[NGO] Plone FAQ for CMS evaluators (was: plone vs drupal at Greenpeace UK)
Nate Aune
natea at jazkarta.com
Sun Jul 2 17:02:23 UTC 2006
> Thought y'all might be interested to see the results of GPs' recent
> evaluation of Plone vs. Drupal (vs Planet2, an in-house OpenACS
> solution).
>
> http://importantprojects.com/archives/000084.php
>
> Plone lost narrowly to Drupal. I offered some extensive comments
> to Rob Purdie, who ran the process (and is a friend). I think they
> misjudged Plone on a few key points, my comments on those are below.
>
> Nonetheless, their requirements are a VERY interesting read to get
> a sense of what a typical large NGO might be looking for in a CMS.
I think some sort of "FAQ for CMS evaluators" on plone.net would go a
long way to avoiding these misconceptions about Plone. There is a
*lot* of power lurking under the hood of Plone + add-on products, but
you don't get this sense in browsing plone.org and reading the
mailing lists. Or maybe you do, but you have to look in 10 different
sources to gather all the information you need to make a decision.
We need to provide a comprehensive overview of what Plone offers, and
your feedback to Rob Purdie below is a good start. I think if this
were to be generalized and slap a few screenshots/screencasts in
there, it would give evaluators a jump-start for considering Plone in
their CMS evaluation process.
The mockup that Limi posted at http://plone.org/ploneorg_frontpage is
good because it gives a quick-jump overview of what Plone offers. But
I think it's still too simple for people who are seriously
considering Plone. If this overview had links to more in-depth
information, then it would be a much more valuable resource.
For example, for the "Pluggable Authentication" heading under the
"Standards Compliant" tab, a link to a page with more information
about PlonePAS and howtos for connecting it with LDAP and Active
Directory would go a long way. As it is now, the evaluator has to
hunt for this info, rather than having it easily accessible/digestible.
> Also it's interesting to note how hard the Drupal community worked
> this process:
> http://groups.drupal.org/node/411
> http://groups.drupal.org/node/458
This also shows how the Drupal community is perhaps more transparent
because the list archives are easily read through-the-web and don't
require subscribing to the mailing list in order to post. Compare
these Drupal list archive pages to the Plone NGO-list archive pages:
http://lists.plone.org/pipermail/ngo/
which are more friendly and inviting discussion?
We might want to consider using listen (http://plone.org/products/
listen) which allows for mailing lists to be archived on a Plone
site, which means they are searchable using the Plone search tool,
and members can subscribe and respond to the lists through-the-web.
Nate
> Very interesting food for thought.
>
> Here's the feedback I offered to Rob Purdie:
>
> ===============
>
> System scability: Plone A- , Drupal A.
> -- Not sure what that means to you, but Plone (well, Zope
> actually) has built-in multi-server clustering support and can
> scale almost infinitely in terms of traffic. Drupal, AFAIK, does
> not. Plus, it has the smartest caching technology out there
> (CacheFu) which dramatically speeds up performance.
>
> RSS Feeds: Plone A, Drupal A+
> -- Again, not sure why Plone would rate lower. Everything in
> Plone produces RSS, and you can construct RSS feeds for anything
> you can search for, which AFAIK is actually MORE flexible than Drupal.
>
> Be able to include HTML in any field of the CMS: Plone B-, Drupal A+
> -- I don't know what this means, but I think this is a pretty weak
> requirement. The whole point of a CMS is to separate formatting
> from content. Plone allows you to insert arbitrary HTML into page
> bodies. You can override styles locally if you want to configure
> Plone to allow that. Perhaps the evaluators didn't realize this
> -- Plone doesn't really advertise it. You certainly don't want to
> insert arbitrary HTML into metadata fields.
>
> Global Login: Plone B, Drupal B+
> -- Not sure what this means at GP, but Plone unlike Drupal, has a
> pluggable authentication system that can authenticate users against
> prety much anything. A single outlier rating made the difference.
>
> reuse/leverage content: Plone F-, Drupal F-
> -- I know this was constructed for Planet2, but perhaps you weren't
> aware that Plone, using the PloneRSS product, can import content
> via an RSS feed and transform it into first-class content objects.
> That probably rates better than an F-, doncha think?
>
>
> Product database: Plone B, Drupal A
> -- If you're talking about full-on e-commerce support in the CMS,
> Plone is definitely weaker there. But if you're talking about
> custom content types, I can't see how you one could rate Plone
> significantly lower than Drupal. Plone's Archtypes system for
> creating custom content types is second to none. Fields can be
> maintained through the web. Validation, UI and more are all
> specified in a single schema.
>
> Cross-browser support: Plone A, Drupal A+
> -- What is this based on? Plone is the most validatable,
> standards-compliant package out there. There was only one outlying
> rating on this, otherwise both would hvae gotten A+ across the board.
>
> E-newsletter distribution: Plone C, Drupal A+
> -- You're giving Drupal an A+ because of CiviMail? Beta quality
> "developer only" code? Relying on any CMS for email newsletter
> distribution is pretty dodgy, IMHO. A serious organization like GP
> should be using a powerful hosted email newsetter distrbution tool
> such as WhatCounts, Vertical Response, etc. that offers serious
> deliverability, bounce management, etc. Plone plays nicely with
> these tools. A single outlier rating accounts for nearly all of
> the difference.
>
> extensibility: Plone A, Drupal A+.
> -- Not sure what this is based on. But to argue that Plone is
> any less extensible than Drupal is simply not true.
>
> I'm surprised that GP didn't consider support for multi-lingual
> content as a requirement. Plone is of course very, very strong here.
>
> I'm also surprised GP didn't really consider versioning support.
> Plone is also very strong here.
>
> ==============
> best,
> jon
>
> -----------------------------
> Jon Stahl, Program Manager
> ONE/Northwest - Online Networking for the Environment
> jon at onenw.org http://www.onenw.org
> 206.286.1235x15 skype: jonstahl y!: jondstahl
>
> Want a piece of my mind? Check out my blog at:
> http://blogs.onenw.org/jon
>
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--
Nate Aune - natea at jazkarta.com
http://www.jazkarta.com (open source technology solutions)
http://www.nateaune.com (blog, photos, music)
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