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.

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!

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: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.