Slashdot Mirror

I second this. I'm not a big PHP fan, but the Drupal guys (and its cousin project CivicSpace) were very thoughtful in designing a complete drop-in but very extensible CMS framework. Plone with Archetypes is also a good choice, if you prefer Python (and who wouldn't?), and it tends to iron out a lot of the wrinkly parts of Zope that turn people away.

Dreamweaver is an impressive behemoth of a tool, no doubt whatsoever. Back in 1999/2000 it was the only possible way to edit and manage websites on a professional level. Dreamweavers wysiwyg power with the older browsers and it's HTML editing features are unmatched. The template engine completely abstracts changes to a website in your developement directory and automatically keeps track of anything you what across multiple documents. If DW doesn't crash and screw up your template dir that is - which does happen more often than you like. It's the best thing you can use ... ...if you don't have a CMS.
Which gets me right to the point:
Sorry, but it's like five years since the early dot-bomb days where dynamic server side stuff was considered exotic and people got payed for klicking static websites together. You may haven't noticed, but the world has moved on. There are something like fifteen bazillion open source content management systems out there. One better than the next.
Who the fuck needs DW nowadays? You don't want DW! DWs concepts are ancient by todays standards. The last time I used it was about 4 years ago in some project where the system team couldn't get their stuff together and set up a halfway decent JSP framework and we had to hack the webdocs by hand in record time. And my web productivity has tripled by now, since I exclusively use content management systems (as every body else does), and be it "only" to generate the html docs offline and publish the output to static webspace.

Honestly now: Ditch DW allready, it's nothing but a huge waste of time these days. Trust me, I make a living with this stuff. And take a look at one of the frameworks above. To save your time, I recommend checking out one of the following: Plone/Zope, Callisto CMS, Mambo, Typo3, Mason, Slashcode, or (forgot this one above) Xoops. Save yourself half to three quarters of webdev time in the long run.
Oh, and welcome to 2005. ;-)

Zope and Plone is the way to go. These tools are RAD for the web, you'll have to learn them, which is hard, but then I guarantee that you'll save LOTS of time !

Tooting my own horn here for a bit, but:

Plone has had excellent support for blind people for quite a while, and passes both the US Section 508 accessibility guidelines and the much stricter WAI-AA accessibility requirements.

I've seen several blind people use the CMS without problems, and it's quite a satisfying feeling to see that people can make use of your application even when they can't see it.

We regularly get thank-you e-mails from blind people that are extremely grateful for giving them a way to do online publishing and intranets. Web standards really matter more than you think - especially to these groups of people.

What we have seen with our own project, the Plone Content Management System is that people very often use Windows as their evaluation platform. Since it is so simple for them to download, double-click the installer and have a Plone site up and running in a few minutes, they actually find that Plone is a good alternative to whatever proprietary solution they are using or considering. They get hands-on experience without the hassle of setting up a separate server to test it.

The most common scenario we see is organizations that are evaluating or currently using MS Sharepoint, and they find Plone as a much more compelling and useful system for them, regardless of cost.

When they can then get rid of the Windows box they purchased to run the other system, and install Linux on it, and not have to reboot the server every night just to keep it stable - they couldn't be happier.

1. CPSSkins

Run one of the videos. If you have Plone give it a try. Slick.

No slashdotting here... The URL in the article is wrong, it should read http://www.gocc.gov (a Plone site BTW) instead of http://gocc.org.

First off, I should point out that I'm the guy who was interviewed by Demos for the report, and also the same Seb Potter that the nice people at the BBC interviewed for their piece. Please excuse any rambling in the article, I was interviewed very early in the morning, before coffee, on the day after the wedding of two close friends, and my brain was most definitely not fully engaged.

The first thing that I notice on here is a lot of detracting comments from people who haven't read the full report, but are just going on the headline. I'm not particularly surprised, as, of the several members of the press that interviewed me, only the BBC actually wanted to try to present the story in a positive light. Others just wanted to regurgitate the press release and get some nerdy quotes about not having a social life, for which I was happy to disappoint. No member of the press that I spoke to had actually read the port as far as I could tell.

Strangely, nobody wanted to publish my photo, because I don't look at all like the stereotypical image of a trainspotting nerd. I feel sorry for the other 5 people who were put forward by Demo as being examples of what Demos calls the "Pro/Amateur" economy, as the press ignored them completely.

So guys, remember that when you're pressing that submit button, you might be coming off as no more intelligent than a tabloid journalist.

I'm pretty encouraged by the report and what Demos are doing with it. For those who don't know the background, Demos is a think-tank organisation that provides policy advice to the british government. In this case, their advice has been obscured behind a knee-jerk press reaction, a reaction that I especially wouldn't have expected from the audience that the report praises.

You might need to know who I am, that I have the nerve to represent the community in this way. Well, I'm a 27 year old programmer from England. I've held a series of successively senior roles in several companies over the last 8 year, that has led to my current position as the Technical Director a company called Getfrank (http://www.getfrank.com/. Along the way I helped get Battle.Net started in Europe when I worked for Sierra/Vivendi running their online presence back in the 90s.

6 years ago, almost to the week, I was one of a handful of people that started an online community called evolt (http://evolt.org/). Actually, the wedding I was at this weekend was for 2 of the most prominent members of that community. I'm about to dump most of my time over the next couple of weeks to work on a complete rebuild of the technical architecture behind the community.

About 2 years ago I started working with the Plone project http://plone.org/, and became a core developer through working myself silly helping to get the 2.0 release out of the door. I don't get to contribute to the community as much as I would like at the moment, but that's mainly because everyone there is pretty damned good at what they do.

I have a steady girlfriend, but then, so do nearly all of my geeky friends, except the married ones. I have a social life that can best be characterised as amplified. I code about 50 hours a week at work for clients (on OSS projects), and about 30 hours a week for fun (on whatever the hell I like, but mostly little Torque Engine-based games for fun).

The point about the Pro/Amateur thing isn't people making a living out of their hobbies, it's mostly about motivation, and the availability of expertise and knowledge outside of the traditional bounds of "professions". In fact, it's one of the first indicators that many sections of the economy are noticing a move back away from the protestant work ethic, and back towards concepts of social responsibility and pride in self-directed achievement.

It's all small steps, and getting a report like this published and noticed in the press is just the first tiny step towards change, but it's definitely going to be an interesting journey.

I agree with all the comments about Plone being great, if Plone existed before we started developing MKDoc then we probably wouldn't have bothered... If you like Plone but want a CMS written in Perl then check out MKDoc.

MKDoc doesn't yet have such a big community around it yet but it's only just been GPL'ed...

The PHP CMS's are great if you don't have root, if you do then the Zope, Perl and Java ones are worth checking out.

Another one that hasn't been mentioned here is Java Mir the Indymedia CMS.

Zope is written in Python, so you avoid the PHP stack and its evils. Unlike PHP, Zope is designed around object-oriented concepts such as encapsulation.

For example, to interface with a database you typically create (again, through the web) a connection object, then an SQL method describing the data (a pure SQL script with a few special HTML-like tags for specifying parameter slots) and finally a page template which calls the method.

The upshot? You just decoupled the data from the presentation in a very elegant way, and you decoupled the data operators from the data source. Abstraction is the key.

Plone, in turn, abstracts much of Zope away to provide an elegant, extensible GUI for managing user-oriented content. It has a workflow system, a component system, WYSIWYG article editor support etc.

(The workflow system allows complex flows such as "both John and Jane must review and accept the article before it can be published, and after they've reviewed it, spelling wizard Bob must look over it before it for typos; but users Jack and Jill are trusted users who don't require John or Jane's approval to post articles.)

Unlike most other CMSes, Plone/Zope have no external dependencies -- no MySQL needed, for example.

http://plone.org/

Zope is an incredibly flexible web application development environment. It can be used for pretty much anything ranging from a full blown CMS with shopping cart facilities to a cutting edge XHTML/CSS showcase site. It works well with all Internet standards (including XML, XHTML, iCalendar, etc.) and most non-standards / semi-standards (PDF, Flash, RSS, etc.). I've even used it to on-the-fly convert definitions from within a CMS to be served by a dict server.

The popular Plone is built on top of Zope / CMF. Ditto for Silva and Nuxeo CPS.

Because Zope is so flexible, the sites it's used for generally look quite different from one another.

It's good to hear that Zope v3 has been released. I now egarly await what I assume will be version 3 of the Zope based content management system Plone.

Except that Slashcode produces horribly invalide HTML. Please use something well designed. Try:
Drupal
Plone
or Xaraya

Plone runs on top of the Zope application server. Zope is quite secure, and it scales up reliably to manage huge web sites, like The Boston Globe.

-Don

There are plenty of alternatives. A quick search at freshmeat.net for CMS reveals many when sorted by popularity. I'm still using nuke because I have too much content invested in the architecture to easily switch now. But Plone looks good to me. I suppose it mostly depends on what a publisher is looking for in features. I was originally attracted to phpNuke because of all the modules and huge development community. Now I've found that it's the modules that provide most of the security vulnerabilities, so I've had to disable them all.

Running your site on a popular publishing platform is great except that there are hundreds of krackers huntng exploits in the software and when one is found, there are hundreds of attackers searching google for sites running the software with the vulnerability. Although obscurity is no reliable form of security, I would prefer it to being a high-profile target.

It's well known to be riddled full of security holes, it's horrible to maintain or extend, it looks and feels unprofessional, and it falls apart under pressure.

Kids, if you want a real content management system like grown-ups use, you should download Plone. It's high quality free open source software, it works great right out of the box, it's secure, and it cooks a lot better than a 60 watt lightbulb.

-Don

If you don't realize that Perl sucks, then you don't understand it yourself.

Want to read some reasonable, cool, pleasurable Python code?

Zope: http://www.zope.org

Plone: http://www.plone.org

-Don

When I hear about a site powered by Python

Here you go.

Oh yeah, and then there was this small startup, you may not have heard about them, what was it again... let me think, oh yes, something called "Google".

I expect there to be ample amounts of Spam, Vikings, Spanish Inquisitions, Black Vicars, etc.
Happy?

Dunno. Didn't notice any of those, but perhaps they all popped up at your place?

...and, of course - Plone. XHTML, WAI-AA and Section 508 compliant.

That's called Plone.

Amen. Firefox should also support Presentation Mode, a very cool & useful feature that only Opera supports.

Furthermore, we are looking at content management systems for knowledge base solutions such as TikiWiki or egroupware.

Zope and Plone require a bit of a shift in thinking but I would add them to your short list. Zope provides a rather robust framework and Plone provides a rather well tested CMF solution with plenty of add-ons available. Plus you get the benefit of an open source solution with corporate support if you need it. Note that I have no affiliation with Zope other than I'm a happy user.

Sorry, misspelt URL. should be www.plone.org, not pone.org . /jeorgen

For any of those out there who were at Europython in Sweden a couple of weeks ago can testify, Nuxeo have a large presence in the French public sector. Nuxeo's product, CPS, fulfils a similar role to Plone as a CMS. Like Plone, it's based on Zope.

In fact, I hear that it's got to the point where if you're planning a CMS project in Public-Sector-France-Land and you *don't* have a Zope-based product on your shortlist, questions are asked why... Corroborations, anyone?

The CMFOODocument Plone product (http://www.icoya.de/support/download_area/zope/CM FOODocument) has some interesting bridging functionality.

I guess that when one uploads a OO Write document to a Plone site and it is converted to HTML by this product the content is added to the site catalog so it can be located on a seach by keywords.

Yo can try it at the Plone demo site http://demo.plone.org

I haven't' tried it myself though.

-

R

The CMFOODocument Plone product (http://www.icoya.de/support/download_area/zope/CM FOODocument) has some interesting bridging functionality.

I guess that when one uploads a OO Write document to a Plone site and it is converted to HTML by this product the content is added to the site catalog so it can be located on a seach by keywords.

Yo can try it at the Plone demo site http://demo.plone.org

I haven't' tried it myself though.

-

R

• web development: Not only Zope and Plone, there's a lot of interesting development going on with Twisted... and, well, Twisted is not only about the web, it is about networking in general;
• .NET / Java development in general: Python in Java exists already... Java gaining more and more popularity? No problem, Python is already there. .NET/Mono taking the market away from Java? The industry will perhaps support more and more .NET techniques - with IronPython (featured recently on /.), Python is already there. No problem;
• some people might wonder if you really need that stinkin' .NET/Java stuff at all - Python is already very portable, but that's not everything - it already supports a wide range of MacOS/Unix/win32-specific functionalities.
• anything else makes you wonder, if Python is a good choice at all? What about realtime applications, like a VOIP phone (GUI included, win32/unix compatible) in Python? Do you read "interpreted" as "slow", do you wonder if Python is good enough to be useful in CPU-demanding programs like games? Anything else against it? Perhaps you're worried about Python's extensibility?
• if software telephony sucks for you, perhaps you should try a real mobile phone

Absolutely. Plone will be issued under an OSI-approved license. The Foundation is working to build a guarantee of this nature in to the Foundation bylaws and in the contributor agreement."

The current Plone approach states that companies can negotiate a non-GPL license. Thus, the Foundation might pursue a dual-licensing (GPL and non-GPL) scheme -- but, at this time, the Board has not yet created any policies on this. This is an important question for the community, of course, and the Foundation intends to have this conversation in a transparent way. For more information, see Contributor's Agreement for Plone Explained.

I'm sorry....point me at the OSS equivalent of Sharepoint and I'll start deploying that.

Plone. Now start deploying that.

But seriously, I had a very high-level IT manager complain that she wanted to replace a home-grown collaboration-site-creation web application with the more polished and integrated SharePoint, but that the costs were enormous. (If you really have installed it for clients, you have already gone through this exercise. For my Fortune 250 company, this is going to range into about a half a million dollars, not counting the hardware and other infrastructure.) Unfortunately, Plone only does a little more than what our home-grown app does, but I throw this out there so that other people can benefit from the technology that 1) don't have a ton of money for it and 2) don't have a talented web development group. Plone does most of what SharePoint does. It only lacks the usual Microsoft lockin..., er, integration.

I'm new to blogging and group/forum CMS systems, so forgive my n00b-idity.

In terms of features and target implementation, how do WordPress and MT stack up against stuff like PhpNuke, Drupal and Plone? Don't they all do basically the same thing?

The learning curve is pretty steep for newbies, but the features, scalability, and price are hard to beat. It's not the standard Apache/MySQL/PHP approach, but there is alot to like about it.

Warning: Zope has some religious followers that make RMS look tame by comparison. Fortunately, most of the enthusiasm is justified by what the product can actually do.

http://www.zope.org

http://www.plone.org

Not prime-time ready, but it's getting there... (OpenGroupware). It's getting built on much better foundations than Microsoft's, of course.

For the time being, if you want a solution that works now and if you don't mind that it's not so closely integrated to your Office apps, you might consider Plone.

The current Brazilian government's love for Free Software gave us a nice surprise this year by providing a nice Java app with which we can declare our anual taxes on several platforms. Until last year we had to chose between using a Windows app or using paper forms. Gee, I just realized that the Receita Federal site (our IRS equivalent) is made on plone. How nice!

I didn't post above, but I currently use both XP and 2000 daily. Make your own decisions but I also use OS X daily and it's far and away the most pleasant working environment I've encountered to date. That doesn't mean it's perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but that's not the point now, is it.

As for "OS 9," um, who's talking about OS 9?

If you want Unix, install Linux... FreeBSD... SuSE... Debian... Lycoris... Lindows... There are choices in the Windows world.

Well, by the time I've finished clicking through the (Continue) buttons in an OS X install I've managed to install both the entire GUI environment and the entire Unix OS. I can also install other Unix systems on Mac hardware, but frankly I've got everything I need right here.

I don't need to install anything else except Logic Pro 6, Ableton Live, MetaSynth, ArtMatic Pro, MetaTrack, Voyager, VTrack, Absynth, OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniDiskSweeper, Studiometry, FileMakerPro, Adobe Creative Suite, LaunchBar, MySQL, Perl 5.8.3, Fink, Plone, Keynote, BBEdit, FastTrack Schedule Pro, Sonasphere, Toast 6, ZBrush, and a few more but I'll get to those tomorrow.

I run all these (plus my email, internet, contacts management, calendaring, etc) in the same operating environment; not an emulation shell, not after dual-booting, but in the very same operating system and simultaneously.

To top it all off OS X comes with a full set of developer tools, documentation and optimization utilities, plus Cocoa+Obj-C is a match made in heaven.

There's no need to pay Apple for a decent Unix experience.

Well, I believe there is. I enjoy the ability to support quality whether it's a film, a restaurant, a music venue, a book, clothing, my neighborhood, an artist, etc. every single day.

The hardware is just a hunk of material until you've discovered/designed an interface with which to use it. Solely on a base consumer level, I'm very happy to pay Apple for what is, in daily practice, a superior computer operating system. From the level of both a technology consultant and a media creator, the solution is very simple.

OS X is a very impressive "Holy Grail" for all my current activities. Strap me in because I'm ready to get to work.

More:

Python Resources

Why Plone?

We've been using Plone for a while now and for me it has a few distinct advantages:

* Plone works *out-of-the-box* and is easy to extend and configure.

* Plone provides excellent workflow support. A Workflow is the editorial chain used to manage documents. Creating new workflows is easy.

* Plone is easily extended with external components ("Products" in Zope/Plone parlance). I run Plone with Zwiki (a wiki extention) and CMFBoard (forums), making for a very rich intranet site with loads of possibilities. Check out the The Collective or the Zope website

* Plone comes with Archetypes, which is a framework which allows for the relatively easy creation of new content types (in Python)

* It runs on Zope which is a very powerfull Application Server and Content Management System. Zope has got a rather steep learning curve, but its documentation has been improved and it has got a very supportive and vibrant user community.

I'd recommend Plone v 2.0

WhyPlone

It incorporates the Wiki features you mentioned, has support for authenticating against Active Directory and LDAP, even SMB if that is what you use and it has a fully implemented ACL system with granular permissions which includes adding files/documents as content and setting global, group and user specific permissions on each file or on folders "with inheritance".

Not to mention one of the best documented APIs around for any OS CMS.

Check it out, it is very robust and scales well.

• Python - Get the Python interpreter, base libraries from here. The default install includes the IDLE editor.
• Win32All - Windows extensions package that includes the excellent Pythonwin editor.

• wxPython - Wrapper to the cross-platform wxWindows window manager library. It's a better windowing system than the TCL/TK library that is the default Python install.
• Boa Constructor - GUI builder that uses the wxWindows library.

• Psyco - x86 runtime compiler. Transparently improves the performance of most Python code - for performance-critical apps, it's often a much better solution than a C rewrite.
• Py2Exe - Builds Python scripts into Windows executables. Perfect for distributing programs to systems that do not have Python installed. Use with Psyco for the best effect.

• PyOpenGL - Use OpenGL from within Python
• Python Image Library (PIL) - Package for easy image loading and manipulation

• PostGreSQL - Full-function SQL database. More complete and advanced than MySQL.
  
• PyGreSQL - Python bindings for the PostGreSQL database.
  

• Plone - Web applications, built on top of the Zope framework.

Interestingly, NASA uses Open Source Plone to run some of their sites, including the Mars rover site.

• Python - Get the Python interpreter, base libraries from here. The default install includes the IDLE editor.
• Win32All - Windows extensions package that includes the excellent Pythonwin editor.
• wxPython - Wrapper to the cross-platform wxWindows window manager library. It's a better windowing system than the TCL/TK library that is the default Python install.
• Boa Constructor - GUI builder that uses the wxWindows library.
• Psyco - x86 runtime compiler. Transparently improves the performance of most Python code - for performance-critical apps, it's often a much better solution than a C rewrite.
• Py2Exe - Builds Python scripts into Windows executables. Perfect for distributing programs to systems that do not have Python installed. Use with Psyco for the best effect.
• PyOpenGL - Use OpenGL from within Python
• Python Image Library (PIL) - Package for easy image loading and manipulation
• Plone - Web applications, built on top of the Zope framework.

Slight caveat - Psyco is x86 only. Which is OK if you're not needing a globally redistributable end result. Testing with Plone suggests that by Pysco compiling a few of the more expensive components, you get a 10% speedup.

Mailing lists (or nntp/www via GMANE) are where all the discussion lives. Between the Plone users, developers, archetypes lists etc, I would guess about a volume of 600 messages a month, and equally that volume on the various Zope lists. The community discussion is VERY active.

Resource hungry? Yes, well so is PHP, JSP, and any other system relying upon a VM. You can serve pages statically out of Zope, even from the filesystem, with the right add-ins. And by simply spending 5 minutes adjusting your caching rules, Apache or Squid will serve from cache 90% of your requests. Also, you can push static files (with plugin product) - use plone on a workgroup server, and render/push static content out of it like some commercial CMS products. Your traffic can just be served as static pages, with only dynamic pages hitting your Zope, if you like.

I think things are getting better - much better, much faster. Soon-to-be-released Plone 2.0 and Archetypes are contributing to this - the learning curve for all aspects of Plone is getting flattened.

Zope has a "Z-shaped learning curve" -- or so goes the saying; this is becuase Zope (well, Zope 2) has a deep tree of class inheritance - a "deeply object oriented" system (to borrow a phrase from Jon Udell, not sure if that's his intended meaning). When someone tells you to "read the source" -- that's usually becuase Python is remakably easy to read -- but you still you end up with a task that's fairly involved and somewhat academic (not to discount this - once you get it it is quite rewarding).

What the CMF and Plone do is put a "wide-not-deep" framework on top of the Zope app server to abstract most of that tedious, academic learning curve for serious developers. The CMF hard-codes a really simple MVC-like design-pattern for best practices for component-oriented development, where lightweight components interact (global "tools" like search/catalog, workflow, etc and content objects in folders/containers (the model) - and UI/automation skin code (view/controller)). Each component is lighter-weight and pluggable (with defined interfaces and unit-tests), and CMF, Plone, and unrelated Zope 3 development are working towards not just pluggable components, but user/admin configurable components. The Plone 2 control panels are a good start towards making this more human. The ease-of-development and deployment story is getting better. The UI is also more configurable in Plone 2 via CSS.

Getting better by the minute: Archetypes is the secret weapon for Plone's future success; Archetypes makes schema-based development for content items, along with relationships among content items, not just easily possible, but much less tedious. It's architecture, in many ways (though it is still maturing), is superior to the same concepts in WinFS in M$ Longhorn. Archetypes will make development of content types easier to learn and develop day-to-day, whether you as a developer prefer to live in Vi (or Emacs), UML modelling tools, or a web-based schema editors. Simple, usable, documented examples for Archetypes development in Plone are popping up every day. Developing global CMF tools (singleton services/utilities for all objects in the site) has always been trivially easy, but underdocumented. Plone 2 is making the UI easier to customize, and I expect that forthcoming books and improved documentation on Plone 2 will make this straightforward.

Keep in mind, the Plone/Zope/Python stack is much less complicated and easier to learn than equivalent technology stacks in Java app servers (and less messy than inline web apps in PHP/ASPX/etc). And seriously, if you have to say WTF, say it on #plone on freenode or the plone-users list - there's a high likelyhood that someone will have an answer to just that question... ;)

It took me all of 2 minutes with Google trying to find links for all the software you mentioned - and greatly enriches your post.

Other than that, thanks for the pointers.

====

ImageMagick

K3b - DVD/CD burner software

Plone - The most mature open source CMS.

Mamboserver - Not as mature or featurefull as Plone, but very nice as well.

OfflineIMAP - Simple, reliable, powerful

Kstars - and KDE Technology in general

The ones that are almost there but could use a hand to make them more intuitive:

GNUCash - Can't wait for their Gtk2 version.
Mr. Project
KOffice - has a great technological underpinning.

Depends on what the "web server" is; it might be expensive SQL stuff, for example. Or it might be a heavy-weight CMS thing; Plone's default skin gives me less than 10 hits/sec on a very fast SMP box, and the lack of speed is, amazingly, mostly in the templating system. This is a case where caching would help.

10-30 concurrent users I interpret as meaning 10-30 requests per second. To put it in perspective: 10 req/s is 864,000 req/day. 30 req/s is 2,592,000 req/day. If every page in your system is 30 KB in size, then 10 req/s is equivalent to a constant bandwidth usage of 300 KB/s.

I didn't actually try one of the alternatives mentioned in this discussion. But when I look at the web sites of the different solutions, it's remarkable that only the home page of Plone validates as XHTHML 1.0 transitional, and uses div structures instead of tabulars. If I need a content management system one day, I'll try this one first.

Rolling your own blog tool with BlogFace is pretty straightforward, or you can use one of the custom blog tools (CoreBlog, PABlog*, or CMF WebLog). For a very simplistic blog, you can just use the built in "news" tool.

*I wrote and maintain PABlog, I like it obviously. It doesn't currently work with Plone, CMF WebLog only works with Plone. CoreBlog is the most flexible of the three, as it runs on pure Zope, CMF, or Plone.

(woops hit submit by mistake)

> First of all its interface is terrible, and extremely hard to customize

Plone, CMF, CE ..... along with thousands of others. Need I say more?

> For instance you can't really just write an HTML page and upload it and hope it will work

Uh... yes you can. And when using a CMF based solution, it automaticall renders it using the default template and stylesheet.

> I've never seen a photo-album plug in, and I expect one would be terriblely difficult

A quick google search turned up quite a few. And if their wasn't, it would be trivial to whip one up in an hour or two.

> Simple scripting is difficult. I wanted to add a simple Python script to a zope site, and there was almost no way to do it

Python scripting is pathetically simple- My Mom could do it. To add a python script, just... add a python script from the content type menu. I dont see how that could be considered hard.

Overall, I think your post is just a big Troll. IMHO Zope is, by far, the most powerfull solution for, well, anything to do with a website. ZPT Leaves ASP and JSP in the dust, and is trivially easy to use. I've trained several people how to use it in a matter of hours.

> First of all its interface is terrible, and extremely hard to customize

Plone, CMF, CE ..... along with thousands of others. Need I say more?