[Evangelism] [Plone-developers] Looking for talking points comparing Plone vs. Wordpress

[Ed Manlove]

> I'm attending a local WordCamp [1] in a couple of days - proudly wearing
> my Plone T-Shirt - and wanted to brush up on my Plone vs. WordPress
> talking points.  All of my Plone work has either been on my own project
> or within Plone core (RTL, UI testing, i18n, etc) so I've never really
> looked outwards too closely. I going to do some searching around but
> wanted to see if anyone, in particular our Plone development shops, have
> any notes when they talk/work with customers on showing the value of
> Plone as compared to Wordpress.  Thanks.
>
> Ed
>
> [1]http://2012.providence.wordcamp.org/
>

Here is a belated report from my day at WordCamp Providence [1]. I was 
attending as regular participate interested in some technology topics 
and in, more so, the local community and their use of WordPress.  I 
wasn't giving a talk this time around. Here are some of the highlights 
of the day...

The first talk I attended, a talk about use of WordPress within 
academia, was given by a trio of people from The Harrington School of 
Communication and Media at URI. What struck me most was Miss Lukovics 
talk on her use of WordPress for her student portfolio.  Their talk 
reminded me of Jim Groom's keynote at PSUEast2012 [2].  I passed on the 
url for PSUEast and Jim's talk to the director at the Harrington School.

The second talk I attended was given by Jess Jurick entitled "Writing 
Tools for WordPress". Among the themes that stood out was the need for 
publishing workflows and writer management. There was a fair amount talk 
about drafts.  Most of this functionality it seemed came from 
third-party add-ons instead of Plone's built-in workflow, permissions, 
scheduled publishing. Concerning wysiwyg editiors the NY Times' ICE 
editor was mentioned.

The one sole tech talk I attended, "Debugging, Testing, Security, 
Performance", was given by John James Jacoby.  John works for 
Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, and is also the lead 
BuddyPress (WordPress-powered social networks?) and bbPress (bulletin 
board, forum add-on for WP?) developer. John flew through his slides and 
hit various topics. Since I am neither a WordPress developer nor did I 
need intimate details I had few take-aways from his talk. Mostly is that 
WordPress security is difficult to implement and difficult to keep 
strong and that debugging in php is hard (but apparently getting better).

Brad Parson gave an interesting talk on responsive design. As far as I 
could tell Brad is more developer then designer but much of his advice 
was in sync with what Jen Robbins had said during an earlier talk at a 
different web designer meetup. One topic he brought up, lack of 
web-based responsive design advertisements, is being addressed by a 
local startup, Pennant - http://pennant.co/, that I was introduced to at 
another startup incubator launch night. (Apparently I'm seeing/attending 
a lot of responsive design at local tech meetings...)

I attend a few more talks covering topics of entrepreneurship and 
WordPress themes. I talked with a few people but no one who was doing an 
evaluation of CMSes.  It seemed as if most people were using WordPress 
for basic sites with blogs and a few other pages with information (About 
pages, basic portfolios, etc) and a fair amount of novice users. This 
was what I was expecting and I do want to thank everyone who offered 
suggestions for Plone vs. X talking points. I plan on continuing 
attending local events and talking about Plone. If anyone has any 
question on my interactions or thoughts on the WordCamp Providence event 
please ask.

Ed

[1] http://2012.providence.wordcamp.org/
[2] http://weblion.psu.edu/news/jim-groom-to-keynote-at-pse12