Experience with Zope/Plone?

4 thoughts on “Experience with Zope/Plone?”

1. D’Arcy — My nonprofit organization, ONE/Northwest, chose Plone (over Drupal, Mambo, etc.) as the foundation for the open-source CMS impletation work we do with small (2-20 people) organizations here in the Pacific Northwest & BC.

   The reasons we chose it, and have been very, very, very happy with it, have included:

   — The professionalism, organizational maturity, and sophistication of the Plone community. This is huge in an open-source project. The Plone Community has its act together, communicates from a place of deep respect for each other, and puts out some great code and documentation.

   — Usability. Most of our end-users are not very technology savvy. We felt that Plone had heads-and-shoulders the best designed UI of any of the open-sources CMSes out there, and the ~50 sites we’ve launched over the past 2 years have not proved us wrong. Most of our clients get a one hour training, and they’re good to go.

   — Headroom. Unlike most other open-source CMSes, Plone (and Zope) were designed to be enterprise grade software. You can cluster servers with Zeo. You can integrate with instiutional authentication systems like LDAP. You can connect to most any SQL/relational database store. Plone plays nice with other systems, which I would think makes it very attractive in an enterprise environment. We haven’t had to do most of this, but it’s nice to know we’re unlikely to run into limits here. Another really powerful thing we have taken big advantage of us Plone’s system for creating (and re-using) custom content types, called Archetypes. This lets us really adapt the system to our client’s content needs with minimal programming work.

   Downsides?

   — Plone has a limited stock of publicly-available default themes/skins.

   — Plone’s features for web-based collaboration (e.g. wikis, blogs, forums, etc.) are good but not as great as the best standalone tools. Lots of progress is starting to come here, though.

   — Python is a really easy to learn language, but the Zope web framework has a lot of moving parts, and can be a little daunting if you’ve never encountered a web framework before. (e.g. if your only ‘programming’ experience is hacking PHP scripts.)

   — Zope itself is in transition between the aging Zope 2 and the all-new Zope 3. (Plone is a Zope 2 application). The next couple of years will be ones of considerable evolution in the entire software stack. This process is being managed extremely well, but it is definitely complex. We think the risks are very reasonable, though. The Plone community takes a very measured approach to big changes.

   — Plone likes lots of RAM.

   That’s my $0.02 as someone who’s built a consulting practice on Plone, but is not “core Plone developer.” Hope it helps.

   If you have more specific questions, I would encourage you to throw them out to the plone-users list, which is a busy and helpful place. You can find it and other Plone community lists at http://plone.org/support.

2. We chose Plone for our eduCommons software (educommons.sourceforge.net) for many of the same reasons listed above. I don’t have much to add by way of reasons separate from Jon, but wanted to add our vote.

3. Hello

   We wrote comparisons between plone, mambo and lenya: http://www.menttes.com/contribs/cms.html.en

4. Hello

   We wrote comparisons between plone, mambo and lenya at http://www.menttes.com/contribs/cms.html.en

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