Plone - Community Plumbing - or Just Content Managment !

Nynke Kruiderink NKruiderink at iicd.org
Tue Dec 11 22:36:29 UTC 2007


Thank you Peter Hollands for starting this dicussion and for the
responses. 

We are currently planning a revamp of our iconnect-online.org platform
so that it can support a web 2.0-ish way of facilitating thematic
communities/groups. 

I am a great fan of Plone but when we were at the brink of starting this
endeavor I was doubting whether Plone was the right platform for the
job, or if Drupal would be better suited. I'm still not 100% sure but we
have decided to try it with Plone based on the following findings, and
please feel free to let me know if these findings don't match your
perspective/understanding. I am here to learn. :>

- No open source cms is web 2.0 out of the box.
- A lot of Web 2.0 is attitude/approach/culture rather than tools per
se.
- Plone has a lot of add-ons which do fall within the web 2.0
expectations of users today. The ones we are planning to use are:
  * Zwiki
  * Quills
  * Tagging
  * Bookmarking
  * PloneProfiles
  * PloneBookmarklets

We will (try to) encourage a certain protocol with some tags so that the
thematic virtual folders we will be building throughout the website will
reflect the content members are adding. Initially we want to minimize
the editorial management and allow all content published by members to
be visible by all members. But this is also based on the fact that we're
not expecting thousands of members, so the community members should know
one another. We know this is a risk, but it's a risk we want to take to
increase the sense of empowerment and ownership, vital to community
building I think.

But indeed, the tools we have available stay close to the core of Plone,
namely publishing/managing content. In terms of social networking
functionalities, I am not familiar and haven't heard of
tools/functionalities which are similar to those as in Facebook for
instance, which I have been using for 3 months now. Don't get me wrong,
I don't think Plone should try to be another Facebook. However some
minimal options such as leaving bilateral messages for each other, or a
"writing on a members wall" (is that like the commenting system you
mentioned Jon?), (Twitter-like) status updates, might be a small
investment with high rewards.

But if I've missed something and someone can point me in the right
direction in this regard, I would only be grateful. 

Again, thank you Peter for starting this discussion and I look forward
to thoughts of others.

Sincerely,
Nynke













-----Original Message-----
From: ngo-bounces at lists.plone.org [mailto:ngo-bounces at lists.plone.org]
On Behalf Of Jon Stahl
Sent: Monday, December 10, 2007 2:07 AM
To: A list for NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations) using Plone.
Subject: Re: Plone - Community Plumbing - or Just Content Managment !

Peter Hollands wrote:
> Is Plone going to develop into a Community Plumbing Platform ? Will it
have h 
> as standard the features that Non-Profits nead to build a constituency
? 
>   
What is your definition of "the standard features?"

In my opinion, Plone is already a community plumbing platform. 

It lets users register, login, create content, comment on other content,

etc. 

Does that mean it has every feature you might need to build an online 
community?  Of course not!  And especially not out of the box.  Plone 
(like Drupal, Joomla and most other open-source CMSes) is a "lean core" 
with lots of add-on modules.  Which add-on modules exist are solely a 
function of what the community needs and wants... and, most critically, 
is willing and able to pay for! 

When I think about building an online constituency, I think that 
constituent relationship management is at the heart of that.  Plone 
doesn't do that, and I don't think it should try.  But Plone does 
integrate with powerful, inexpensive CRM platforms such as 
Salesforce.com.  That's a smart approach that avoids reinventing the
wheel.

Plone always has room to improve. But just because Plone.org doesn't say

"Community Plumbing" on the homepage doesn't mean it isn't an extremely 
suitable tool for groups of people to work together to create and share 
content and build community.  And over the next couple of years, we're 
going to continue building on this amazing platform to make it even 
better at those tasks.

A couple of obvious places I think it would be great to invest some 
money in:

-- The commenting system (building on some great initial work by Tom 
Lazar, Kai Diefenbach and Christian Scholz)
-- The user profile system (to make it easier to extend user profiles 
with simple custom fields)


$0.02,
jon


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