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Professional Plone Development
Michael J. Ross writes "Among the hundreds of content management systems (CMSs) available for building Web sites, Plone may not be the most popular; but for the majority of experienced Python developers, it is without equal. This is partly due to Plone being one of the few major CMSs written in Python, and partly due to its powerful extensibility. Customizing and extending Plone, however, are not for the faint of heart. Fortunately, help is at hand, in Professional Plone Development, a book written by seasoned Plone developer Martin Aspeli." Read below for the rest Of Michael's review.
Professional Plone Development
author
Martin Aspeli
pages
420
publisher
Packt Publishing
rating
7/10
reviewer
Michael J. Ross
ISBN
1847191983
summary
A practical exploration of how to extend the CMS Plone.
Professional Plone Development was put out by Packt Publishing, on 26 September 2007, under the ISBNs 1847191983 and 978-1847191984. On the book's Web page, visitors can order a copy of the book (more on this later), download the sample source code found in the book, submit feedback, ask questions of the publisher, and download a sample chapter — specifically, Chapter 2, which presents the case study used by the author. For anyone who wants to get the most out of this book, downloading and working through the sample code would be extremely valuable.
The book's material is organized into 19 chapters, spanning 420 pages — despite what is reported on the publisher's Web page, which as of this writing indicates that the book comprises 300 pages. The book's chapters are grouped into four parts. The first one, the briefest, sets the stage for what follows, by presenting a context for Plone development, including the CMS's history, its competition, its use as a stand-alone application versus use as a framework, and other foundational matters. It also introduces the case study — a cinema chain's Web site — used throughout the book to illustrate the concepts being taught. Lastly, the first part of the book covers the development environment needed by the reader to follow along, including discussion of Zope, which is an open source application server designed for creating CMSs and other Web-based applications.
The second part of the book covers Plone customization: basic concepts, laying out a site's strategy, security and workflow issues, add-on products, and creating a new theme. The book's third part, the longest, covers how to extend Plone with new functionality: Zope programming essentials, custom content types, standalone views and forms, working with a relational databases, user management, creating user interfaces with KSS, and more. The fourth and last part of the book addresses real world deployment of one's extensions, including Zope server management, production server setup, LDAP authentication, and possibilities for the future. Unlike most technical books, the author provides at the end a brief yet worthwhile section on where the reader can go next to learn more along the same lines as the book. The brevity of the section is certainly not from a lack of knowledge or helpfulness on the part of the author, but rather the dearth of information available to developers interested in learning about how to extend Plone.
There's a great deal to like about this book. The author clearly possesses the expertise and experience needed for providing instruction on a challenging topic such as this. His explanations are not abbreviated, as seen in so many other technical monographs. Furthermore, most programmers learn best by viewing and mentally dissecting sample code. For such people, Martin Aspeli's practical approach — focusing on a substantial sample application — will prove more engaging and instructive than the made-up and oftentimes overly simplistic examples found in many computer programming books — including the increasingly popular cookbook titles. On the other hand, by placing almost all of the discussion within the framework of a single sample application, the author diminishes the potential of the book for reference purposes. To benefit the most from this book, the reader definitely would want to work through all of the chapters, in detail, and in the order presented.
In presenting the many steps of creating the case study application, the author provides a generous amount of information on what he considers to be best practices, to make the Plone development process more reliable, and the resulting code easier to maintain and further extend in the future. The confident authority with which the author covers these principles, and the validity of the examples provided, demonstrates his knowledge of the subject matter, and reassures the reader that the author has the experience to provide reliable technical guidance.
In terms of prerequisites, readers should have a solid familiarity with Python and Plone. The book covers Plone version 3.0, but still would be of value to developers who have not yet upgraded from an earlier 2.x release.
Professional Plone Development is definitely best suited for Plone developers and administrators from the intermediate to advanced levels. However, even someone fairly new to Plone, would benefit from what it offers. In fact, carefully working through all of the material, and taking the time to really understand it, could take a developer from the beginner to the intermediate level. With further experience, subsequent rereadings of the book would likely yield further insights. It's that kind of book — meaty and in-depth, and not in any way a shallow "dummies" book.
However, there are some criticisms that should be leveled against this book, although none of them have anything to do with the writing of the author or the sample code. Rather, these are recommendations for future improvement directed to the publisher. First and foremost, the book's print on the page, is quite shiny — and not in the sense of a "Firefly" compliment. Rather, it reflects light as if the ink were extremely glossy. As a result, depending upon the placement of one's reading light, the page being viewed invariably has a large shiny spot, forcing the reader to keep rocking the book back and forth, relative to the light source, in order to shift the glare away from the section on the page that is currently being viewed. Of the hundreds if not thousands of technical books I have read, this is the only one with this type of printing, and I hope it is the last. This problem is not seen with the largest text of all, such as "Part N" at the beginning of each of the book's four major parts.
The images in the book, of which there are few, have a high degree of pixelation, which makes them look cheap, though it certainly does not make them impossible to read. As with the book's text, the pictures suffer from the same annoying shininess.
Earlier it was mentioned that the prospective reader can order a copy of the book from the publisher's Web site. However, I would not recommend this until the publisher improves the way that they package their books for shipping. Rather than enclosing the book in a plastic bag or a piece of clean wrapping paper, to protect it, the book is placed bare inside of the shipping box, in which it bounces around during transit, as it makes its way to the purchaser from the shipping/distribution facility. Consequently, the corners and edges of the book are easily curled, and the outside surfaces of the book's cover are scratched from the imperfections found in the shipping box's interior. This shows what can happen with books that are mailed with no internal protection. Publishers should not assume that what the shipping department sees when they place the book in the box, is what the customer sees days later when they receive it. Fortunately, this book is available from all major online booksellers, including the 11 firms listed on the publisher's Web page, for various countries. While this might not guarantee better protection of the book's cover, I have had far fewer similar problems with Amazon.com, for instance.
Despite these production flaws — all of which can be corrected — Professional Plone Development is a worthy addition to the library of any Plone administrator interested in making the most of their Plone installation, any Python developer who wants to create Web sites without reinventing the wheel, and any professional programmer interested in taking advantage of the growing demand for Plone developers.
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.
You can purchase Professional Plone Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
The book's material is organized into 19 chapters, spanning 420 pages — despite what is reported on the publisher's Web page, which as of this writing indicates that the book comprises 300 pages. The book's chapters are grouped into four parts. The first one, the briefest, sets the stage for what follows, by presenting a context for Plone development, including the CMS's history, its competition, its use as a stand-alone application versus use as a framework, and other foundational matters. It also introduces the case study — a cinema chain's Web site — used throughout the book to illustrate the concepts being taught. Lastly, the first part of the book covers the development environment needed by the reader to follow along, including discussion of Zope, which is an open source application server designed for creating CMSs and other Web-based applications.
The second part of the book covers Plone customization: basic concepts, laying out a site's strategy, security and workflow issues, add-on products, and creating a new theme. The book's third part, the longest, covers how to extend Plone with new functionality: Zope programming essentials, custom content types, standalone views and forms, working with a relational databases, user management, creating user interfaces with KSS, and more. The fourth and last part of the book addresses real world deployment of one's extensions, including Zope server management, production server setup, LDAP authentication, and possibilities for the future. Unlike most technical books, the author provides at the end a brief yet worthwhile section on where the reader can go next to learn more along the same lines as the book. The brevity of the section is certainly not from a lack of knowledge or helpfulness on the part of the author, but rather the dearth of information available to developers interested in learning about how to extend Plone.
There's a great deal to like about this book. The author clearly possesses the expertise and experience needed for providing instruction on a challenging topic such as this. His explanations are not abbreviated, as seen in so many other technical monographs. Furthermore, most programmers learn best by viewing and mentally dissecting sample code. For such people, Martin Aspeli's practical approach — focusing on a substantial sample application — will prove more engaging and instructive than the made-up and oftentimes overly simplistic examples found in many computer programming books — including the increasingly popular cookbook titles. On the other hand, by placing almost all of the discussion within the framework of a single sample application, the author diminishes the potential of the book for reference purposes. To benefit the most from this book, the reader definitely would want to work through all of the chapters, in detail, and in the order presented.
In presenting the many steps of creating the case study application, the author provides a generous amount of information on what he considers to be best practices, to make the Plone development process more reliable, and the resulting code easier to maintain and further extend in the future. The confident authority with which the author covers these principles, and the validity of the examples provided, demonstrates his knowledge of the subject matter, and reassures the reader that the author has the experience to provide reliable technical guidance.
In terms of prerequisites, readers should have a solid familiarity with Python and Plone. The book covers Plone version 3.0, but still would be of value to developers who have not yet upgraded from an earlier 2.x release.
Professional Plone Development is definitely best suited for Plone developers and administrators from the intermediate to advanced levels. However, even someone fairly new to Plone, would benefit from what it offers. In fact, carefully working through all of the material, and taking the time to really understand it, could take a developer from the beginner to the intermediate level. With further experience, subsequent rereadings of the book would likely yield further insights. It's that kind of book — meaty and in-depth, and not in any way a shallow "dummies" book.
However, there are some criticisms that should be leveled against this book, although none of them have anything to do with the writing of the author or the sample code. Rather, these are recommendations for future improvement directed to the publisher. First and foremost, the book's print on the page, is quite shiny — and not in the sense of a "Firefly" compliment. Rather, it reflects light as if the ink were extremely glossy. As a result, depending upon the placement of one's reading light, the page being viewed invariably has a large shiny spot, forcing the reader to keep rocking the book back and forth, relative to the light source, in order to shift the glare away from the section on the page that is currently being viewed. Of the hundreds if not thousands of technical books I have read, this is the only one with this type of printing, and I hope it is the last. This problem is not seen with the largest text of all, such as "Part N" at the beginning of each of the book's four major parts.
The images in the book, of which there are few, have a high degree of pixelation, which makes them look cheap, though it certainly does not make them impossible to read. As with the book's text, the pictures suffer from the same annoying shininess.
Earlier it was mentioned that the prospective reader can order a copy of the book from the publisher's Web site. However, I would not recommend this until the publisher improves the way that they package their books for shipping. Rather than enclosing the book in a plastic bag or a piece of clean wrapping paper, to protect it, the book is placed bare inside of the shipping box, in which it bounces around during transit, as it makes its way to the purchaser from the shipping/distribution facility. Consequently, the corners and edges of the book are easily curled, and the outside surfaces of the book's cover are scratched from the imperfections found in the shipping box's interior. This shows what can happen with books that are mailed with no internal protection. Publishers should not assume that what the shipping department sees when they place the book in the box, is what the customer sees days later when they receive it. Fortunately, this book is available from all major online booksellers, including the 11 firms listed on the publisher's Web page, for various countries. While this might not guarantee better protection of the book's cover, I have had far fewer similar problems with Amazon.com, for instance.
Despite these production flaws — all of which can be corrected — Professional Plone Development is a worthy addition to the library of any Plone administrator interested in making the most of their Plone installation, any Python developer who wants to create Web sites without reinventing the wheel, and any professional programmer interested in taking advantage of the growing demand for Plone developers.
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.
You can purchase Professional Plone Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
When my friend and I were creating an offshore gambling application for a sports bookie in [censored] we decided to go with Zope. Our decision was made on a couple factors. Mandrake could encrypt both disk and swap out of the box, Zope had (has) an incredible security model, and very few sports betters would likely to know Python. (Yeah, you with the glasses, I know all about you. I know you exist but you weren't on our books).
In any event, when we looked at Plone we ditched it immediately. It was too much. We lost all the abilities to control the minutia of any given piece that we wanted and the bubble up ability of Zope was more or less lost.
I'm NOT saying don't use Plone. It has a lot going for it... but don't forget to look under the hood and see if straight Zope will do what you need first.
I love Python. In fact, I wrote a short magazine article about how much I like it (although I admit that the promised sequel never materialized; sorry Tony). Having said that, working with Plone was like pulling teeth. It's obviously a nice system with huge potential and excellent customization options, but the learning curve is enormously steep.
We ended up abandoning our Plone intentions and moving toward Drupal for pre-made CMS stuff; even if I don't like hacking in PHP, hundreds of other people have already done most of the work for just about anything we might conceivably want to do. For true web application development beyond content management, we switched to Django and haven't looked back. If you already know Python, Django's learning curve is exceedingly shallow.
I don't hate Plone. It's just that it didn't seem to offer anything more than its competition, and that's from someone who already built a large web application in Zope (which is the platform Plone is built upon). Having said that, this book and others like it can hopefully make it a lot easier to get started with Plone development. It has great possibilities if you can get past the startup cost.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
i go to the about page to learn about plone, and now not only do i not know what plone is,
Wha? The description says:
"Plone is a content management framework"
What else do you need to know. Unless, of course, you don't know what a CMS is, in which case you shouldn't be bothering with this article in the first place.
The cmses, which are generally based on php/mysql, fall little short of doing housework, laundry and cooking. One can do everything with them. So ? whats the racket about 'professional' development on a cms on pythong ? it doesnt go professional unless there are hundreds of thousands of people using it, and using it for serious ends, like oscommerce.
Read radical news here
I bet "America's Funniest Home Videos" has you in stitches, doesn't it?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Plone is a Content Management System, not an web application framework.
Writing a gambling application in Plone is absolutely not what it's built for, in those cases you should use something that fits the use case better -- Zope 3, Django, TurboGears or Pylons come to mind if Python is your language of choice. They are all excellent frameworks, Plone is much closer to an application than a framework.
-- Alexander Limi, Plone co-founder
I run both so I have some insight.
Plone is a content management framework
A simpler way to describe it is as a content management system. But that's actually kind of a limited definition of it. Think of it as features on top of Zope.
What's Zope? Zope in this simple example is the guts of the content management system. The big advantage the entire system has is the design is more robust and scalable (ex. clustering) and has far better developer interface than your average PHP cms. (Drupal I'm looking at you)
Change management in general is not pretty and while they claim postgresql support, it's actually quite limited. It's great for more rapid development and small sites. But if your infrastructure already has clusters, then you would want to look very closely at Plone and perhaps even Zope.
Got Trader Joe's? friendwich.com RSS feeds work now!
Just be sure to apply the recent hotfix for a pretty nasty vulnerability.
http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/98576
I'd like to point out the sites currently running Plone:
:)
http://plone.net/sites
Novell, Trolltech, CIA, Akamai, Discovery Magazine, Oxfam -- these are hardly small sites.
If you're going to troll, please at least troll on something that is close to the truth.
I have been using it and developing apps for it for the past three years. There is a learning curve but it is worth it. There are some great videos about how easy Plone is to work with on the plone site:
http://plone.org/about/movies
Well all good software has silly names, what's your problem?
My little Linux and tech blog
I've been developing with Plone for 3 years, and admit that like any other complete web app out there there's a learning curve, but - Martin Aspeli's book is precisely the sort of clear and useful document a web developer needs to get started with an great application like Plone. It is also a solid guide for any seasoned Plone integrator to the direction Plone will be taking in the future.
You know you're old when you get the joke... PL/I haha
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
The title of the plone.org front page is "Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management".
That should give you more than a clue as to what Plone is.
Right below it, under "What is Plone?" is a link: "What is A CMS?"
I think you should click that and read it.
It's your ignorance, not someone else's design/usability flaw.
I can't believe this got a 5 rating - sheesh.
The comment earlier that Plone only can handle small sites is completely refuted by facts. There are some seriously big sites using Plone, such as Novell.com, CIA.gov, Akamai's website, etc. As an example, I know for a fact that http://www.discovermagazine.com/ (Discover Magazine's website) got nearly 100,000 site visitors just yesterday and gets over 1.5 million page views per month currently. Bottom line, Plone is really powerful stuff. If you are doing a small rinky-dink site, it might be overkill (depending on what you want to do), but if you are building a site that needs strong workflow, security, internationalization, standards compliance, scalability, good usability for non-technical staff, automatic related content indexing, integrated search, or any other feature used in a modern high-end website, you could do a heck of a lot worse than Plone.
We started in plone, spent about $30,000 dollars on initial prototyping but found some problems and then rewrote in ruby on rails; redoing the same work for about $10,000 and being more complete. Granted our needs were not for the full plone capabilities, and granted some of the initial research we did in plone did rollover to the RoR version but the fact is nobody uses the full capabilities of plone and most of the features that one really needs can be easily written as small modules in say drupal or ruby on rails. I did have several specific criticisms of plone: Most seriously the database is too closely coupled to plone and doesn't support the kinds of independent access, orthogonality, scaleability, standard query language and many of the kinds of characteristics that we were used to with ordinary rdbms such as postgresql. It was exceedingly unclear as to how we would do replication and scaling with plones database model and this created fear for us. Granted there is apparently an ordinary sql database binding for plone but we want to have simple table structures; not some bizarre plone ODBMS mapping to an RDBMS. Secondly the templating grammer was hermetic, poorly documented and required a priesthood of plone experts to maintain - we wanted to also help participate in defining templates and the like and not always have to have the plone experts mediate our changes. Beyond this the python notation is terrible; verbose, clumsy, the white-space requirements are completely ridiculous and impositional. Basically it is an obsolete language. The state of tools and libraries for Python is also unclear; is twisted-python the state of the art? What are the right choices for socket handling and the like? At least with newer grammars the field has not been polluted by many half-baked solutions. The larger problem with plone is that it reinvents everything into python rather than being centered around a small pieces loosely joined philosophy. This is not dissimilar from Java and is a trademark of smart isolated people. This makes the learning curve too steep, makes the technology too fragile, and makes us all too dependent on experts who hold the secret lore. We were much happier rolling our own even with having to do work that is normally already provided (such as user account handling); not because we got the work done any faster per se but because we could open up the work to more participants and could separate roles between participants more easily. The ruby and php and like model of just being lightweight scripting languages, acting as a glue binding the database to the layout is much easier to deal with conceptually. I see plone as a pathologically bad choice; like RDF it is grasped at when somebody has unclear goals, and wants to avoid nailing down their specification. In reality most projects consist of only a few specific modules of functionality and those modules can be written by hand or scraped together from other existing modules or source code on the net. This is not to say that Ruby on Rails doesn't have serious problems as well, or that the infinity of php based frameworks and cms'es don't have serious problems, but Plone was particularily hermetic, clumsy and obsolete. I raise it as a red flag in my advisory roles when I see teams suggest it now.
You mean, other than the obtusely-titled "What is Plone?" section on the home page?
I think you should get your Braille reader checked out.
Zope stands for the "Z" object publishing environment ... not sure what that means, but you get used to it :-)
Plone is the name of a (now defunct) techno band that Alexander Limi is a fan of.
Alex Clark
Some people might not know what a content management framework is, but it's damn rude to say that he shouldn't be reading the article if he doesn't know.
Whatever happened to the old idea of learning something new? Whatever happened to being a friendly neighbor?
No weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men.-Ronald Reagan
Thank you for a fair and balanced review. I hope you enjoyed the book!
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, available from Packt Publishing.
i'm pretty tech minded, but i'd never heard of this, so i go to the site to read up on it, I dig 3 pages deep looking for a general description
What? Right on the start page on plone.net, directly beneath the headline, I can read the following description:
"Plone is a leading open source Content Management System, and people use it to run their web sites, intranets and extranets."
It's a CMS.
If you want to know what it can be used for, I suggest you read the case studies. They shouldn't be difficult to find either, because they are introduced right below the text I quoted above:
"Curious about what sort of things Plone is used for? Read case studies [...]"
Maybe you were looking at some other site??
Hi :)
Thanks for recommending my book. Although I am being paid royalties, the main motivation was precisely what you identified: we need more, and better documentation. I think this is a problem that affects quite a few open source projects, though.
I won't claim that Plone (or Zope) is small and lightweight (I do quite like Pylons, though). I do, however, find it to be one of the most productive tools I've ever used for delivering a certain type of solution - what I call "content-centric" systems. The book is very much about that. I think this type of problem fits many business use cases, perhaps better than enthusiast/single-person use cases. I run my blog in Plone, and it was a two-minute job to set up, but if all you want is a simple web site, then Plone may be overkill. Similarly, if you want to build an intranet or a complex multi-author publishing platform or a bespoke portal where semi-structured content will be key, Plone may be a good fit.
The single most important reason to love Plone, though, is the community. I have some incredibly good friends in the Plone community (and outside... I do occasionally leave IRC), individuals whom I respect and admire greatly. People are friendly, constructive and helpful, and we all actively welcome new contributors and interested parties. If you found Plone frustrating, and you're able to put that into the language of constructive criticism, we'd love to hear from you (http://plone.org/support) so that we can improve the system. We're not perfect, but we are also proud of what Plone does.
By the way, if you want to read a pretty in-depth and interesting case study of a Plone implementation, take a look at http://plone.net/case-studies/discover-magazine. Obviously it's favourable (and I'm biased), but it may give you a good flavour.
Cheers,
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, available from Packt Publishing.
Speaking as someone who had to deal with a myriad of CMSs in my previous role, the best answer is 'none of the above'. As a system admin with other things to do, I didn't find a single one of them to be intuitive and user friendly enough. Often, as another person commented, you can dig six levels deep in documentation and still have no idea what people are talking about. Implementation of basic features is often haphazard and illogical (except, of course, to the developer, who also often writes the hard-to-understand documentation). Don't get me wrong - these are tools with a great deal of power. But by and large they're a lot like many linux distros - if they don't work straight off you're in a world of hurt. There are several CMS comparison sites, many with useful feature lists and details on implementation. If you must put something up, use these to save yourself some hassles later on.
"using it" does not mean who actually use it as a client/visitor. user here means the provider of that service, ie the company utilizing it. cia and so on do not count as examples in that. even if they deployed sh*t, people would have to use them. no choice.
Read radical news here
yet, fantasticness does not justify widespread usage.
Read radical news here
Let me make this short and sweet:
Zope, a widely-used Open Source web application server and development system.Zope is kind of like Cold Fusion. It defines a lot of components that you can link together to build a website. For example, you have page template objects that contain all of the HTML you will be sending to visitors. Those templates have fill-in-the-blanks parts that you can populate with the output of a Python (or Perl) script or with the results of a database query. It also includes all the authentication software pre-written so that you don't have to cobble together your own, and a security system that gives you fine-grained control over which visitors can access which objects. With us so far? OK...
Plone is a content management frameworkPlone is an application written in Zope, more or less. It's a "content management system", meaning that it's designed to let users upload data to it and make changes. There's an almost infinite number of ways to say which users can perform which actions. For example, say you're running a newspaper website. You can say that users in the "reporter" group can access to upload content, but not to actually make that content available to random visitors off the Internet. People in another group, "editor", don't have permission to upload new content but they can make changes to what "reporter" users have added and then mark the content as "ready for publishing". Then people in the "section editor" group can look at content that has the "ready for publishing" flag set, and if it's truly ready for the world to read, they can set it to "published". Otherwise, they can send it back to the junior editors.
Maybe in your organization, you only have "reporters" and "section editors". A good CMS would let you remove the "editor" role so that it's no longer used. Also, Bob Smith may be a "section editor" for the Sports section, but a "reporter" in the local news section. Again, a good CMS will let you set this up.
But that's only one example. Blogging software is another kind of special-purpose CMS, often giving the blogger permission to allow comments to his posts and edit or delete them. My company uses an internal CMS for blogs, a message board, and a vacation board. Only certain users can add "vacation" events to the calendar. Other users can write blog entries. Everyone can comment on the message board.
Basically, a CMS does exactly what it says: it allows you to manage (typically user-generated) content. If you find yourself writing a site that allows visitors to upload data for other people to see, you're probably better off installing a CMS and letting it handle all the details you're likely to forget.
So there, Zope and Plone explained. Does that clarify matters?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
You might want to looks at Silva, also based on ZOPE. Not only is the name not silly, it also has great version control for content and uses XML for content metadata.
The university I work for considered Plone for some large-scale CMS concerns. We finally decided in favor of Drupal instead because PHP developers are a dime a dozen. We have plenty of in-house expertise, but thinking about hiring down the road it seemed best to us not to narrow our options for at best a marginal software advantage.
My 2 cents.
// This is not a sig.
I've been using Zope/Plone as a development platform for years now (Since an early alpha of plone1.0), and I can honestly say it is without equal.
There is an incredibly steep learning curve and sub-par documentation, but once you get your head around it the speed and ease of development amazes everyone I develop for (And myself).
Having started using Java/Tomcat again for a project, It feels like taking several steps backwards. Apart from the the (imho) superiority of Python over Java*, The entire development process in Java feels antiquated, slow, error-prone, and difficult to scale (Not to mention Javas #1 Philosophy- if it aint broke, try adding XML).
I ended up writing my own framework to replicate my favorite parts of Zope/Plone (mainly Skins, ZPT, and Zope3 Views) and am feeling much more productive.
*I will admit, there are a lot of things- most notably typing and Interfaces- that I would love in Python, but overall Python wins over Java
Is there such a thing as a good cms? It seems like most designs seem to breakdown when there interdependencies between data.
Then again, I've only ever used DotNetNuke, which is a complete joke of an application.
I guess a good analogy in regards to the Zope that Plone runs on would be "Python is the 'GNU/Linux', Zope is the 'GNOME', and Plone is the 'Firefox'".
Zope has been around for almost 10 years now, so when people say "Zope" they can mean very different things. Zope 2 was originally used as a content management systems and a through-the-web development environment using the Zope Management Interface (ZMI). This was way back in 1998-2000 when web sites were simpler and mixing these UI of these two applications into one didn't seem so egregious at the time. Today the ZMI still exists, although it is only used to do more advanced customizations to a Plone site. Plone still runs on Zope 2, but Zope 3 was developed starting in 2001 as a from-scratch rewrite. Initially there was the idea that Zope 3 would replace Zope 2, but Zope 3 was also designed to be an extremely "loosely coupled" system - Zope 3 is sometimes called "The Framework without a Frame". Zope 2 started to ship the majority of Zope 3 as libraries, only of course it was still Zope 2, and called Zope 2 except it has Zope 3 inside of it and Zope 3 the standalone framework was also still available and this confused the heck out of everyone. Today Zope 3 is primarily used as a suite of integrated libraries - many of these libraries are now available packaged as Python eggs, and the current Zope 3 focus is on improving the ability for any Python web application to only use "small pieces" of the Zope 3 libraries. Finally there is Grok, which takes the Zope 3 libraries and applies the practice of "convention over configuration" to give you a Ruby on Rails like development experience, while still retaining all of the wonderful capabilites of the Zope 3 library such as a sohpisticated security system and the component architecture.
I've delegated Zope/Plone sysadmin responsibilities to people who little about Linux let alone system administration and they were able to keep Plone running without too much effort.
Perhaps you were trying to deploy on Solaris? I've heard Zope runs not-so-good on that OS.
Plone's focus is on being a CMS. It is also often used as a content deployment system, but it doesn't have to be. Products such as Entransit let you manage content in Plone, and then push it out into a relational database/XML formats if your web site happens to already have significant investment in other technologies (ASP/PHP/etc)
http://www.enfoldsystems.com/Products/Entransit
...is plane bad.
* Plone was excessive for our needs. We reimplimented the needed feature subset quicker in Rails than learning how to use the equivalent feature subset in Plone would have taken.
* Plone conventions in database management and templating were difficult to understand, even if you had a deep understanding of databases and web content creation, due to implementation idiosyncracies.
* I really dislike Python's syntax.
I think syntax is a "You say tomato, I say tomato" sort of point, but the first two points should be kept in mind both by folks designing web application frameworks and by folks trying to figure out which framework fits the needs of their current project.
(Incidentally, I think if you actually executed the ruby code above you'd find that it returns his entire post at the end. I'll spare you.)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Mona Lisa is fantastic. Can it be used widespread ? Is it relevant ?
Moreover, even if that word was fit to use in that fashion, the simple fact that it is not in widespread use would mean that it wasnt that 'fantastic'. Volkswagen beetle would be in 'fantastic' category then, likewise "ibm compatible personal computers". but not python.
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