One thing to not underestimate - Collections and collection portlets.
Anyone with at least moderate experience with a CMS and who understands
challenges with 'content reuse' will light up when seeing Plone
collections in action. And the fact that they've been part of Plone for
10 years (a.k.a. Smart Folders, a.k.a. Topics) is even more impressive.
And as far as being ahead of its time, how about the fact that Plone
(b/c of Zope) has had web services capabilities (via XML-RPC, not full
SOAP at the time) since Day 1 (over 10 years ago.) I recall Zope having
clustering and XML-RPC before (circa 1998?):
a) there was any open source Java or other language/framework
alternative offering clustering (this was before JBoss)
b) before a SOAP spec even existed
-Ken
On 5/30/12 10:29 AM, T. Kim Nguyen wrote:
Thanks Matt - I don't think there is going to be much difference between this
edu-focused list and the more general one for plone.com.
One item I did not think of before to add to the edu list is perhaps not
specific to Plone but applies to open source software in general: that it is
part of a university's academic mission to create and share knowledge, in this
case in the form of software, documentation, classes that we contribute back to
the community. We have also used Plone with great success in introducing CS and
IS students to a world-class framework (a teaching example of how it's
designed, developed, and maintained) and to a dynamic international
developer/integrator/user community. We sometimes forget that the concept of
sprints and users-helping-users is revolutionary; I myself only realized this
the other week when I was explaining what happens at the Plone Symposium to a
completely non-technical person, and she reacted with such amazement when I
described sprinting.
On the idea of simple products: it's gratifying to see eyes light up when I
explain the relatively simple idea of centralizing all info related to a
particular meeting (in uwosh.meeting) and then demonstrate it. This is what
gets me charged up. :)
Kim
On May 30, 2012, at 9:48 AM, Matt Hamilton wrote:
Kim,
Thanks for making this list! I was actually going to ask you to do something
similar for Plone.com. We did a brainstorming session in Sorrento and it will
be good to correlate both lists and see what we each came up with.
Working in the sector you do I think you are probably a lot closer to users
than many developers are. I know that there have been a number of occasions
where I have seen Plone 3rd party products developed by those in Education
which I've looked at with my developer hat on and said 'wtf?! but it is just
something simple'… but in many cases that 'simple' thing exactly solves a
specific need or requirement that a user has had. And it is often that specific
requirement that makes or breaks the adoption or use of Plone.
-Matt
On 28 May 2012, at 22:37, T Kim Nguyen wrote:
I'd be tempted to make security a top 5 item.
At PSE we did some brainstorming as part of the PloneEdu web site sprint and
came up with this (raw) list. The starred ones the ones we thought were most
important.
Kim
What Makes Plone Great
*Community
*High security out of the box
*education-focused “products” (modules, add-ons, extensions) (eg. FSD,
timeslot)
*intranets
*improving your business processes
*forms builder
*free and open source
*in-place editing
*accessibility
responsive / mobile-friendly
scaleability
file structure
accessible URLs
docs of various types
Plone user groups
accessibility compliance
modern technology framework
upgrade path
easy to theme
extendable
workflow
multilingual and global community
handles lots of content
publication workflows OOTB
built in search
fine grained permissions groups
auth integration
collections / reports / queries
robust
stable
installable product modules
zeo-enterprise scale OOTB
conferences for edu
On May 28, 2012, at 11:04 AM, Matt Hamilton<[email protected]> wrote:
Hi all,
I'm going to be representing Plone at a fairly informal local event,
BathCamp who are running a CMS Smackdown:
http://bathcamp.org/events/cms-smackdown/
I've got 10 minutes to talk about 5 things I love about Plone and 5 things I
hate. I'm up against 7 other CMSs. So I'm trying to think of my list of things.
Many of the people at the event will generally be techies, so I won't be afraid
to talk about some of the technical aspects. However the bit I'm struggling
with is coming up with 5 things I hate ;) I'm hoping to mention how we are
improving the things I hate
So my draft list so far:
5 Things I love about Plone:
- The Community (international events, people, etc)
- Buildout + Deployment (dev.cfg -> staging.cfg -> live.cfg, versioning eggs
etc)
- The ZODB (pervasive data store… no need to think SQL etc)
- Diazo (Great way to theme sites + demo)
- Python [1]
5 Things I hate about Plone:
- Legacy (talk about ripping out stuff, Zope 4 etc)
- Documentation (talk about the swamp of old docs, but point out good new stuff
eg. Developer Manual)
- Perception by Python developers (that is is old hat and boring: point out it
does its job well and is mature)
- Everything in the catalog (talk about navigation using it etc. Point out move
to parent pointers, use of Solr etc)
- Too easy to shoot yourself in the foot performance-wise (i.e., as ZODB is
pervasive, you can accidentally load every object in the ZODB or mutate things
you don't mean to).
Any thoughts on this list? Any other good viewpoints, ideas? Bearing in mind I
have just two minutes per point!
-Matt
[1] Great quote from colleague: "When I used to program in Java I used to first
think how to solve the problem, then I had to think how to code that in Java. With Python
I think how to solve the problem, then just write it"
NETSIGHT
Matt Hamilton
Technical Director
Email
[email protected]
Telephone
+44 (0) 117 909 0901
Web
www.netsight.co.uk
Address
40 Berkeley Square, Clifton
Bristol BS8 1HU
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/plone-evangelism
NETSIGHT
Matt Hamilton
Technical Director
Email
[email protected]
Telephone
+44 (0) 117 909 0901
Web
www.netsight.co.uk
Address
40 Berkeley Square, Clifton
Bristol BS8 1HU
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/plone-evangelism
--
Ken Wasetis
President& CMS Solution Architect
Contextual Corp.
office: 847-356-3027
[email protected]
_______________________________________________
Evangelism mailing list
[email protected]
https://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/plone-evangelism
