[NGO] what NGOs need in a website [checklist]

[Raphael Ritz]

Andrew Burkhalter wrote:

> [..]
> In my 2 years working with Plone, I've never really seen the  
> community talk about "endorsing" winners to ensure that a product  
> receives the eyeballs it needs for proper testing, documentation, and  
> feature-requests.  I know I'd rather contribute to those efforts than  
> having to evaluate and track 5+ decent, but not fantastic blogging  
> options.
>
> So, my question/thought/comment is this: could the effort put into an  
> NGOPlone distribution/service catalyze this type of contribution to  
> the Plone community?

yes.

> Do others agree there is a gap here?

yes.

And just a comment that might help to get started with coding:

I see the current discussion heading towards something I would like
to call 'integration products' (or 'integrative products'?). My feeling
is that the more we adopt the component architecture as well as
the more useful 3rd-party products become available, the more
integration becomes an issue.
 
One way to deal with this, I'm exploring with one of my most recent
projects: "Research Community Site" (RCS)

   http://svn.plone.org/view/collective/ResearchCommunitySite

Just look at its dependencies
http://svn.plone.org/view/collective/ResearchCommunitySite/bundles/trunk/EXTERNALS.txt
to get an idea what this is based upon.
Further see how a customization policy is used to trigger RCS installation
on Plone site generation which in turn does quite a few changes to a
default Plone by installing the dependencies, generating default content
and various other kinds of configurations. (Yes, I know I should use a
generic setup profile instead as customization policies are deprecated and
not even supported from Plone 2.5 onwards, but you get the idea.)

Personally, I found svn bundles to be extremely helpful in getting started
and keeping track of things. From there it should be just one step to get
to bundled release tar balls with all products needed.

I think Nate's Plone4artists adopted a similar appraoch.
 
With more such "high-level" products I think it could become
much easier to have several "pre-configured" sites that can be
much closer to individual people's needs in that they don't
need to worry about what product to use for what kind
of additional feature because it's just there.

On the other hand interesting information could be obtained by just
looking at what people put into their bundles because this tells
you something about the other products they have selected for
their needs.

Just a thought.

Raphael


>
> Andrew