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

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.