[NGO] plone vs drupal at Greenpeace UK

[Jon Stahl]

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.
 
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
 
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 <mailto:jon at onenw.org>   http://www.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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