[Evangelism] CMS smackdown
Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]
ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com
Wed May 30 16:26:16 UTC 2012
One thing to not underestimate - Collections and collection portlets.
Anyone with at least moderate experience with a CMS and who understands
challenges with 'content reuse' will light up when seeing Plone
collections in action. And the fact that they've been part of Plone for
10 years (a.k.a. Smart Folders, a.k.a. Topics) is even more impressive.
And as far as being ahead of its time, how about the fact that Plone
(b/c of Zope) has had web services capabilities (via XML-RPC, not full
SOAP at the time) since Day 1 (over 10 years ago.) I recall Zope having
clustering and XML-RPC before (circa 1998?):
a) there was any open source Java or other language/framework
alternative offering clustering (this was before JBoss)
b) before a SOAP spec even existed
-Ken
On 5/30/12 10:29 AM, T. Kim Nguyen wrote:
> Thanks Matt - I don't think there is going to be much difference between this edu-focused list and the more general one for plone.com.
>
> One item I did not think of before to add to the edu list is perhaps not specific to Plone but applies to open source software in general: that it is part of a university's academic mission to create and share knowledge, in this case in the form of software, documentation, classes that we contribute back to the community. We have also used Plone with great success in introducing CS and IS students to a world-class framework (a teaching example of how it's designed, developed, and maintained) and to a dynamic international developer/integrator/user community. We sometimes forget that the concept of sprints and users-helping-users is revolutionary; I myself only realized this the other week when I was explaining what happens at the Plone Symposium to a completely non-technical person, and she reacted with such amazement when I described sprinting.
>
> On the idea of simple products: it's gratifying to see eyes light up when I explain the relatively simple idea of centralizing all info related to a particular meeting (in uwosh.meeting) and then demonstrate it. This is what gets me charged up. :)
>
> Kim
>
> On May 30, 2012, at 9:48 AM, Matt Hamilton wrote:
>
>> Kim,
>> Thanks for making this list! I was actually going to ask you to do something similar for Plone.com. We did a brainstorming session in Sorrento and it will be good to correlate both lists and see what we each came up with.
>>
>> Working in the sector you do I think you are probably a lot closer to users than many developers are. I know that there have been a number of occasions where I have seen Plone 3rd party products developed by those in Education which I've looked at with my developer hat on and said 'wtf?! but it is just something simple'… but in many cases that 'simple' thing exactly solves a specific need or requirement that a user has had. And it is often that specific requirement that makes or breaks the adoption or use of Plone.
>>
>> -Matt
>>
>> On 28 May 2012, at 22:37, T Kim Nguyen wrote:
>>
>>> I'd be tempted to make security a top 5 item.
>>>
>>> At PSE we did some brainstorming as part of the PloneEdu web site sprint and came up with this (raw) list. The starred ones the ones we thought were most important.
>>>
>>> Kim
>>>
>>> What Makes Plone Great
>>> *Community
>>> *High security out of the box
>>> *education-focused “products” (modules, add-ons, extensions) (eg. FSD, timeslot)
>>> *intranets
>>> *improving your business processes
>>> *forms builder
>>> *free and open source
>>> *in-place editing
>>> *accessibility
>>> responsive / mobile-friendly
>>> scaleability
>>> file structure
>>> accessible URLs
>>> docs of various types
>>> Plone user groups
>>> accessibility compliance
>>> modern technology framework
>>> upgrade path
>>> easy to theme
>>> extendable
>>> workflow
>>> multilingual and global community
>>> handles lots of content
>>> publication workflows OOTB
>>> built in search
>>> fine grained permissions groups
>>> auth integration
>>> collections / reports / queries
>>> robust
>>> stable
>>> installable product modules
>>> zeo-enterprise scale OOTB
>>> conferences for edu
>>>
>>>
>>> On May 28, 2012, at 11:04 AM, Matt Hamilton<matth at netsight.co.uk> wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hi all,
>>>> I'm going to be representing Plone at a fairly informal local event, BathCamp who are running a CMS Smackdown:
>>>>
>>>> http://bathcamp.org/events/cms-smackdown/
>>>>
>>>> I've got 10 minutes to talk about 5 things I love about Plone and 5 things I hate. I'm up against 7 other CMSs. So I'm trying to think of my list of things. Many of the people at the event will generally be techies, so I won't be afraid to talk about some of the technical aspects. However the bit I'm struggling with is coming up with 5 things I hate ;) I'm hoping to mention how we are improving the things I hate
>>>>
>>>> So my draft list so far:
>>>>
>>>> 5 Things I love about Plone:
>>>>
>>>> - The Community (international events, people, etc)
>>>> - Buildout + Deployment (dev.cfg -> staging.cfg -> live.cfg, versioning eggs etc)
>>>> - The ZODB (pervasive data store… no need to think SQL etc)
>>>> - Diazo (Great way to theme sites + demo)
>>>> - Python [1]
>>>>
>>>> 5 Things I hate about Plone:
>>>>
>>>> - Legacy (talk about ripping out stuff, Zope 4 etc)
>>>> - Documentation (talk about the swamp of old docs, but point out good new stuff eg. Developer Manual)
>>>> - Perception by Python developers (that is is old hat and boring: point out it does its job well and is mature)
>>>> - Everything in the catalog (talk about navigation using it etc. Point out move to parent pointers, use of Solr etc)
>>>> - Too easy to shoot yourself in the foot performance-wise (i.e., as ZODB is pervasive, you can accidentally load every object in the ZODB or mutate things you don't mean to).
>>>>
>>>> Any thoughts on this list? Any other good viewpoints, ideas? Bearing in mind I have just two minutes per point!
>>>>
>>>> -Matt
>>>>
>>>> [1] Great quote from colleague: "When I used to program in Java I used to first think how to solve the problem, then I had to think how to code that in Java. With Python I think how to solve the problem, then just write it"
>>>>
>>>>> NETSIGHT
>>>>>
>>>>> Matt Hamilton
>>>>> Technical Director
>>>>> Email
>>>>> matth at netsight.co.uk
>>>>>
>>>>> Telephone
>>>>> +44 (0) 117 909 0901
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Web
>>>>> www.netsight.co.uk
>>>>>
>>>>> Address
>>>>> 40 Berkeley Square, Clifton
>>>>> Bristol BS8 1HU
>>>>
>>>>
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>>>>
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Evangelism mailing list
>>>> Evangelism at lists.plone.org
>>>> https://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/plone-evangelism
>>> NETSIGHT
>>>
>>> Matt Hamilton
>>> Technical Director
>>> Email
>>> matth at netsight.co.uk
>>>
>>> Telephone
>>> +44 (0) 117 909 0901
>>>
>>>
>>> Web
>>> www.netsight.co.uk
>>>
>>> Address
>>> 40 Berkeley Square, Clifton
>>> Bristol BS8 1HU
>>
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>
--
Ken Wasetis
President& CMS Solution Architect
Contextual Corp.
office: 847-356-3027
ken.wasetis at contextualcorp.com
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