Plone NGO Mailing List Christian Aid go for Microsoft over OpenSource

[Andy McKay]

> "You can't have people running local Plone's in most situations."
>
> Why not? Speaking only from a system resource perspective, if you can
> run Word on a system you can run Plone.
...
>
> I don't know enough about Zope internals to know if this is even
> feasable. Andy do you know?

Yes, and ok you got me. You were meant to skip over that bit :)

You can run Plone pretty much anywhere, I maintained the Windows  
installer and it did get a little bit hairy installing Plone on  
things like Windows 95 but anything there gets hairy. In fact there  
was a lightning talk by Andreas Jung at the Plone conference, where  
he describes installing it on something like 20,000 desktops. The  
problem I've found is that most people don't run Plone out of the  
box. In fact it's normally heavily customised for sites in ways that  
cause issues.

For example your server could be running on Linux, so various  
components of the site like full text indexing or portal transforms  
wouldn't work because they depend upon Linux binaries. You'd need to  
keep products in sync., so that Archetypes content types all other  
the place would be the exact same version. You'd need to ensure  
security is correctly applied (you can't copy down that whole 10G db  
containing private data now) and so on....

Further Plone is a bit of a beast to start and stop. The thought of  
starting Plone to go in and quickly edit a document, on some laptop's  
I've seen would be... erm a challenge.

So let me rephrase that. "For anything other than a trivial site,  
running Plone locally for lots of people is a challenge and you'd  
have to work at that". As ever, pick your poison.
--
   Andy McKay
   Blue Fountain