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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.
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?
For feature by feature comparisions between a large number of CMS applications, check www.cmsmatrix.org.
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.
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.
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Matt Hamilton (aka HammerToe)
Netsight Internet Solutions