[Plone-NGOs] Re: Plone Costs for Non-Profits

[Jon Stahl]

Alexander Limi wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 09 Jan 2007 04:57:06 -0800, Martin Aspeli  
> <optilude at gmx.net> wrote:
> 
>> By contrast, if all you want is a very simple web site building tool,  
>> then Plone is probably overkill. Cost of hosting may be a factor, since  
>> it becomes a much bigger proportion.
> 
> Also consider how far up you want to scale. I have seen several  
> organizations starting with MediaWiki or a "we built it ourselves in PHP"  
> systems, and after discovering that they doesn't really do proper  
> permissions and delegation — had to migrate to other solution (in our  
> cases, Plone). It's not cheap to migrate stuff between solutions either,  
> so choosing a project that gives your room to grow seems to be one of the  
> strong stories for Plone.
> 

Just to build on this... it's not just about "scaling up" (in terms of
volume/traffic) -- it's about conceptual sophistication.

One of the biggest reasons we use Plone, even for fairly simple projects, is
that it has such amazing "headroom" to grow as the client's needs grow and
change.  

For example one of projects started as a very simple site that we could have
probably implemented in Joomla or Drupal or homebrewed-whatever.  But about
two months after they launched, they said, "hey, we need a secure intranet
space for our board members, too."  And fifteen minutes later, we had it for
them.  They're also a international organization, so when they come to us
and say "um... can we do a French version of our site?"  we'll be ready with
LinguaPlone.  

Another big argument in favor of Plone for small projects is its
ridiculously good usability for non-technical end-users.  This is the
biggest hurdle to real-world adoption of CMS by average NGO-folk, and Plone
passes this test with flying colors.  The time they save NOT wrestling with
Plone's UI is invaluable.

best,
jon

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