[Evangelism] New presentation. Plone: the CMS that hits above it's weight

[Dylan Jay]

On 17/07/2011, at 11:20 PM, Mark Corum wrote:

> Dylan,
>
Hi Mark,

This is an important discussion so I hope you don't mind me taking it  
back to the list.

... <stuff cut> ...

> "Hits above its weight."  Sports metaphors are fine when addressing a
> male, middle aged, corporate IT shill audience. Boxing metaphors have
> bad connotations among females, folks and many parts of the middle
> east and India.  Also, what is the message here?  Plone is wimpy?  A
> lightweight?  Fights hard to be considered on par with its heavyweight

Looks like the title didn't give the impression I hoped for. I take  
your point about negative connotations.
My point with the title was that here is a CMS that you might never  
have heard of that a lot of people have picked to run some important  
sites. The point is really encapsulated in slide #8 with the plone  
positioning stats by w3techs.com.
I was also trying to get across the point that Plone is now light,  
quick, open source yet has enterprise features.

> alternatives?  Its fine to position yourself as a new kid on the block
> ... if you are in fact a new kid on the block. Plone is a very old CMS
> and has been around as long as most of the other CMSs people already
> know about.  Maybe trying to leverage the idea of a comeback would
> make sense?

Plone is new to the vast majority of people. When I first promoted  
Plone. I used to say it was 4th largest after WP, Joomla and Drupal.  
That's no longer true. Drupal, Joomla and WP and now way out ahead in  
raw numbers of sites and there are plenty of others ahead of Plone  
(see http://trends.builtwith.com/cms).
The people I was trying to reach are people thinking of creating their  
own site. Hobbiests, or developers looking at web technology. Most of  
these people know a little PHP and are very unlikely to have heard of  
plone in my experience.
Plone has pretty much been rebuilt, and is now starting to have many  
innovative features ahead of some of the others. We could present that  
as a comeback but I'm not sure comebacks are very convincing in the  
tech world. New kids seem to get more attention.
If the vast majority of people haven't heard of plone can't we somehow  
present it as something cool that the bigger players are using to get  
security and features?
In fact the combination of Ploud and Diazo now takes Plone to the same  
league as wordpress, really easy to have hosted and theme. That is  
new. So within the last few months we've got an enterprise CMS that  
the "professionals" have been using for years, that you can now have  
your own free site in seconds and learn to theme in hours instead of  
days. Even convert existing sites quickly. Anyone have any idea how to  
title that pitch?






>
> Mark
>
>
>
> On Sat, Jul 16, 2011 at 10:56 AM, Dylan Jay <djay at pretaweb.com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I gave this presentation to the Australian Computer Sociaty last  
>> week that
>> seemed to get a good response.
>>
>> http://www.slideshare.net/djay/plone-the-cms-that-hits-above-its-weight
>> If you download the presentation you can see my notes which might  
>> be needed
>> for it to make more sense.
>>
>> It's meant as an introduction to Plone. Feel free to use it or  
>> expand on it.
>> I took a new way at explaining Plone. I told a story of how Plone  
>> is used by
>> some of the largest organisations but many might not have heard of  
>> it. I
>> used stats to show it's less popular with smaller sites and  
>> explained this
>> with the lack of easy hosting options. I hightailed security and the
>> increase in innovations and also Ploud. I thought it worked quiet  
>> well.
>>
>> My 2c, I think Plone has the opportunity to position itself as the  
>> fast,
>> flexible, "cleaner to develop", innovative alternative CMS. An  
>> underdog. I'm
>> not sure how we could break from peoples perceptions of Plone from  
>> the past
>> however. Maybe the marketing experts have some ideas?
>>
>> ---
>> Dylan Jay
>> Technical Solutions Manager
>> PretaWeb: reducing duplication in the government web.
>> P: +612 80819071 | M: +61421477460 | twitter.com/djay75 |
>> linkedin.com/in/djay75
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Evangelism at lists.plone.org
>> https://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/plone-evangelism
>>
>
>
>
> -- 
> Mark Corum
> Plone Foundation Board of Directors
> Communications Team
>
> Find out more about Plone at http://plone.org