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 _______________________________________________ NGO mailing list [email protected] http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/ngo
