O'Reilly Interview with the Plone Founders

Alexander Limi writes "Just in time for some light weekend reading, O'Reilly's OSDir.com has published a byte-sized interview with the two founders of Plone. This is a nice follow-up to the earlier discussion on Slashdot, and covers a lot of the unanswered questions people directed to us earlier as the surprise winners of the O'Reilly COMDEX competition."

Comments

A bit telling

[Saven Marek]

This says a lot about good documentation and decent ease of use. I've seen many perfectly intelligent people come up against the brick wall of Zope's usability, and sit there scratching their heads going "wtf?". Luckily zope IS very powerful, otherwise it'd never end up being used.

While it's testament to the skills of the plone team that now there's a solution, and indeed that's the OSS way - if a solution is needed someone will write it - the years that zope's existed WITHOUT some kind of help it desperately needed is telling.

Re:What exactly *is* Plone?

[Qbertino]

Err, well, you've missed the mark a little.
Here's my quick standard reply:

Zope is an open source Web Application Server, developed allmost exclusively in Python (some speed parts in C) with an integrated object relational database, aka ZopeDB and a web frontend with access to all interal components.

That pretty much summs it up for Zope. :-)
Now for Plone:

Plone is a CMS and a content syndication system programmed for and with the Zope Appserver. These Zope Applications and 'addons' are very easy to develope and install on Zope (naturally, if you consider the description above) - think 'plugin' - and are called Zope 'products'.

So Plone it a 'tad' more than you're standard CMS, be it slashcode/e107/Nuke/whatever, since it can very easyly utilize the vast power of the underlying Zope and other products, like Webshops, syndication mechanisims or webcrawlers and data-mining bot's, just to mention a few. Zope actually severely blurrs the edge between database, application and frontend and leaves it completely to the developer where to draw the line between those components.
Imagine an appserver where you can just drop of data for storage at whim without having to mess with DB abstraction layers, conectors and stuff, that comes with a full featured web interface where you can track and modify the inerts of your appserver either by custom coding (in whatever language you fancy that has conectors to Zope, Perl for instance) or by using the interface options and elements - which you can of course provide with your own extensions.
That's what Zope and thus Zope/Plone is all about.
That one can't exactly say what Plone is in standard terms actually shows the power of Zope. Basically it's whatever you make of it.