Slashdot Mirror
NASA Launches New Science Website
aclark4life writes "NASA just launched a new website designed to provide information about its scientific endeavors and achievements. The new site was built on top of the Plone Open Source Content Management System and features an easy-to-navigate design and several new search features."
Plone has RSS support; NASA probably just didn't wish to have feeds. There's a decent, if biased summary of what some of Plone's high points are here. The CMS itself isn't geared towards any specific category of content; some organizations use it for their public website, whereas we use it to power a small Intranet web site where I work, primarily for the purpose of sharing documents rather than typical web content. It has relatively fine-grained security options built in regarding who can see what, and the Kupu editor is *extremely* easy to use for people who know nothing about markup languages, but who can at least use a word processor. The default site skin presents a very intuitive interface. The ability to manage documents in a workflow is helpful, too. For me, the biggest downside to Plone has been the shear amount of conflicting documentation on the product. For a sortable table, documents for slightly older versions will say to mark it as a certain class (and different versions say different classes), and let Plone do the work. Newer documentation points the user to JQuery. A lot what works well with the current version seems to be located off the main Plone site; there are a lot of articles on the official project site itself that are our of date, and, since that's where a newbie is going to go first, it can be an exercise in frustration. Most of what applied to older versions still works on the current one, but, when it doesn't, sometimes reading the conflicting recommendations and averaging them is the best way to go. Overall, though, it suits our needs well.