Scott,
This is an amazing panel discussion. There was meant to be
something similar at IMS this year, but it got dropped, which was a
shame. I'm still not entirely sure the organisers themselves 'get'
Open Source. Having a quick look at the OSS vendors/projects listed
for IMS there will be: Plone, eZpublish, Squiz, and Day (whose product
is not OSS, but they contribute to a lot of OSS components they use,
mainly Apache stuff).
I've got a meeting setup with Janus Boye from Jboye who does quite a
bit of work for CMSWatch (they wrote the Plone entry for CMSWatch's
reports) so similar to below, if anyone has any specific info they
think I should be mentioning then let me know. I'm going to mainly
talk about the Plone 4 roadmap and general Plone ecosystem.
-Matt
On 23 Nov 2009, at 14:51, Scott Paley wrote:
Steve - this is fantastic. Thanks!
Next Wednesday (12/2) I'll be sitting on a panel at Gilbane Boston
entitled "Open Source CMS Powwow", as the "Plone representative".
Others on the panel will include Mitch Pirtle, the founder of
Joomla, Jay Batson, a co-founder of Acquia, and Ian Howells, the CMO
of Alfresco. In other words, it's a pretty strong panel (always fun
to be the "weakest link!") Obviously I know a lot more about Plone
than the other 3 platforms, so this kind of information is extremely
helpful. It's interesting to see how Drupal stuggles with many of
the same challenges as Plone and is not some "magic bullet".
http://gilbaneboston.com/conference_program.html#W9
If anybody out there wants to "arm" me with additional information
about what you perceive to be the strengths of Plone relative to the
other platforms, please send an email my way. I'm not as interested
in the specific ways in which Plone is better than Joomla as I am
about where Plone really shines. I have my own ideas on this, but
would love feedback.
The stated agenda of the talk is, "Just a few short years ago many
organizations wouldn't think of implementing an open source content
management system. Today, thousands of major global companies have
implemented solutions like Drupal, Joomla!, Plone and Alfresco, to
name a few. In this session, Joe Bachana, Founder and CEO of DPCI,
has invited major luminaries from these four open source CMS
projects to help attendees better differentiate each system from the
others. Particular attention will be paid to calling out the
strengths of each system. The session will also pay close attention
to any feedback or lingering criticism in the market that open
source CMS platforms still face."
The moderator followed up privately to let the panelists know that,
"With regard to the tone of the session, I'd like it to be
constructive -- I don't have a particular interest in declaiming
which project is better than the other. However, there are clear
differentiators on platforms (LAMP, Python, Java/J2EE) as well as
functional focus for each that can and should be called out, and we
should endeavor to do so. Further, I would like to leave ample time
to discuss the criticisms of the open-source platform and
communities, since there is still a great deal of it out there."
Thanks all,
Scott Paley
Abstract Edge
On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 12:59 PM, Steve McMahon <[email protected]> wrote:
While at the Non-Profit SW Dev Summit, I had the opportunity to
attend a couple of Drupal panels (new to Drupal, and what's new with
Drupal). Drupal had their A team at the summit (a couple of core
devs and several evangelists) to do the talks. I wanted to pass on a
few things on what I observed. Share as appropriate.
1) Drupal is also having the framework vs product debate. From what
I heard, the "framework" side is definitely winning. Many Drupal
integrators are actually demanding that some new, friendlier UI in
the Drupal 7 preview be rolled back because they feel it undermines
their flexibility as integrators. Drupal 7 continues to be a micro-
core product that is not really suitable for use out of the box. The
Drupal folks emphasize that no inexperienced person should think
they can integrate Drupal by themselves (for more than a blog), as
they need to gain a lot of experience as to which modules really
work together.
2) There is no migration path for add-on modules between 6 and 7.
The core devs emphasize that it will be a rare 6 module that does
not need a complete rewrite to become a 7 module. The integrators in
the audience moaned loudly on receiving this news, and complained
that this was awful for them. The core devs replied that the new
APIs would make add on modules more secure and reliable.
3) Drupal is still very complex for end users. I don't think they
really differentiate between users and site managers. Positioning a
node in the content hierarchy still requires intimate knowledge of
how Drupal works (or add on modules that organize portions of the
tree). The ideal Drupal install is probably either small enough that
a single site admin is not a bottleneck, or large enough that
several site admins can be well trained.
4) Permissions and roles are still pretty much global, and workflow
is rudimentary. No ACLs. The organic groups module remedies some of
that, but there was skepticism about whether or not it could be
ported to 7.
5) The CCK (content creation kit) is now pretty much integrated into
7, and is really pretty cool in its ability to allow site admins to
add fields to content types TTW. On the other hand, they don't have
a round trip story, and I heard a couple of conversations, that
translated to Plone-speak, amounted to "we need something like
generic setup to handle repeatable deployments."
6) Real-life Drupal is actually very resource intensive. The
audience was told that they could do something like a blog on a
cheapo host, but that a real deployment with multiple content
authors would require a dedicated server or large virtual slice.
7) They are still, out-of-the-box, a great blogging platform, and if
you're using Drupal as a "news to the home page site" with a few
static pages, it's easy and fast to configure.
8) The party line on Acquia is that what's good for Acquia and Dries
is good for Drupal. I saw not a hint of discomfort with that.
9) A somewhat contradictory pair of party lines: "it's easy to find
PHP programmers, and they're inexpensive, therefore PHP is the place
to be" and "Don't even think of using a PHP programmer with less
than 3 years Drupal experience to do any customization."
10) Taxonomy was "never meant to provide site structure" and is now
deprecated as a way to build nav trees. The "right" way to do it is
with the new relations fields, which allow you to pick nodes as
parents/children.
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