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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."
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 /.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
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.
A raving techie is the kind you see at a late night warehouse partying to music that would otherwise make his head hurt if he wasn't so up on the x trip. I love to see such thinly veiled articles as this that are made to be oh so much more than they really are. Come on I haven't seen a tech rave about software since Virtual Valerie and that's only because it was the first time he had made a woman moan without it being more of a groan of disgust.
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?
I'm sure that this is a really great piece of software and I've been meaning to check out Zope for a long time. But I just can't get over this name. It just sounds too much like it ought to be signed to Warp Records or something.
I just can't take it seriously... I look at a headline like "Plone 2.0: eWeek Reviews" and I go "oh, so Aphex Twin's released a new album then?"
For feature by feature comparisions between a large number of CMS applications, check www.cmsmatrix.org.
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.
Got Code?
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
... 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.
...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. :)
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> 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 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.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
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
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.