Plone Costs for Non-Profits (Was Re: [Plone-NGOs] Initial thoughts ona "Plone for Nonprofits" bundle)

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi Ben,

I'm sure a lot of people (me included) finds this incredibly useful. 
Thanks for sharing!

> As the main site administrator, but with little time for acquiring  
> arcane knowledge about products,  I am beginning to feel that some of  
> the content management methods are turning out to be time consuming  
> -- I would really have liked a bulk document loading method included  
> from kick off, for instance. Uploading hundreds of documents one at a  
> time, and then having to "publish" each of them one by one turns into  
> a significant project cost. The same applies to membership management.

I think bulk member management is something Plone core should grow. 
Perhaps you're interested in sponsoring that?

Bulk page upload can be achieved via WebDAV or FTP, and bulk publishing 
can be achieved from the 'contents' tab, or by using a workflow that has 
'published' as the default state.

> Until then, one method for picking up admin/project management  
> knowledge is probably to run a version of Plone locally, try out  
> different products etc -- Getting Plone to run on a Mac is a breeze,  
> and I learned a lot from a couple of days mucking about at the  
> beginning,  I've just not had the time to keep up.

I think this is the way most people learn, frankly. It's either that or 
books, practically speaking. Of course, this is no different from any 
other technology. We have some end user documentation on plone.org, and 
there's learnplone.org from the fine guys at One/NorthWest, but keeping 
it up to date is a challenge (it's not fun work).

> The gocept book (www.gocept.com) is a good starting point, but we  
> could do with an administrator/project management guide (online but  
> printable) that addresses preferred content architectures, approaches  
> to database implementation, bulk document management, RSS feeds into  
> sites, etc -- issues that are crucial for project managers and  
> administrators, especially if they don't have much Python or feel for  
> ZMI.

This is of course one of the main ways that non-technical or 
semi-technical people can contribute back to the community. Don't think 
that not writing python absolves you from any responsibility towards the 
community. :-)

Martin