row with different variables (e.g. insert into
...) but you object mapper does not know that fact. Thus you can use one prepared SQL statement and fill in the variables upon execution. This saves a hell lot of time (depending on your database system, some systems are slow either way).
Ok, I got my flame shield up, let 'em come ... -
Re:no sql?It shows a high level of abstraction when you access the DB by simply loading/persisting objects [...]
Last time we used an object-to-sql mapper was quite some time ago, so my info might be outdated:
We attempted to create objects (in Python) to store a lot of attributes ( > 30 ). The design explicitly asked for a "flat" database.
All this happened inside Zope/Plone, so we tried out the Archetypes, which come with a hand attributes (or better PropertySheet) to SQL mapper. But the code was that ugly, it created a single SQL insert/update statement for each property (attribute) even if it did not change.
This resulted in an extremely long running "save" operation that you could simply throw the code out of the project ... . The data is now stored in the Zopes own ZODB and gets archived after a while in a SQL DB.
For archiving purposes a hand-crafted SQL statement is used that runs lightning fast :-) .
On the other hand, I have seen Java code querying an SQL DB using the Oracles TopLink product to abstract the underlying database. The code was so gross, you simply felt the urge to go and wash yourself after looking at it.
The result of this experience is:- If you want to concentrate on your object oriented approach, stick to databases that can handle objects, like the ZODB (usable w/o Zope if you like).
- If you have to access mass-data from legacy systems (like e.g. master product data), you have to program SQL, since nothing is faster than that. Make sure the results can be converted into something like a list of dictionaries so handling of the results is more natural in an object oriented manner.
- Every good programmer should be able to switch between programming languages and be able to access data stored in legacy systems as well. Sometimes the data comes only via an ODBC connector from an old AS/400, but if that is the source of the master data, you have to live with it.
- SQL databases are not the primary choice to store objects and/or tree like structures. They were designed it the "good ole' times" when everybody though that relational databases were cool. Sometimes it can be much more useful to store a tree in an object persistent storage and put the node data into an SQL DB (for performance).
- For debugging: If you use SQL code in your project you can actually print out the statements before they get send over to the database so you can simply copy them from your logfile (you have a logfile, do you ?) and run them manually to see if they produce the outcome you want. This is often more useful than enabling query logging on the server since digging through thousands of lines of log-messages can be rather time consuming.
- For designing: You can build your queries step by step in a "Query Analyzer" using some example data and then embed the results into your code (including the exchange of fixed teststring with variable names).
- For performance: You might know that you have to run a query 3000 times in a row with different variables (e.g. insert into
...) but you object mapper does not know that fact. Thus you can use one prepared SQL statement and fill in the variables upon execution. This saves a hell lot of time (depending on your database system, some systems are slow either way).
Ok, I got my flame shield up, let 'em come ... -
How's this different?
What's the big difference between this and http://www.plone.org/ ? Haven't Plone and http://www.zope.org/ providing such framworks for years?
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Plone Help Center
While we are probably going to end up with SharePoint (which isn't a bad collaboration tool if all your fellow staff members know is Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), I personally like the Plone Help Center. You can see examples on the Plone web site or on my personal web site.
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Plone Help Center
While we are probably going to end up with SharePoint (which isn't a bad collaboration tool if all your fellow staff members know is Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), I personally like the Plone Help Center. You can see examples on the Plone web site or on my personal web site.
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Re:Please stop the MySQL Bashing...
I am looking at a plone deployment. The requirements call for a relational back-end. Although the docs claim that plone can play with either, I'll be picking MySql over postgresql because I could never get the postgresql to plone adaptor to work.
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Plone
Plone does exactly this -- it's one of its main features. Plone probably has the best interionalization/localization support of any current CMS.
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plone.org
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I don't Mambo
I think PHP is great, but I don't think it's quite ready for a robust content management system. The PHP CMS community is very fragmented. When shopping around for a good open source CMS, I found a profileration of nukes. The two CMSes I considered seriously were Mambo and Drupal. Both of them have had some recent issues that made me glad I didn't pick them. Not only that there were some serious PHP security issues. I've been a fan of Perl far longer, but was amazed at how quickly I could slap together usable stuff in PHP. And I didn't choose a Perl based CMS either.
Ultimately, I chose Plone which sits on top of Zope which sits on top of Python. It can sit behind Apache, You can use it with other other databases than it's own weird object db, but it's not easy. It also has a steep learning curve. Despite all these drawbacks and concerns, Plone is the most robust, secure, and ready to use out of the box CMS I've found.
Maybe it was just dumb luck and the recent problems with Mambo, Drupal, and PHP made me feel better about my decision. I'm still learning Zope and Plone, but I'm impressed that I can throw stuff together pretty quickly with it, even though hides stuff in non-intuitive locations. -
MIA
I went to the Content Management page and was surprised to see no plone. What happened? Are the pythonistas no longer in vogue?
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Zope with Plone
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Python, Zope, and Plone Are Good
I still use PHP for a lot of personal work and quick stuff, but I've been leaning more and more on Python, Zope, and Plone for building stuff at my day job. If you need to quickly and easily implement role based security, Zope makes it drop dead easy because it's built in and through ZEO, zope apps can be highly scalable. Of course as with most things, use whatever technologies get the job done. For example, my Zope apps live behind an Apache server that I use for SSL as well as access control.
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Plone CMS, Enfold Enterprise Server and Railroad
You should have a look at the Plone Content Management System[1] and the Railroad Server[2] which complements Plone for (large) digital media files like photography, audio, video and their associated metadata.
There's also a commercial version of Plone, the Enfold Enterprise Server[3], with comes with Windows and ActiveDirectory integration and commercial support.
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[1] http://www.plone.org/
[2] http://www.infrae.com/products/railroad
[3] http://www.enfoldtechnology.com/ -
drupal host uses plone
http://osuosl.org/ the host of drupal uses plone. http://plone.org/
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Re:Advertisement!
With that type of load, I'd reconsider also. Perhaps something like Plone would be more suitable for your purposes?
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Re:Opinions on DrupalDrupal is an excellent piece of software. Compared to other CMSs it is fast, modular, has a clean codebase and a gentle learning curve. I recently started using it after messing around with various other CMS systems over the last couple of years.
To be honest its the first one that has really impressed me. I looked at slashcode, scoop, zope, plone, postnuke, mambo.
When I started using drupal I got the same feeling as when I started using Mac OS X. To continue the OS analogy postnuke and phpnuke are more like windows whereas zope and plone are kinda linux of the CMS world.
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Re:Opinions on Drupal
Plone. Don't forget Plone.
http://plone.org/
Plone is simple. Plone is built on Zope. It's all Python (which I love). And there are so many Products - my favourite right now is CSSManager:
http://opensource.arche.de/products/cssmanager
You can do absolutely anything with Plone - I absolutely love it! -
Plone
I'm surprised Plone hasn't been mentioned yet. For a low-volume site it should work very well. -
a few more?
- ClamAV virus definition distribution model (use of incremental updates, dns txt field checks for new updates, automatic, etc..) -- compare this to the weekly (!) updates of Symantec (or manually updating slightly more frequently) or even some of the "download a big chunk from a centralized location" method of commercial competitors.
- BitTorrent
- So many things in KDE its insane.. (just check out all the awards, including Software Innovation of the Year - CeBit!)
- Plone, Zope, Typo3 - These content management systems lead the way for both commercial and opensource.. so much innovation going on here
- CUPS - While not glamerous, I have setup lots of print servers and the flexibility and modularlity of CUPS (in my experience) is unmatched.
- The spam fighters: greylisting, spamassassin, amavisd, postfix, dnsrbl, etc.. developed under or made popular due to opensource.. I have yet to come across _any_ non-FOSS solution that comes close to the success and accuracy of the OSS tools for spam filtering
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Re:No such thing as WYSIWYG
This is a troll or a joke, right?
I mean, I know that some sites/products (notably Plone use some JavaScript to implement missing CSS properties in various browsers, but an ActiveX super-fixer-upper?
I've seen ActiveX do a lot of things (many that it shouldn't), but never fix IE rendering to the point it's pixel perfect with Photoshop. Not to mention that the biggest problem on the web is still fonts (although this may be due to legal, not technical, concerns).
Not to mention that ActiveX controls only ever make anything worse. Seriously. If you need ActiveX for a web interface, you should probably be writing a native interface instead. -
Why not an OSS CMS?
Why not try an Open Source Content Management System like Plone or Mambo? Being a technical guy you will probably find that the only way to produce a good looking site is to do it by hand, learning the intricacies of HTML/CSS and latest graphics tricks, and that's a lot more work than meets the eye. That's why those things are nice - they give you a more or less professional look to start with.Oh, and for hosting I recommend OpenHosting, of course!
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Re:Dont Forget Zope
If you can get your head around Aqusition[sic], the ZODB and Product Deveopment[sic] then Zope is a super-fast development platform.
I recenty became the web administrator at a small university and the college I work for uses Zope. I knew a little Zope and Python beforehand and it helped me get the job. I was all hot and heavy to switch them to a PHP/MySQL solution, though my first love is Perl. Doing stuff in PHP was fast. As I studied Zope and Python more and more I came to realize that my initial impression was correct. It does have a steep learning curve (Zope not Python), but it is very powerful and reasonably fast. I'm not crazy about ZODB. I'll keep Zope put it behing Apache and connect to MySQL when I redesign the site. Also I'll throw Plone on top.
What does this have to do with Ruby and Rails? Not much. The user base of Plone/Zope/Python (8) is much smaller than the PHP (5)/MySQL crowd. The Ruby (23) on Rails is even smaller than the Plone crowd. -
There are better choices than Email
A content management system, such as this one, I find to be a better repository of information.
For one thing additional meta-data about the items can be stored in the CMS. Secondly, the built-in search capability beats the pants off what I have to deal with in MS Outlook (100 times faster). Finally, it has the flexibility for me to extend its functionality beyond what I find out-of-the-box (e.g. to manage appointments, and link related information to those appointments).
I get so much cruft in Email, and I have so many other sources of information I use in my day to day job that a CMS is a better choice for more intelligently filtering and organizing my information.
Sadly, too many folks are enamoured with thier particular (annointed) Email systems, and force the rest of us to play in their very limited world. -
Re:drupals ok, I prefer mambo
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Meet Zope and Plone!
I remember when I first heard of Python back in grad school. I wondered what would become of it, but didn't have time to deal with it at the time, after all FORTRAN was teh cool, right? Lately, since I started using Zope, which is written in Python, and more recently Plone, which is built on Zope, I've really gained a great appreciation for Python because it really has made building sophisticated logic for web apps a lot easier than some alternatives. Now admittedly, I did not choose any of these because I heard they were easy or even cool, I stumbled into Zope because of an app, OIO, that I thought I could build on for another project. Later I heard about Plone and decided that I could build an easier to use portal for clinical investigators using that rather than PHP based solutions like PHP-Nuke. Python was just the icing on the cake as I discovered how much I could do with it.
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Re:Please enlighten me
Can one use Python to do the same?
Not as a applet.
Where would it play its role? The backend or on client machines?
A little interface script on the server connecting to a database (like PHP does now most of the time.) Or to previde a complete CMS. On the clientside either XUL in Mozilla is still a Toolkit to be discovered or a browserindependant Python-client (Python is well integrated with native Toolkits, for example via wxWindows - used in bittorrent). -
"[The FSF] has a new website, BTW"...
... Which is actually a nearly stock roll-out of a rather popular Content Management System called Plone. They added their logo and replaced some icons with the GNU logo and changed the blues to greys. An excellent use of multiple tiers of free software to illustrate their point succinctly; my hat goes off to the FSF and to the Plone team for a job well-done.
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Here is an even faster way to build your own site:
Zope plus Plone - if you are looking for a content management system, or Zwiki if you are looking for a wiki solution, or learn Python and roll your own inside of Zope's Management Interface (ZMI).
Before you know it you will have dynamic content coming out of your ears - and you won't have to muck about with a relational database at all (and the ZODB scales better anyway from my experience). -
Plone
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Plone : free, easy, open and a decent UI to bootPlone http://plone.org/ should be on your list to check out. It's designed as a communal publishing system with orderly content flows and a permission heirarchy for bringing submitted content to the site through moderators.
I've used it for several sites, and I expect it might fit your school newspaper model (perhaps multiple contributors to a periodical publication).
The best thing (I think) about Plone is your "users" can contribute rich articles to the site without dicking around in HTML or external editors. It all happens in the browser, any browser.
Server side, it's Python/Zope/CMF which is quite a few layers. It's worth it though, as these technologies are designed for running an object-oriented content system. If that sounds scary, you can just use it like most people and not worry about all that. But it's a powerful framework that can be customised if you want.
And it's got nothing to do with PHP, so right now you don't have the hacking worries from PHP based systems.
Installation and doco are easy, and Plone is free and runs on anything. Another big plus is there are smart people designing the system and the user interfaces. This pays off big when your readers and writers aren't technologists but just want to get the work done.
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Re:Zope/Plone
That is, use Plone, built on Zope. Do not use Zope itself for what you're trying to do. Zope is a framework. Plone is an Open Source CMS built using Zope.
Plone probably gives you most of what you need "out of the box": users, groups, workflow, searching, content/presentation separation, some standard content types, etc. You'll probably want to customize the style to match your site and eventually create some custom content types. In that case, you'll need to read some of the documentation. Thankfully, there's finally a good Plone book available: The Definitive Guide to Plone.