Re: [Sheflug] Content management with Plone

[Alex Hudson <home [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2004-11-22 at 18:53 +0000, Bob Holland wrote:
> We have been evaluating Mambo for use as a community web site management tool 
> in Dinnington for a while but now feel it might not be totally suitable for 
> our needs in terms of being able to give editorial responsibility to specific 
> community members for specific sections of the site.

I looked at Mambo a while ago too; I was looking for something to
replace the code that currently "powers" alexhudson.com (which isn't
really doing anything terribly tricky, but is a little sophisticated).
Didn't find it at all suitable, sadly.

In general, the CMS scene is fairly poor. Each CMS out there has some
kind of major flaw (for my requirements) so I'm currently writing my own
system :(

> Some of the reference sites produced with Plone look much more like what we 
> are trying to achieve and they would appear to scale well.
> 
> Anyone have any experience (good or bad) of this that they wish to share?

Zope, if you can run it, might be ok. I have heard reports of the app
server (it requires a daemon to run, unlike [say] PHP) being flaky
occasionally; I'm not sure whether or not that was due to a bad setup
(entirely possible..) but hasn't been something I've experienced.

The site admin tool is nice. Hosting many domains is a crock though -
there are solutions, but none of them is "nice" to my mind. And, also,
you have the whole python factor - some like it, some don't. Personally,
I detest it. The ZPT system is nice though (and is something I've
borrowed for the above project), and generally if you know how to
program something it's pretty easy to patch Zope apps.

The through-the-web thing is a crock, to my mind. I detest that you
cannot edit files with vim (or whatever) and have that change
immediately reflected on the site. I also don't like the ZODB (Z Object
Database), where "stuff" goes. Also, many Plone sites kinda look the
same - I don't know whether or not that says something about the
laziness of implementors or difficulty of change.

I'm not totally convinced it will necessarily be a good fit for your
needs: you sound like you need some very specific functionality which
isn't common, and while Plone will probably provide it, it might not be
in a terribly nice fashion. 

In terms of scalability, I don't know. It seems you need much more oomph
to power a Plone site, but it hasn't really been a problem for me. I
would think one of the main things you need is something that your
admins can look after easily: Plone + Zope does have a bit of a learning
curve, and might be a bit unwieldy unless you're willing to invest some
time and effort into it. 

Might be worth setting one up on a server and playing with it for a
while. 

Cheers,

Alex.

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