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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."
Their outputted html is amazing, the CSS is elegant but very very powerful, they leverage as much of their Zope underpinnings as possible, it is quite extendable, has a nice management environment, international support is getting very good, and it's interface is great (they actually have interface engineers on the team), it is a very good CMS. It is easy to jump into too, there is a good amount of, if scattered, documentation. Being able to bridge between news sites and group-ware is pretty encompassing. It might not be the absolute best solution for every situation, but it is getting there with its plug in architecture.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
You go and try to find a non-cutsey domain name without a hundred grand to throw down.... seriously, go try it.
thanks for playing
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
We've been using Plone for a while now and for me it has a few distinct advantages:
* Plone works *out-of-the-box* and is easy to extend and configure.
* Plone provides excellent workflow support. A Workflow is the editorial chain used to manage documents. Creating new workflows is easy.
* Plone is easily extended with external components ("Products" in Zope/Plone parlance). I run Plone with Zwiki (a wiki extention) and CMFBoard (forums), making for a very rich intranet site with loads of possibilities. Check out the The Collective or the Zope website
* Plone comes with Archetypes, which is a framework which allows for the relatively easy creation of new content types (in Python)
* It runs on Zope which is a very powerfull Application Server and Content Management System. Zope has got a rather steep learning curve, but its documentation has been improved and it has got a very supportive and vibrant user community.
Once in a while, I even pass the Turing-Test
> What is so special about Python and why should I
> care?
Glad you asked!
I've also been writing software for 20+ years (God, is it really that long?) and Python is the nicest language I've come across for many types of task. No, it's not the "ultimate" language, but it's a very good fit for a lot of problem spaces.
Key features:
- it's very easy to learn (20-odd keywords, which is very few compared to most languages). In particular, any reasonably competent programmer will pick up Python and be coding well with it in a remarkably short time. Moreover, you can actually keep the entire language in your head; you don't have to resort to having language references at your desk, which makes a big difference when it comes to speed of delivering a solution
- it runs on almost any platform
- it discourages "individual coding styles"; most competent Python programmers would come up with substantially the same code to the same problem. This is unbelievably useful when it comes to supporting other peoples' code, or even your old code
- OO support is both unobtrusive and very complete. Among other things, this makes "design by contract" a much easier goal to achieve, which goes a long way towards making "software project management" an achievable target rather than a tautology
- it's a great general purpose scripting language. It's very nice to use the same language for scripting as for your "real" coding
- it's a "batteries included" language. Although you have to use external libraries in many cases, the base set of libraries that come with Python cover a very wide set of technologies
- it's mature enough that there's very few surprises in the language itself. When you have a problem, you can be pretty sure it's in your code rather than a compiler or library bug. Another benefit of this is that your Python code has a strange tendency to work first time; I spend very little time debugging my Python code compared to most other languages
- although I write Perl code faster than Python, in productivity terms Python is quite extraordinary. I would write Python code 5-10 times faster than C/C++/Java/C# code, so I get to a working piece of code that much faster
- Python is very good at talking to other code. I've found it's fairly easy to get Python talking to libraries written in C, and you can actually compile your Python code (using Jython) and call Java library code natively
Finally, I'd have no qualms recommending Python as a prototyping language for almost any commercial app I've worked on. You may need to go back and rewrite it in another language later for security or performance reasons, but Python is the best way I've seen of creating working prototypes quickly.
I recently came back from the Plone Sprint in Austria. For those not familiar with sprints, this is where you get a bunch of developers in one place for a week to concentrate on development.
Virtually all of the people there (there were ~50 attendees) ran their own small businesses (myself included, Netsight) that used Plone -- mostly providing installation, customization, and support. Most of these companies *depended* in Plone for their livelihood.
What struck me the most was how business focused all of the developers were. This is something that really sets Plone apart from some of the other OSS projects out there. All of these people are making real dollars on developing this software, and hence *need* to have a business focus otherwise their businesses would fail. As technically great as many OSS projects are, many of them don't have the business drive to succeed.
The second thing that really struck me was a demonstration by a blind woman from the local Institute for the Blind. Plone is known for being very hot on accessibility, but this was just amazing. The woman had half a day training, and was then able to enter content, add metadata and take it through a workflow -- all using a braille reader and text-to-speech software. And what is even more amazing, is that she doesn't speak any English, she was relying on the internationalization features of Plone to deliver a German version of the UI -- including all the alt tags and hidden things that screen-readers rely upon.
--
Matt Hamilton (aka HammerToe)
Netsight Internet Solutions