[Evangelism] virtual appliances for Plone evaluation

[Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]]

Kim,

This has been talked about numerous times - in fact, a year and two 
weeks ago, at 2010 CMS Expo, we had Calvin, Nate, Alan, Alexander, and a 
couple others all saying the same.  One of the things about that 
conference is that it smacks you in the face how much better Plone is 
than Joomla, for instance, but how much they've kicked our butt in the 
area of mind share due to the availability of single-click options via 
cPanel and Plesk setups with the ubiquitous $10/mo hosting providers.  
And with the topic of getting Plone added to such installers offered 
from the likes of GoDaddy, etc. came the idea of - hey, we should really 
have virtual appliances with an Edu stack, an NGO stack, an Intranet 
stack of add-ons already in place.

This is a repeated topic - I even remember a BoF at the Seattle 
conference about doing vertical stack distros, but nothing has come to 
fruition, and now it's so much simpler with the release of an 
edu-buildout.cfg, for example.

If you guys get something rolled out, we all need to coordinate with 
Mark Corum (Marketing) and the Plone.org web site team on how to make it 
extremely easy to get at this information - perhaps from the Plone 
installers download page?  Just spit-balling - we'll all have our own 
ideas (this is a good place to put them), but again, it needs to be 
coordinated and the information needs to be easily found, so that you 
guys aren't wasting your time - so that someone can actually find your 
VMs images easily and get using them.

I really hope this is the start of finally executing on something that's 
been talked about for a long, long time.  Go get 'em, Guy/Kim!

Mark - if  you're listening/reading, any comments on next steps for 
these guys?

Ken


On 5/26/11 8:14 AM, T. Kim Nguyen wrote:
> Guy Heckman and I are putting together a VMWare appliance and a VirtualBox appliance for Plone 4.0.5.
>
> We thought it would be a good way to ease people into trying out Plone.  If you look at vmware.com/appliances there are many out there for other CMSs, but none for Plone.  Same at other virtual appliance sites below. This idea stemmed from our PloneEdu buildout project (first a buildout, then a custom unified installer, and then an appliance)...
>
> Is this something that should be part of the Plone marketing effort?  Below is the rest of a message I sent out to the plone-website team yesterday - sorry for the duplicate-ish message but this idea probably falls in a couple of places (plone.org site, documentation, marketing).  Has this been considered before?  Other questions/thoughts below.
>
> 	Kim
>
>
> There are a couple of places we can (eventually) get them hosted:
>
> http://vmware.com/appliances/directory/cat/502
>
> and
>
> http://virtualboximages.com/
>
> and possibly
>
> http://www.turnkeylinux.org/
>
> Or we could use BitTorrent to distribute them from someplace else.
>
> Is there interest in pointing to these appliances from plone.org?  Perhaps making a plone.org/appliances or plone.org/eval section?  The point of these appliances is to make it easy for someone to evaluate Plone.  There are a lot of appliances out there for other CMSs.  We could make them for a mix of OSs as well as for things like the PloneEdu buildout.  Do we want to set some ground rules on what kinds of documentation goes with these, or what they can contain, and should we organize now who will maintain these as OS and Plone versions come out?
>
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