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Plone 2.0: eWEEK Reviews, Raves About OS Software
securitas writes "eWEEK Labs' Jim Rapoza reviews open source Plone 2.0 Web publishing portal / content management software and raves about the Zope/Python-based system. He liked it so much it garnered an Analyst's Choice award, beating out a commercial portal suite, Traction's TeamPage 3.01, reviewed in the same issue. The Plone 2.0 release was mentioned a couple of weeks ago on Slashdot."
Plone is not the only one open source CMS around. Tikiwiki, Typo3,Drupal and a lot more are open source, some even with commercial support (i.e. Typo3, comparing with it could be a bit more fair) if eWeek want that "feature" over every other possible functionality they could have.
Plone two is by far the best portal / cms system I have ever tried. It spanks the pants off of every single commercial system as well and I have tried some expensive ones. It is the flexibility and power of python that makes it so great.
Got Code?
For feature by feature comparisions between a large number of CMS applications, check www.cmsmatrix.org.
Not necessarily true. Deployments may actually boost development as you find bugs and are presented with challenges by the client. These challenges may result in the creation of a new product, new documentation, or new configurations for deployment.
"Do not be swept up in the momentum of mediocrity." - anon
Great product, but if you follow the links to the plone website, then watch the demo for the HIGOV.net implementation, part of it (near the end) shows integration with monitoring software... and it reveals the private IP addresses inside their LAN and that they run telnet. Considering that I just finished Kevin Mitnick's book on social engineering (the Art of Deception), this wasn't the best choice of content to put into a demo. Running telnet on a firewalled, private LAN is one thing. But telling the world your private IPs that are being used for telnet services mean one only needs a username and password now...
...to plug another newly-open-sourced CMS I'm the lead developer for:
Sitellite CMS
Written in PHP, unusually flexible, very strong add-on framework, free add-ons, including a search add-on based on Apache Lucene (no PHP Java extension required though), and HIGHLY usable by non-techies. Cross-browser WYSIWYG editing is built-in, and it's designed for non-techies to use, but real techies to code in. Like any proper template system, standards compliance is up to you however (although our XML-based templates require XHTML or XML output, so we do encourage at least ;)).
There's also a commercial version, and commercial support available (this was the qualm that the reviewer had about Plone) at simian.ca. We also sell commercial add-ons (gotta eat too, right? ;)).
Anyway, </plug> -- just trying to scare up some more interest, never hurts to try. :)
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/network/2000/06/02 /magazine/python_first_language.html
http://www.linuxjournal.com/article.php?sid=3882
The community is building rapidly. We're nearly 200 registered users strong now, and the site has only been going since the beginning of February. We're up to 600 unique visitors a day too. We're doing what little promotion we can, but we're a 2-person company/project, so time to get the open source word out there is pretty limited.
However, with those stats, I wouldn't call the developer site dead. :) It's no google.com, but it's a good start.
The anonymous CVS instructions are here:
http://www.sitellite.org/index/cvs
Yes, contributors are required to license their changes (changes to the core system, add-ons are a different matter) back to us, for inclusion in both the open and commercial versions (the two being identical, aside from license, warranty, resellability, and a few extra add-ons). We don't try to hide this, but even the Free Software Foundation require that you assign/grant unlimited copyright to them on contributions. So I don't think it's unfair for us to ask the same thing.
Also, a commercial version is a good thing for the community as well. The fact of the matter is that programmers need to eat too, and that costs money. You can't make money offering nothing but free code, free support, etc. So we sell a commercial version for people who have commercial interests in the software (just like MySQL does, for example). So a commercial version helps keep a core of developers working primarily on the CMS itself, not as a hobby, but as their day job.
Yes, but these don't come overnight. That's why we're trying to get the word out there, and going an extra mile to get people interested/involved right now. New projects don't just pop up with 10,000 members. :)
Technology-wise, we have one of the top CMSes in PHP, and I know we compare favourably to Open Source CMSes in other languages too. That's not to boast, but it is true (go look). What we're trying to do now is fill in the blanks -- community, documentation, more free add-ons, etc.
Anyway, it's getting late. I should catch a few zzz's. :)
Cheers,
Lux
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
darnok's already covered most of the salient points as to why Python's the shits. I was in something of your shoes -- doing IT work with a big chunk of development for the last fourteen years. I got into Perl back in the 4.x days and loved it; started doing PHP about three years ago and discovered Python a year ago (I might be out of P* languages by now). It's not tremendously fair to compare Python to PHP -- PHP doesn't have much of an existence outside the context of a web server (yes, I know you've got the CLI, but you're still essentially writing HTML pages with PHP embedded into them). That said:
:) ).
At least last time I had to do PHP, I had a bitch of a time trying to get it to act as an HTTP _client_. I ended up having to open straight socket connections and hand-crufting[sic] my HTTP calls. Ugh;
Object orientation is bolted onto PHP; it's built into Python.
[Yes, I know this is one of those religious issues] mandating whitespaces makes Python code much more readable (until someone edits your code and uses a tab instead of four spaces
It's the easiest, most intuitive language I've ever used (this includes Perl, LISP, TCL, and PHP, among others). Most times, if I think "well, I'll just put this code in and see if it does what I want it to do," that's what happens -- it makes it much easier to prototype.
Zope, built on Python, is also quite nice. Reasons for it include the fact it mandates the separation between presentation, business, and database logic (well, you could work around that, but they make it easy to do it The Right Way), and (again) the rapid prototyping of web applications.
I should note, by the way, that Zope is one of those F/OSS projects that's phenomenally coded and absolutely horrendously, horrifically badly documented. Oh well.
Oh, and 'Zope Security' is something of an oxymoron. I don't like the in-band management of it (if you've got a Zope server running on http://host:8001, then you manage it by going to http://host:8001/manage. This is one of the reasons you want to front it with Apache and do ProxyDeny for a whole bunch of special URLs)
I need for what?
It's a Content Management System for running "dynamic" web pages, which have a standard format throughout and a series of articles that comprise the site.
A typical use case is, actually, the website you're reading right now. Slashcode is a form of CMS--it provides layout, content management, and a structure for revising and approving content.
Plone is a great out-of-the-box application
But if you want a supported open source application with equivalent functionality and more, scalability and commercial support I would suggest you take a look at CPS3 (http://www.nuxeo.org/cps) even though it may be a bit more difficult to learn from the beginning, but it will pay off in the long run.
All packages come from the same company (Nuxeo) and are completely supported and the code is very readable and well written/documented. The application is targeted towards large sites (10000+ users).
CPS3's equivalent to Archetype is called CPSSchemas which in my opinion is much more flexible (design is done through the web with exporting capabilities of schemas, widgets, layouts, and document types to the file system).
I am negotiating right now with one of my customers to get a long-term grant to build a GPLed Knowledge Management (as apposed to just content managment) layer on top of the Python/Zope/Plone stack.
I usually use Java (or Common Lisp) for development, but Plone offers so much infrastructure out of the box, that the decision to use it seems right. (Although I have been experimenting a lot with OpenCMS, which also looks very good).
-Mark
Shameless AMD plug, but Zope's performance on AMD64 is very good. As long as you pick an architecture that has decent integer performance, you are likely to find that VMs (Python, Java, .NET CLR, etc) will usually run decently fast for most apps. The same isn't a much true with SPARC or ppc (not to knock those platforms).
That's not true. We tried to help you but you resisted reading some essential books, manuals, tutorials and examples about Zope, Plone and Archetypes.
We help other people on #plone in our free time and we don't get paid for it. We like to help and most people are amazed about the help they get on the mailing lists and the irc channel.
We are helping newbies to start with plone and we are helping novice to experts with precise problems. But we are not able to take you on your hand and guide you from the beginning to an expert. You have to spend time to learn all stuff yourself or you have to pay money for commercial support.
You don't need to be our friend to get help from us but if you start to offend us you can NOT expect to get more answers to your questions.
Tiran
Plone and Archetypes core developer
Supporter and moderator on #plone