Plone 2.0 Released

Alexander Limi writes "Over a year in development, the Plone Team released the 30+ language strong Plone 2.0 to the public today. It's been a fun year, with a number of surprises - coming out on top of O'Reilly's Open Source at COMDEX vote, powering the Mars Rover site and a lot of positive mainstream press. And the invaluable recognition of becoming recognized as a real word by Google *wink*. A detailed summary of what's new in the 2.0 release is available, and as usual all platforms have dedicated packages/installers that will get you up and running in 10 minutes. Enjoy!"

Comments

What is Plone?

[ArmorFiend]

Plone, a user friendly and powerful Content Management System:

Plone is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, a portal server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities. A versatile software product like Plone can be used in a myriad of ways. Look through the sites that use Plone section to see a variety of ways people have implemented Plone and Zope solutions.

Re:What is Plone?

[Anonymous Coward]

Plone is crap because it it Python + Zope based.

Let me know when it is implemented using Java...hell, I'd even take PHP over python.

What is Plone?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the site:

What is Plone? Plone is a free, open source Content Management System. The focus of Plone is to provide value at every level of an organization. It comes with a workflow engine, pre-configured security and roles, a set of content types and multi-lingual support. There are many developers, writers and testers from all over the world, contributing to Plone everyday. Plone is based on the Content Management Framework.
Homepage: www.plone.org What is a Content Management System? Finding a definition for what a Content Management System (CMS) is seems to be harder than finding someone willing to sell you one. Simply put a CMS allows you to manage content, usually for a web site. The main goals of CMS are to allow easy creation, publishing and retrieval of content to fit a business needs.
"The trouble with content management is that its trivial or impossible." Quote: from OSCOM, 2002 One common dividing line between different CMS's is the integration of the web and hence can two types of systems: a web based system, and non-web based system. Plone is a free, open source web based CMS

Dear slashdot editors,

[lightspawn]

Why not explain what the subject of the article actually is?

Not everybody is familiar with every software project.

And consider that this site may occasionally be visited by non-nerds. If they can skip the stories they don't care about, they may read the others (and make informed decisions about software, stop supporting the RIAA, etc). But if they'll be unable to even understand what the stories mean, they're much more likely to leave, never to return.

Just adding "Plone, the content management system for the Zope application server" will at least make enough sense to let people know if they'd be interested in reading any further, instead of making them think "I didn't even know he was arrested".

my experience with Plone so far

[DrEasy]

I've been playing around with Plone to see if it makes sense to use it for a web site of mine that has multiple contributors.

First thing is that the pages can look really good and professional to the end user, the stylesheets are very tidy.

But I found Plone to have a very steep learning curve. First thing I did was to remove all the bells and whistles from the default pages that it created for me. I mean things like the calendar and all the tabs are nice, but I'd rather look for them when I know the tool better and when I really need them. So please turn off the extra stuff by default!

The admin interface was the worst part, and hopefully the new release has simplified it a lot. It's very hard to find your way in it, not to mention that you end up fiddling with Zope and CMF and all sorts of things that wouldn't want to know about. There should be better separation between these layers.

On the other hand, the workflow is easy to understand, and the various tools are easy to add. Speaking of which, why isn't ZWiki part of the download (it can be installed separately)? I went through hell to get the old CMFWiki to work in there (why did they bundle it while saying they don't recommend using it???). Thankfully it is now dropped.

I need to check out the archetype stuff, looks like an easy way to add customized content. However I wish they used XML (Schema and Stylesheets) in there.

Performance is average, but my feeling is that it scales well.

In summary, I find Plone to be very powerful, but you have to invest a lot of time in it. The good news is that as much as the admin suffers, the rest of the contributors will only see the easy parts, and maybe that's what really matters. But adoption would be much easier if the admins weren't afraid of the learning curve, after all, they're the ones who choose the tools.

Re:my experience with Plone so far

[pnatural]

I've been playing around with Plone to see if it makes sense to use it for a web site of mine that has multiple contributors.

We're currently in production for our internal folks (about 1500+ users, with about 100 of those producing content). We're planning on rolling to our public users (60,000+, all read-only). No major glitches so far, and folks *dig* the way plone works once they get the swing of it.

First thing is that the pages can look really good and professional to the end user, the stylesheets are very tidy.

Agreed. But save yourself a head-ache: disable user-selectable stylesheets. Just not worth it for most sites.

But I found Plone to have a very steep learning curve. First thing I did was to remove all the bells and whistles from the default pages that it created for me. I mean things like the calendar and all the tabs are nice, but I'd rather look for them when I know the tool better and when I really need them. So please turn off the extra stuff by default!

The "extra stuff" isn't that hard, it's all just a property setting in the management interface. But you're right in that it's a steep learning curve. Welcome to the bleeding edge of modern web/FOSS development.

The admin interface was the worst part, and hopefully the new release has simplified it a lot.

If you're speaking of the ZMI (zope management interface) it's doubtful that the plone crew has changed it. It's a hold over from early Zope 2.0, and will be much more to your liking w/ Zope 3.x.

It's very hard to find your way in it, not to mention that you end up fiddling with Zope and CMF and all sorts of things that wouldn't want to know about. There should be better separation between these layers.

There is a *good* separation between "those layers". Just because you're not aware of it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. Look, plone is the first real "skin" for the Zope CMF. The Zope CMF is alive and well, but there hasn't been much of a public-facing side to it because it's deployed for private use in most spots. Plone changes that by making the CMF (remember, the 'F' is Framework!) a publishing system.

Speaking of which, why isn't ZWiki part of the download (it can be installed separately)?

Because it's trivial to install and the dev crew doesn't want Yet One More Thing to keep track of?

I need to check out the archetype stuff, looks like an easy way to add customized content.

Archetypes is nifty and a whole lot simpler than writing your own content types. We've developed a couple of dozen content types, and it's nice using Archetypes because you can subclass your document types to your liking -- lots of reuse and lots of small benefits (metatypes match, for example).

However I wish they used XML (Schema and Stylesheets) in there.

No, you don't. Trust me.

Performance is average, but my feeling is that it scales well.

You can't just install plone and expect to serve hundreds of thousands of dynamic pages per day. You need to configure, cache, and tweak.

In summary, I find Plone to be very powerful, but you have to invest a lot of time in it.

And that time is well spent -- they're not going to charge you more next year or figure out some other way to lock you into their system. It's Open.

The good news is that as much as the admin suffers, the rest of the contributors will only see the easy parts, and maybe that's what really matters.

Ding-ding-ding! We have a winner! The absolute best thing about plone is that it removes *every* barrier to putting content development square on the shoulders of those who create content. Get the admins and the developers out of the way, and let users do user things!

Re:my experience with Plone so far

[haystor]

I'd like to comment on the part about investing a lot of time. Having made that investment, I've found that I only have to invest that time once.

The only thing Plone really suffers from is a division of administration between Plone and Zope. This is natural because of its implementation but is not always so well documented (imagaine that).

That said, most of the time I spent not finding what I was looking for ended up being time well spent because everything that I was poking around in was so easy to use.

Btw, what's up with the quote at the bottom of my page? It's neither funny nor famous, what makes it quotable? "The Marines: The few, the proud, the not very bright." As a Marine I may resemble that remark but it doesn't make a plain insult worthy of a quote.

Re:my experience with Plone so far

[mios]

Is plone meant only for a community of users addig/editing content? Or does it work well as a content management/deployment system whose primary focus would be to have a few key players as the ones who submit new content for a website and have an even smaller number of key players approving the content to go live. I'm looking for a CMS that is meant to make the deployment of webpages on a large website more structured in that the only form of updates is through this submission/approval process, rather than direct ftp access to a docroot. It seems that many reviews of plone say it's great for 'portals' with a community of users (forums and what not), and in my particular case I'm not interested in building a community at all, just "content-dispatch" system. I think Plone could work for this, but I'm having a hard time coming to a strong conclusion .. if you have the time, could you email me at: steve [at] pagepoint [dot] com with your impression? thanks -steve

Just Released? Whu?

[FFFish]

I installed Plone-2.0-final some time last week. WTF is this "now released" BS about? Have I ended up with some misbegotten proto-release?

bricolage

[kwoff]

For a perl CMS, try Bricolage.

Performance + Scalability?

[t482]

I used the ab benchmarking tool from Apache to test Plone 2 and the performance seemed fairly poor when compared with Lotus Domino or mod_python.

Does it scale well? Did I do something wrong?

Anthony

Re:Performance + Scalability?

[3.2.3]

Try these tutorials:

http://freecache.org/http://media.plone.org/vide o/ neworleans/Plone%20Conference%20Tutorial%204.mov
http://www.clearwind.ca/talks/profiling_and_cachin g.pdf
http://www.plope.com/misc/szweb
http://fre ecache.org/http://media.plone.org/video/ neworleans/Plone%20Conference%20Day2%20Talk3.mov

Plone is the best software I've ever gotten to work with in 25 years of professional programming. It's just an astounding achievement.

Re:Performance + Scalability?

[mios]

I'm in the process of reviewing plone and was wondering if you could offer some insight in its suitabality for as an appropiate CMS for my needs ... if you get this as an email (and have the time), could you please respond to me at steve [at] pagepoint [dot] com thanks -steve

Re:Just Released? Whu?

[dracvl]

Nope, you have the right version, but the official release never happens until the installers and packages are ready. So the tarball was released about one week earlier than the installers.

Dear lightspawn

[Odat]

Why not explain what the Zope Application Server actually is?

Not everybody is familiar with every software project.

And consider that this site may occasionally be visited by non-nerds. If they can skip the stories they don't care about, they may read the others (and make informed decisions about software, stop supporting the RIAA, etc). But if they'll be unable to even understand what the stories mean, they're much more likely to leave, never to return.

Not running MER Sites

[Anonymous Coward]

Plone is not used for any of the external nor internal MER web sites. The link to Maestro is misleading. Maestro and TelaScience.org are not JPL products.

No Explanation - 11 comments

[Anonymous Coward]

Editors: Notice how this story got just 11 comments ?

Editors: Notice how the story does not mention WTF "Plone" is ?

Editors: Do you think the two previous points might be causually related ?

Editors: Do your job.

Plone LiveCD

[wrecked]

The Plone LiveCD is based on Knoppix and will run without needing a hard-drive installation.