Slashdot Mirror

This event has been long in the making. Massachusetts established an "Open Source Public Trough" over a year ago, and many of its more prominent regional web sites had been using and/or advocating open source since before then (see this recommendation or Guide to Free Software for just a couple of examples from my home town) and of course Massachusetts was the only state not to cave in regarding the court case against Microsoft.

For locals, this isn't surprising. What's more surprising is that it took so long.

Massachusetts is a huge proponent of open source. There was an article with references about some of the open source stuff going on there here.

Not in the case of Massachusetts. Look at the state's history with Microsoft -- they were the only ones not to cave in with regards to the antitrust case, and there are numerous stories regarding their ongoing efforts to better embrace open source.

I see the announcement both as a way to encourage the regular rank & file and the various commonwealth communities to embrace the efforts more than it is an effort to gain some ground negotiating with Microsoft.

I would have been the first to tell you about Plone, but I was in bed and apparently others beat me to it:)

Plone is extremely flexible, and fast to production. I have now tested and have in production many instances, and have developed installation, backup rotation, and restoration scripts. The system virtually runs itself when set up, and users find it very intuitive.. Additionally it has very granular user/group control, allowing you to control who publishes what with very little effort.

Sharepoint might be good or not, but on the reason of licensing costs alone, I would choose Plone. You will pay zero dollars for world class CMS/knowledge base solution.

Plone has bunches of modules (products) and features you may find useful. Trouble ticketing system, news section, RSS feeds and RSS publishing, mailing lists production, galleries, forums for discussion, among others. In addition to many levels of undo so that you can correct any action taken if need be.

Another plus is you can cluster (again at no dollars) instances using Zeo, if you need robustness.

Plone looks professional, clean and slick. Plus it's super customizable. Take a look at csszengarden.com and the various looks on the right, to get an idea of what can be acheived with CSS... and look at zopezen.org to see a real simple look that can be acheived on the skin. There's a lot you can do under the hood, or you can just leave it alone. It can easily be administered remotely. And I front end it with Apache and SSL, for a secure access solution.

The Plone community is friendly and responsive, but comprised of some serious Python hackers who probably expect you to come well versed up to a certain level.. Therefore I must second the idea mentioned before of engaging a professional to help you identify your needs now and going forward, and also you capabilities to narrow it down to the right solution for your company.

As the original poster of one of the referenced articles, I have a couple thoughts on Open Source Software in Massachusetts.

First, the cited announcement of the Open Source Trough is really encouraging news. How can one find fault with the notion of having Apache, Zope, Linux, OpenLDAP, etc. all pre-packaged and distributed around to all the different state departments? Better still, this same package will be being made available to the various cities and towns of Massachusetts, too. The fact that other states may start working with Massachusetts to embrace / expand the Trough is icing on the cake.

Second, the question that immediately comes to mind is why it took so long? If GNU (along with Linux) is viewed as one of the parents of the Open Source Movement (or even just an important element), then the Boston / Cambridge / Rt. 128 area is arguably one of the most important sites worldwide for both the past and the present of the Open Source Movement. While it's true that some of the key Massachusetts regional sites like Saugus.net and Boston.com are (and have been for quite awhile) both users and advocates of open source software, there are many more regional sites that aren't. As for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts itself, it's great that it's sticking out against Microsoft even when so many others caved, and it's great that it's finally pushing open source software to its various departments, but it's amazing to me that they're only just starting to do so now.

If the Open Source Movement is taking so long to convince the governments right in its own backyard to switch, how long is it going to take to influence governments more distant? We can only hope that this Trough will have a positive impact and really serve to introduce open source software to those who otherwise would never have even looked.

Massachusetts does seem to be (slowly) embracing open source software. There's an article on ZopeZen discussing the use of Zope in particular in Massachusetts, but it looks like the Zope adoption is just a small part of a much bigger plan.

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... ;)

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... ;)

Done, it's called Zope Zen.

Seriously though, it would make a great CMS migration case study

Speaking about case studies, check available docs, alive borads and screenshots for NeoBoard and CMFBoard. As you can see - both are developing in the same direction (kind of mixing Slashdot and PHPBB ideas), and both have already achived very similar quality and functionality levels, dispite the fact that CMFBoard was mostly developed from scratch (although under strong influence of many ideas from other available boards), while NeoBoard was re-written from PHP to Plone by the original PHP developer of the original PHP-based NeoBoard.