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."

Comments

Open source, once again...

[mindless4210]

Once again, another example of why open source is the way to go. Think about how many websites out there wouldn't be the way they are without open source, and how many businesses rely on it.

I have no firsthand experience with Plone but would be curious to hear more about it.

raves?

[dj245]

...and raves about the Zope/Python-based system

Is software really such a topic that someone (besides a marketing guy) would rave about it in an objective review? I mean, I've had some good software packages that were easy to use (relatively) and did the job well (compared to alternatives), but they weren't revolutionary and didn't make me run through the streets naked, Archimedes-style.

Any person who comes to me foaming at the mouth, "raving" about any type of software is going to have me taking a rather large grain of salty goodness.

except linux. Because this is /.

Re:raves?

[bruthasj]

It's an expression. People of /.: please lighten up. Quit letting rage and hate boil in your hearts. Get out. Take a walk; breathe the fresh air and hear the birds sing. Free your minds from the cares of the word, the patents, the spam, microsoft, governments, corporations. Look in your inner self for answers and release yourselves from self-deposed anguish.

take care.

Re:RHEL 3 support?

[codepunk]

I built it for RHEL 2.1 and RHEL 3.0 and fedora. Dont mess around with the rpm it pretty much sucks. The best way I found is to build a custom python running in a user directory and put zope and plone on top of that. It keeps you environment clean and
moving it later is a simple directory copy.

Bust out a checkbook

[codepunk]

I bet if they where willing to bust out a checkbook
and hit the plone developer list they can get all of the support their little hearts desired. Not only that but they would likely be working with someone that actually wrote it instead of a helpdesk dork telling you to reinstall.

Commercial isn't the opposite of open source.

[latroM]

... beating out a commercial portal suite, Traction's TeamPage 3.01, reviewed in the same issue.

How long it takes for people to realize that you can make money with open source so it can be commercial. Commercial software isn't the opposite of open source. Non-free or closed is.

More advantages (and for the laymen)

[nhavar]

Plone:

• Comes with everything you need.
  
  • HTTP server
  • FTP server
  • WebDAV access
  • SMTP connectivity
  • User and Group level security
  • Content cataloging and search functionality (ala Index Server)
  
  
• Cross platform (Mac, Linux, Solaris, Windows, etc)
• New functionality can be added via plugin products (i.e. message boards, wiki's, additional database types, java/jsp support, php support, etc.)
• Workflows provide an easy mechanism for defining who creates content and how content gets published. These can be easily changed and even graphed (via an add-on product).
• The default set up web content is standards based providing either html tables or CSS for layout. A focus on accessibility and internationization is also a key strength of the system.
• Content is modular and it's easy to include or exclude certain elements based on need, security, or preferences.
• Content can be edited externally using your favorite editor (Dreamweaver, GoLive, Frontpage, Notepad, Word (hA!)). Or content can be edited as source from a web form. Add-ons like Kupu and Epoz can also provide a simple web enabled WYSIWYG that works in most major browsers.
• It can easily be used in combination with standard HTTP servers like Apache and IIS. You could use APACHE to serve static content and Plone/ZOPE to serve dynamic content, or use APACHE as a caching mechanism to speed up and existing Plone site(s).
• Multiple databases can be used to segment content and/or multiple sites. New database types can be added via add-on products (i.e. Oracle, DB2, MySQL, etc.). You choose which type of database you want to use, if you want to use the filesystem, or if you want to mix filesystem and multiple types of databases.
• Instances can be clustered using the installed ZEO product. This allows you to set up a single master site instance and run multiple caching clients on a single machine or on multiple machines. This helps in providing failover solutions and scalability. Other uses include realtime debugging without affecting other instances, separating the development users from the normal users, segmenting content, and helping in zero downtime upgrades/migrations.
• Has XML-RPC, REST, SOAP capabilities.
• Can use standard SQL to select/insert data in existing databases.
• A wide variety of document types including the ability to convert some proprietary documents to HTML format. Document types can be easily extended or new types created via a configuration file (using Python, UML, XML schema).
• Discussion enabled documents
• XML, RSS feeds
• Simple subscription/registration system
• Maintains user preferences
• Much more functional "out of the box" and less to build out than other comparable systems (i.e. Vignette).
• Well supported via commercial support, contract labor, documentation, support e-mail lists, mirrored searchable lists (gmain), example sites, product sites, code documentation, and user created support pages.
• FREE
• Open source.
• Active development.
• Constant improvement.
• Easily extensible.

Re:The most important feature...

[fahrvergnugen]

I work as a support rep for a company that charges our customers tens of thousands of dollars a year for support on a large-scale web-based application. A lot of what I do is phone-based, but let me tell you: Our customers don't have to wait on hold, they don't have to post in a newsgroup or hit an FAQ, and they don't have to hit some irc channel where the developers will sneer at them for not reading a serpentine and outdated man page before they can get any help. And they sure as hell aren't advised to scrub and re-install.

They get zero bullshit, instant-response support, day or night, because that's what they pay for. I solve technical issues, sure, and I take great pride in my work. But I develop relationships with my problem clients, and work hard to make them happy. I communicate with them in a way that lets them know that it is a personal affront to me that their product is not performing exactly as they expect, and they know that they have an advocate within the company that fights through bureaucracy for their needs long after the sale has been made and their account manager has moved on to chasing the next dollar. Our development team works very closely with us and if we identify an issue as being a top customer support, it's fixed in the next release. If that's not soon enough, we'll get the engineering schedule re-arranged to produce a patch for our customer. Our shortest-time support rep has been with the company for four years, and at this stage, perhaps only the director of engineering has an equal understanding of the product. We cost a lot, but we're worth it.

Now, my little rant in defense of commercial support aside: I agree, there's many positive things to be said for open-source software. But it's an investment, something that must be embraced. You can't just install a single open-source app in a mission critical environment and not be sure how it will be supported. There needs to be either a project-wide commitment to F/OSS software, with staffing brought on that can completely supports it, or you need to only use F/OSS tools that are so widespread that they are well understood, and free support is ubiquitous (Apache). It doesn't make sense to keep a highly trained cadre of admins on staff to take care of one application when a very specialized commercial support rep who has the director of engineering's cell phone # is a dial tone away. The difference between a few $80k sysadmins and a few $30k support contracts is substantial enough to catch the eye of more than one CTO, especially once you take employee turnover into account. Why not make that someone else's problem?

Again, this all changes depending on the situation. Obviously, if that previously mentioned hypothetical $80k admin can replace five commercial applications that would cost $30k apiece in support contracts, he's a bargain. And we all of us know of many shops that manage to do this successfully. We also all of us (at least those who've spent a few years in IT) know of many shops that do not.

So, I guess where I'm going with this probably ill-advised 2:30am rant is this: Commercial support can be an extremely important thing at times like these (2:30am), and it's not something you should discount so quickly. A lot of us are very good at what we do.

Zope is the avantgarde in CMS /Appservers

[Qbertino]

I consider them way ahead of time.
And I'm glad to see Zope and one of it's major products, Plone, getting this recognition. I consider Zope vastly superior to any other available Application Server. It's suitable for rapid and large scale developement likewise. If you want to know how the future of databases and high level programming of custom apps will look like, check out Zope.

Re:Agreed

[CountBrass]

pVisual Studio is and always has been a superb development environment. So where's the problem with that award? Just because it's MS doesn't automatically make it unworthy of awards.

that's not a negative

[zogger]

I read the article, the reviewer liked what he saw, just was wishing he could have found a 24/7 place for customized support..

well, well???? Isn't this supposed to be one of the two ways to make some clams with open source software, ie, this is a job going begging now?
make money with open source by:

A-using it directly to help make and sell and service your widgets

B- offering custom service for the application software

No current direct 24/7 support = someone reading the article who might be under or un-employed just discovered a job that didn't exist before. Sounds OK to me, this "problem" will be self rectifying I would bet, real soon now....

Re:My reasons for python

[Anonymous Coward]

1) It's easy to pick up.
2) Guido's tutorial is the best introduction
I ever saw for a computer language.
3) The python reference manual is extensive
and well written, and along with guido's
tutorial is installed on every Linux distro.
4) Using identation instead of braces to delineate blocks of code is a lot easier to read
5) It's object oriented in a GOOD way.
6) idle --- idle rules the world. With idle
I can interactively debug my code while writing
it.
7) Documentation for modules and functions is
trivial, and thanks to idle easily extractable
so if you have to use function foo from module bar, but you're not sure how to use it, or what it's for, you can query bar.foo for its documentation in idle.
8) The profile module is like gnu's gprof for C/C++, but in my opinion much nicer. You can do
all sorts of sorting of statistics with the profile module.
9) The module pdb rocks the world!
With pdb.run('run your code here') in a session
of python, or much better yet, in a session of
idle, you can step through python code
as it executes, examine the contents of variables, even change the variables on the fly
to see how it affects your code.
10) Thanks to interfaces to Tk/Tcl, Gtk,
wxwindows, and QT, you can write python code that uses your favorite choice of widgets as front
ends. It doesn't matter that the widgets are
C/C++ libraries --- the interfacing code
has already been written, and it's free (the
interfacing code that is).

11) swig -- swig makes it possible to call
C/C++ libraries from your python code as if
they were python modules. You get the speed
of C/C++ with the elegance and clarity of python.

Re:The most important feature...

[dracvl]

So, I guess where I'm going with this probably ill-advised 2:30am rant is this: Commercial support can be an extremely important thing at times like these (2:30am), and it's not something you should discount so quickly. A lot of us are very good at what we do.

And what makes you think this conflicts with open source in any way? I make a living off Plone support (and training/development), and see no difference from a "commercial" product. Except that we can do anything given enough time, since the software is open and in a very transparent language (Python).

If you want to call us in the middle of the night, you can - but it will of course cost you. Just like with commercial software. Don't think that commercial software is the only software with good support, because it's not.

Re:Real production Plone/Zope experience

[dracvl]

Where should I start?

• If you're going to deploy a system for 50 000 users, make damn sure you have a support contract.
• The Plone/Zope/Python software stack is a big piece of software, it's not like your average "CMS" which is little more than a blog system with bits bolted on to it. It takes some time to master, just like any Content Management Framework. Workflows, schemas, scripts - there's a lot to learn.
• From your description, you haven't understood how Archetypes work. Arranging everything in skins is not the way to extend Archetypes.
• You have to have done something seriously wrong to get 1.2 seconds/page. Did you read the optimization documents at all? Plone is deliberately created for fronting with a cache, like Squid or at the very least Apache mod_proxy with cache.
• For bigger deployments, you use the ZEO clustering and a load balancer in front. Zope scales more transparently than any Java system I've encountered.
• Zope Page Templates are different, and require some getting used to - but once you do, nothing comes close in programmer productivity. It's a very clean separation of content, code and logic, and is very maintainable over time. Of course you can write spaghetti code in it too, like any language.
• Blindly trusting third-party add-on modules is not a good idea - if you don't know how to evaluate them, pony up the cash for a 1-day analysis from a Plone solution provider, and you wouldn't have these problems. It's open source, you can't expect any piece of downloadable code off the net to be high quality.
• As others have pointed out, the Plone UI is one of the most extensible web interfaces out there - and I can't see how you've managed to not extend it in a clean way, it follows best-practices from everything involving HTML and CSS technologies. It's a minimal mark-up UI that is eminently extensible. Seeing as I am one of the people that created it, I am of course biased - but the first thing people compliment when they come to Plone is normally how clean the UI structure and how modular the CSS/XHTML is.

Summarized, you won't get away without either spending some time learning how to work with the system or paying for some training or consultancy. Just like with any other complex system.