[Evangelism] The State of Drupal
Steve McMahon
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.
Donna Snow
Best Regards,
Donna 'SnowWrite' Snow
Office Manager, Hacker Dojo
Owner, C2E Training
illuminating your path to Open Source
http://www.c2etraining.com (in progress)
card.ly/snowwrite
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Dylan Jay
On 23/11/2009, at 4:59 AM, Steve McMahon 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
some interesting thoughts by the founder/(leader?/dictator??) of
Drupal on this on his blog.
http://buytaert.net/8-steps-for-drupal-8
I especially thought the following was relevant for Plone.
"Clearly the work on improving our APIs needs to continue, and
creating better separation between the framework and the product will
continue to be one of our goals during the Drupal 8 release cycle.
Over-engineering is a real threat though. When people fall in love
with framework design, they tend to decouple everything, abstracting
it up, down, and sideways. Before you know it, you end up with
abstractions that make Drupal harder to develop for, and that could
make Drupal a lot slower."
He also brings up the idea of having co-maintainers with two focuses:
framework and product. The idea that a CMS has two kinds of
interfaces, developer (the framework) and user (the product) and both
are equally important but will often be opposed... I think there's a
lot of truth in that.
With regard to Plone I'm not sure what our equivalent of a maintainer
is since our process is different but I'm assuming it would be the
framework team. Can you have separation of concerns within a single
committee?
> 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.
>
> 3) Drupal is still very complex for end users. I don't think they
> really differentiate between users
He has some interesting things to say on this.
"The single biggest barrier to the success of Drupal is its ease of
use. This is repeatedly shown in studies, competitive comparisons and
blog posts... ...To focus only on the power and flexibility of the
framework mainly serves to keep the Drupal insiders happy, while the
market and customer base passes them by to adopt tools that do not
need their specialized skills because other products solve the
market's needs out of the box."
Then he goes a lot into how there can only be one CMS left standing
(very highlander) and how that can be Drupal etc etc. I can start to
see where these drupal people get their zeal from now :)
Thankfully Plone's UI seems to be in great hands. The simplification
of the framework side of plone has had some great noises made but IMHO
we seem to have a great process for adding features and frameworks but
it's unclear how that process works for simplifying the framework. Do
we raise PLIPs to get rid of all CMFFormController use within the code
for instance? Is it within the process to refactor code to remove old
frameworks within a point release?
We have awesome demos of deco and its easy for all of us further down
the chain to see where we are headed UI wise, but what would be the
equivalent of a vision outlining a simplified framework for developing
with plone?
Limi highlighting 25% less code in plone 4 is pretty cool. Wouldn't it
be great to see 50% less concepts needed to learn plone in plone5?
>
> 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.
This popped on a twitter search for #plone today.
http://drupal.org/project/secure_permissions
Looks like all the security talk about plone vs drupal must have got
someone thinking :)
> 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.
Dries talks about Distributions which isn't something we've done much
with in Plone. Drupal seems to be advertising its out of the box
intranet distribution on drupal.com and Plone doesn't have one and yet
Plone is a better match.
The points Dries makes about distributions are also really interesting.
"There is a risk involved with distributions as well, which means that
we need to approach them the right way. The risk is fragmentation, and
it is why I feel it is important that distributions build on the
usability patterns set by Drupal core. "
>
> 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.
I think this is one of the most important points. Maybe it won't last,
and maybe the community will suffer long term by Acquia making lots of
money? Maybe Drupal will end up being vendor opensource with all its
downsides? Who knows.
In the medium term, as an Plone development company, I think Acquia
gives Drupal an unfair advantage. Just the other day we had a very
large organisation say they went with a proprietary solution because
"we can't sue Plone" and decided this before we could even present to
them or explain that opensource means you can purchase a plone
solution from an integrator and then sue them if it goes wrong. We
have liability insurance :)
Acquia gives Drupal the perception of size and credibility to those
who don't know any better. We can dismiss these risk adverse decision
makers of big organisations but I think those people matter. I agree
with Dries when he says "We should all agree that at the end of the
day, success should be measured by the number of people working with
Drupal, not by the number of people working on Drupal". Plone kicks
Drupal and a lot of proprietary CMS butt, feature for feature but
Acquia makes Drupal easier to sell by giving the perception of
security. Anything we can do to help sell plone is good for plone
otherwise we risk being "irrelevant".
Matt Hamilton
On 23 Nov 2009, at 08:07, Dylan Jay wrote:
All great points, and agree with you... one point specifically I have
been noticing recently...
>>
>> 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.
>
> I think this is one of the most important points. Maybe it won't
> last, and maybe the community will suffer long term by Acquia making
> lots of money? Maybe Drupal will end up being vendor opensource with
> all its downsides? Who knows.
> In the medium term, as an Plone development company, I think Acquia
> gives Drupal an unfair advantage. Just the other day we had a very
> large organisation say they went with a proprietary solution because
> "we can't sue Plone" and decided this before we could even present
> to them or explain that opensource means you can purchase a plone
> solution from an integrator and then sue them if it goes wrong. We
> have liability insurance :)
> Acquia gives Drupal the perception of size and credibility to those
> who don't know any better. We can dismiss these risk adverse
> decision makers of big organisations but I think those people
> matter. I agree with Dries when he says "We should all agree that at
> the end of the day, success should be measured by the number of
> people working with Drupal, not by the number of people working on
> Drupal". Plone kicks Drupal and a lot of proprietary CMS butt,
> feature for feature but Acquia makes Drupal easier to sell by giving
> the perception of security. Anything we can do to help sell plone is
> good for plone otherwise we risk being "irrelevant".
... Acquia have shown up on a few 'Magic Quadrant' type lists from
Analysts. Not Drupal, but Acquia. Now Plone is not listed there at all
as it is just an Open Source 'project' and not a 'vendor' in the
traditional analyst sense. That said I think that is an advantage ;)
but I'm sure potential buyeers might not.
Someone recently pointed out that the role of most Gartner-type
analysts is not to comment on the suitablity of the CMS to your
particular organisation, but to just comment on whether the vendor is
going to be around next year or not. Hence why 'Plone' is not on those
lists as it is not a 'vendor', but it does make me think we do lose
out a bit on mindshare as a result.
Its a tough one as I agree what you say about Acquia making Drupal
easier to sell.... but on the other hand I don't want to ever end up
with a 'Plone Acquia'.
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton ma...@netsight.co.uk
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk +44 (0)117 9090901
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
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Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]
Thanks for the valuable write-up. Following up on Matt's point, why
couldn't the 'Plone Foundation' be the organization/vendor rated by the
analysts? Let them analyze the staying power of the Foundation, the
project, the CMS - that has to be a strength of Plone that we're not
capitalizing on enough.
The downside of not using a Plone vendor/integrator might be that the
analyst might have a difficult time estimating the annual revenues,
number of employees, headquarters and other demographics/metrics they
normally include in their reviews.
I suspect that to gain coverage by the analysts, though, there will be
some 'analysis fee' or some such fee paid to Gartner, Forrester,
whomever we want to have cover Plone. If it's not too huge an amount
(and we could take collections for those interested in coverage), and if
there is enough interest in having Plone compared in the same reports
(it should be, IMHO), then we will have lifted the bar for Plone.
If others agree, we can write a message to the Board to investigate and
go through the proper channels/process.
-Ken
_______________________________________________
Scott Paley
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
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Matt Hamilton
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
--
Matt Hamilton ma...@netsight.co.uk
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk +44 (0)117 9090901
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]
I wanted to make sure we linked up at Gilbane; maybe we can discuss in
more depth some pros/cons of Plone versus other systems and you can
determine the best way to position that in the panel discussion without
it being so us-versus-them. We have a small pedestal display area for
Contextual (www.contextualcorp.com) at the conference. I know that
Nate/Jazkarta will also be working a Plone booth, so we should all hook up.
We all have our favorite aspects of Plone. Here is my off-the-cuff list:
Strengths of Plone (with comparison notes you can omit during
discussion, but which provide some context):
BY FEATURE:
1) Ease of Use / In-line Editing:
(Some tools such as Drupal, Fatwire, many others have a separate Admin
UI and 'Preview' mode, rather than just navigating to the page to edit,
change it, save it. Drupal's admin UI is described as complex and
unintuitive.
2) Flexible Workflow / Fine-grained Permissions:
Many other tools hit a brick wall in this area and Plone really shines
here. Not only can we have different workflows per content type, but
also per area of the site, and permissions per role can be different per
workflow state for each workflow. We can also empower some users to
have edit/reviewer rights in some areas of a site, but not others.
3) PAS / Integration with LDAP, OpenID, SQL, SalesForce, and other
custom Pluggable Authentication Services:
Single Sign-On is a deal-breaker for some organizations and through PAS
(combined with web services in some cases), Plone succeeds very well here.
4) Versioning, Visual Diffs, Audit Trail:
Now granted, many of the commercial tools offer even better capabilities
in the versioning/rollback area than Plone (entire site, entire section,
not just content item-specific), but Plone does do well here, and I
believe better than Drupal, but not as well as Alfresco and ezPublish.
But users still fall in love when seeing visual diffs (green/red-lining
of changes) with the ability to instantly rollback to the version they like.
5) Compliance with Standards (Section 508, well-formed XHTML, etc.):
For some orgs, especially government sites, this is a deal-breaker by
law (if a site does not adhere to such standards)
6) Abundance of Free Add-ons to Extend Functionality:
For commercial tools, and even with other open source tools, such as
Drupal and Joomla, well-working and maintained add-on modules/products
typically are sold (e.g. $200 forums module for Joomla, etc.) In the
Downloads section of Plone.org, there are over 3,000 free, open source
add-on modules.
7) Portlet Management:
Users love being able to add static portlets, collection portlets, RSS
portlets, etc. Plone got this very right with 3.0!
8) Structured Content Types (Taxonomy):
Plone does a nice job of allowing for custom, structured content types.
Types are not limited to simple pages, files, images, as with some
lightweight CMS tools (some people are calling Wordpress a CMS, for
example.) While Drupal handles this well TTW with the CCK and Plone has
similar TTW options with ATSchemaEditorNG, Dexterity is on its way,
etc., I think that the more complex the data/content model, the better
Plone does here (RelationshipField/Widget, use of ATVocabularyManager
for SelectionField values, etc.) Generation of content types/products
via free tools such as ArchGenXML and ArgoUML make it even more tantalizing.
9) Collections / Smart Folders:
Users love seeing that they have the ability to create more complex
listing pages (or portlets with listings), without having to pay a
developer to create them every time they're needed.
10) LiveSearch
BY USE CASE:
1) Microsites / Subsites:
There are various ways to theme a certain folder/page of a site such
that it seems like a separate site. A common use case is an
association, government agency, or company that needs the experience of
having state-specific websites, but wants the ability to 'roll-up' all
state-specific events/news/etc. into the national website. This is done
easier on Plone than with many systems and ever more ways are coming out
(lineage.)
2) Seemless Multi-site Experience:
Opposite of use case #1. With the trend toward use of Deliverance as a
theming approach for Plone (currently is an optional front-end theming
layer), it's very possible to consistently theme ones various SaaS sites
(Plone, cVent, Salesforce, etc.) as one consistent website user
experience. Sure, Deliverance could be used in front of Drupal,
Vignette or any other CMS-based site as well, but if Deliverance/xdv
becomes more the standard approach for Plone, then we can make the
argument this is easier to do with Plone, there will be documentation to
help do so, etc. The market is in desperate need of a consistent
theming layer like this that allows one to theme some SaaS application
that the organization has little customization/development control over,
as it is hosted/provided by another vendor that only allows some slight
color theming and replacement of logo.
3) CMS-to-CRM Integration:
From the feedback I received at our booth at CMSExpo.net last year,
Joomla and Drupal in particular don't quite integrate with Salesforce or
SugarCRM as well, with the more freely available plugins. There were
commercial/hosted service options that did answer this better, though.
On the commercial CMS side, the Salesforce connectors are few and
expensive, and some simply act as an IFrame within the CMS, not blended
into the website experience.
4) SEO Improvement:
As with many CMS tools, using Plone to manage site content pretty much
instantly improves Search Engine Optimization/Rankings/Results. Better
use of keywords, Title tags. alt tags on images/links, proper use of H1
and other heading tags, accessibility options (search engines read a
page similar to the way a screen reader for the visually impaired does),
auto-generation of sitemap.xml.gz file, easy implementation of Google
Analytics code snippet (or other).
5) Security:
There's a reason that Zope is on the Dept of Defense approved OSS
application list and by Plone community accounts is used on fbi.gov and
other security/intelligence-related websites. And as described on the
plone.org front page, cve.mitre.org results indicate that Plone has the
best security record of any CMS. Plone's workflow, PAS, and
fine-grained security on a site-wide, section-wide, or
per-content-object basis really seems second to none.
6) Repeatable Deployments:
Generic Setup allows us to easily export TTW settings for workflow,
search, navigation, content actions/views, etc. out as XML that allows
for migrating such configuration options to other Plone sites on the
same or different servers and platforms. Just listen to the Drupal
folks in the room drool over this one, and likely, even many of the
commercial tool integrators (that rely upon a DBMS to store such
settings, along with site data - have fun separating out just the site
settings you want, when it's time to implement client site #2, 3, or to
promote the settings from dev to production, but without the dev content
data.)
7) No Vendor M&A / Consolidation to Worry About, No Corporate-Owned IP
to Worry About:
While the commercial CMS market has been rampant in recent years with
regard to consolidation (Oracle bought Stellent, OpenText bought
Vignette, RedDot, Gauss, IXOS and others, IBM bought Lotus Notes, MS
bought NCompass Labs, Autonomy bought Interwoven, etc., etc.), I don't
believe customers/adopters/integrators of Plone will be left with no
upgrade path and forced to migrate to another CMS anytime soon.
Plenty of RedDot customers are going to be forced to move to Vignette,
for example, losing significant knowledge of a platform they were
comfortable with. The same is true for other consolidations - I'm sure
MS has pushed NCompass Labs customers to Sharepoint.
We also don't face the prospect of the Mambo/Joomla (commercial vs. OSS)
fork, as the Plone Foundation, rather than some vendor, controls the IP,
brand, trademark, etc. for Plone.
See you at Gilbane!
Ken Wasetis
Presdient and CMS Solution Architect
Contextual Corp.
irc/skype/twitter: ctxlken
ken.w...@contextualcorp.com
mobile: 224-628-1665
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>
>
>
>
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>
> Office: 212.352.9311
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>
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> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Nate Aune
for the enterprise" factsheet, and have come up with the following
talking points. Many of these echo the excellent ones that Ken
already posted in his email.
1) Security
Since Plone is built on top of Zope and Zope uses a security model
similar to Unix, the security and permissioning can be very granular.
Since Zope uses the ZODB, you don't have to worry about SQL injection
exploits.
One can cite that the Royal Bank of Scotland, FBI, CIA and NASA are
using Plone, and Plone is on the list of approved and secure platforms
for use at NASA.
There are the CVE graphs from the IBM report comparing Plone security
track record to other CMSes and frameworks.
http://www-935.ibm.com/services/us/iss/xforce/midyearreport/xforce-midyear-report-2008.pdf
The "Hardening Plone" howto on Plone.org is an excellent document
about how to lock down Plone even more for highly secure environments.
http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/securing-plone
And the accompanying talk from the recent Plone conference which was a
use case of a high-security Plone solution, which was audited and
approved for handling sensitive data from a multi-billion industry.
http://www.slideshare.net/khink/hardening-plone-a-militarystrength-cms
Zope is very secure
http://zope2.zope.org/about-zope-2/six-reasons-for-using-zope/zope-is-secure
2) Scalability
At the recent Plone conference, we heard case studies about sites that
have millions of page views per day and hundreds/thousands of users
logging into the site. I'd like to collect these case studies (perhaps
on plone.net?), so when potential customers ask for real data, we can
produce reports that show Plone can scale.
Since it's built on top of Zope, Plone has built-in load distribution
using ZEO (Zope Enterprise Objects)
http://zope2.zope.org/about-zope-2/six-reasons-for-using-zope/zope-is-highly-scalable
With Plone 4, we get plone.app.blob which stores large files on the
file system. Even Sharepoint can't do this OOTB without an expensive
add-on product.
Plone has built-in caching and with CacheFu, we can send purge
requests to an upstream caching proxy such as Squid or Varnish.
Load tests can be written easily with Funkload to test before and
after performance optimizations using collective.funkbot.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.funkbot
With RelStorage, you can use Plone with any RDBMS including MySQL,
PostgreSQL and Oracle and take advantage of these database clustering
and redundancy capabilities. See Shane Hathaway's recent blog post
about performance improvements when using RelStorage.
http://shane.willowrise.com/archives/relstorage-1-4-0b1-and-zodbshootout/
3) Interoperability
Since it's written in Python, Plone can talk to just about any backend
system, from relational databases to authentication services to web
services, and can be integrated with 3rd party search engines.
The Salesforce.com integration is the best of any open source tool
available today. David Glick from GroundWire gave a good overview at
the PloneConf.
http://www.slideshare.net/davisagli/integrating-plone-with-ecommerce-and-relationship-management-a-case-study-in-plone-getpaid-and-salesforcecom
Because Plone ships with PlonePAS - pluggable authentication service,
it can authenticate users against Active Directory, LDAP, OpenID, SQL
or even Gmail.
Plone's built-in search tool can be easily replaced with the open
source Solr search tool which provides faceted search and enterprise
level search capabilities. Andi Zeidler gave a lightning talk at the
PloneConf about how easy it is to integrate.
http://plone.org/products/collective.solr
Massimo from RedTurtle gave a talk at the European Plone Symposium
about integrating Google Apps / Google Docs with Plone
http://www.slideshare.net/massimo.azzolini/googledocs-on-plone
Sally Kleinfeldt from Jazkarta organized a panel discussion about
Plone and web services at the PloneConf and has also blogged about it.
http://blog.jazkarta.com/2009/08/07/plone-web-services-things-are-looking-up/
http://blog.jazkarta.com/2009/10/27/plone-web-services-what-about-cmis/
4) Data portability
Moving your Plone database to another provider is usually just a
matter of copying the Data.fs file and tar up the eggs/products
directory. Makes it very easy to switch to a different hosting
provider / vendor if you're not satisfied with your current one.
Besides using the web services APIs mentioned above to get data in and
out of Plone, one can also leverage ContentMirror, which will
serialize and replicate all the content in Plone into a relational
database asynchronously. See Kapil's talk about it at last year's
Plone Symposium.
http://docs.google.com/present/view?id=dntgmzf_17547q5j3wq
enpraxis.static site is an add-on for Plone that lets you easily
create a static HTML snapshot of your entire Plone site.
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/enpraxis.staticsite
Also, using new tools such as Transmogrifier and Funnelweb (which
builds on top of Transmogrifier) it's even easier to get data in and
out of Plone.
See Lennart's talk from the PloneConf about Transmogriier.
http://www.slideshare.net/regebro/transmogrifier-migrating-to-plone-with-less-pain-2387600
And the project page for Funnelweb, which gives you a TTW interface
for importing static sites into Plone.
http://www.coactivate.org/projects/funnelweb/project-home
5) Accessibility
Plone is the most accessible open source CMS available on the market.
Conforms to Section 508 which is a requirement for all government
agencies and W3C accessibility guidelines. The functionality
gracefully degrades on older browsers, or when using a screenreader.
http://plone.org/products/plone/features/3.0/existing-features/accessibility-compliant/
and http://plone.org/accessibility-info
An all-too-often forgotten aspect when people construct web sites is
how accessible these sites are to the blind and sight/motor-impaired.
Plone was probably the first CMS out there that focused on
accessibility. With the ruling that web sites can be sued for not
providing access to the blind, things have changed for government and
corporations who provide information to the public through their
websites.
http://www.infoworld.com/d/security-central/target-sued-over-web-access-blind-917
Aaron VanDerlip from Jazkarta gave a talk about Plone and
accessibility at the PloneConf 2006
http://plone.org/events/conferences/seattle-2006/presentations/plone-and-accessibility
6) Internationalization and multilingual content
Plone already supports over 50 languages out-of-the-box and with
Python 2.6 excellent handling of Unicode, we can support multibyte
languages as well such as Chinese, and even right-to-left (RTL)
languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.
Using the LinguaPlone add-on you can translate the content of your
Plone site into any language, and even export the content in standard
XLIFF format for hand-off to a professional translation agency. after
they've done the translations, they send back XLIFF files which can
then be imported into Plone. See Sasha's presentation on this from the
PloneConf.
http://www.slideshare.net/valentineweb/manage-multilingual-sites
There was a lightning talk at the Plone conference about an in-place
translation tool that made it possible to translate the message
strings in the Plone interface just by clicking on them, and then this
could be exported to a .po file.
7) Theming and branding
Plone already has excellent separation of presentation and content,
and almost any element in the Plone interface can be styled using only
CSS. With Deliverance, we have an even easier theming story, and the
possibility to theme multiple applications using the same static
HTML/CSS design. Now any design can be made to work with Plone with
minimal effort - simply add some rules to the Deliverance rules file
to wire up content generated by Plone into placeholders in the theme.
See my presentation from the Plone symposium (conference slides to be
posted shortly)
http://www.slideshare.net/Jazkarta/deliverance-plone-theming-without-the-learning-curve-from-plone-symposium-east-2009
8) Hosting
Plone can be hosted on any platform including Linux, BSD, Windows or
Mac OSX. Basically any platform that can run Python will work.
Plone can be hosted on a VPS, a dedicated server or virtual machines
on Amazon EC2 or using Ubuntu's Enterprise Cloud.
http://www.ubuntu.com/cloud/private
Using GenericSetup, it's very easy to capture site configuration
settings, and programatically replicate the site on a different
instance.
Using buildout it's very easy to make repeatable deployments so that
you can easily replicate a development environment, push it to staging
and finally production.
See Tarek's excellent presentation on this subject:
http://www.slideshare.net/tarek.ziade/delivering-applications-with-zcbuildout-and-a-distributed-model-plone-conference-2008-presentation
A new development by Dylan Jay is collective.hostout which is a series
of buildout recipes for defining your hosting settings directly in the
buildout configuration file.
http://www.slideshare.net/djay/collectivehostout-how-to-host-a-python-app-for-20-in-20min
We've also started working on an Amazon AMI, VMWare and VirtualBox
images of Plone to make it even easier to evaluate and get Plone
hosted on a server quickly and using best practices.
9) Open source
Similar to Linux, Apache, Firefox and many other popular software
tools, Plone is open source. Open source is a methodology to
programming that puts great emphasis on community development. Rather
than one firm or organization building a particular product, an open
source project can be built by a variety of individuals or companies.
We like open source because it helps us stop trying to reinvent the
wheel and instead choose the best of breed systems for our clients and
deliver them at an affordable price.
Plone has won 3 years in a row the Best Other CMS Award from Packt Publishing
http://plone.org/news/plone-wins-packt-2009-cms-award
Martin Aspeli wrote about Plone: a model of a mature open source
product for his MSc dissertation for Analysis, Design and Management
of Information Systems course at the London School of Economics.
http://martinaspeli.net/publications/Plone%20-%20A%20Model%20of%20a%20Mature%20Open%20Source%20Project.pdf
10) Foundation backed international community
With over 300 vendors in 50 countries, and Plone being used by
governments and universities all over the world, Plone is truly an
international movement. With a non-profit foundation owning the
trademark and copyrights, Plone is protected and it's governance is in
good hands. http://plone.org/foundation
The Plone community has an annual conference in a different city every
year with regional symposia in Europe, N. America and S. America also
taking place every year. The most recent conference attracted 400
attendees from 30 countries. http://ploneconf2009.org
In additional to the usual issue tracking systems, Plone also has a
user feedback service to collect suggestions form the users of the
software. these suggestions are reviewed by members of the core Plone
development team and considered for future versions of Plone.
http://plone.org/news/plone-launches-user-feedback-system
There is also a formal process to get a new feature considered for
inclusion in the Plone core, a paid release manager and a clear
roadmap for what future versions of Plone will bring.
http://plone.org/documentation/manual/plone-developer-reference/overview/release-process
http://dev.plone.org/plone/roadmap
This is still very much in a draft state but I would love any feedback
on the points, and I plan to write some blog posts about each point to
go into further details.
thanks,
Nate
--
Nate Aune - na...@jazkarta.com
http://www.jazkarta.com
http://card.ly/natea
+1 (617) 517-4953
Scott Paley
One can cite that the Royal Bank of Scotland, FBI, CIA and NASA are
using Plone, and Plone is on the list of approved and secure platforms
for use at NASA.
I know one of the questions that will come up is examples of sites where the platform is used in the enterprise, govenment, or major educational settings. Basically, what are the "major wins" for Plone in those 3 areas in 2009?
Other topics that will likely come up on the panel:
- Shoot down common misconceptions about open source in general
- Discussion of the "single company model" (Alfresco) vs. the "democratic foundation model" (Plone) vs. hybrid (Drupal) and the differences between community and company driven projects
- How does an enterprise properly evaluate open source platforms? How is that evaluation different than with proprietary systems?
- General compliance issues
- Plone's approach to workflow vs. the other platforms
- Why and when should companies contribute back to the project? What's the value? Examples.
- Standards such as CMIS and RDF, why they're important, and when are they not really important.
Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]
Regarding the different approaches, I think it's worth mentioning and
possibly getting some input/material from Chris Johnson at ifPeople on
the concept of 'Social Sourcing'. He's made some presentations at Plone
conferences on the topic and this is how the PloneGetPaid.com
site/project was run and it worked very well. Contextual, Groundwire,
Tootsie, Trees For Life, and ifPeople put up some of the initial
funding, with help through for-paid client projects that needed
ecommerce for Plone, and then other organizations kept adding more and
more. Kapil with the bulk of initial development, then Six Feet Up,
Maurits van Rees, and Red Domino and many others following on with much
more code (to handle shipping, more payment processors, taxes, etc.)
I think it may also help (and open some eyes of those who aren't
familiar with OSS projects) to point to stats/metrics that quantify
efforts on projects such as PGP, but especially for Plone as a whole, on
https://www.ohloh.net/p/plone This currently indicates over $3M and 43
developer years toward Plone development. Additionally helpful is the
project summary by Ohloh indicating the project 'velocity' - that
development efforts are increasing year-over-year, it has a large
developer base, establish code base, etc.
By comparison, Ohloh warns in its summary of Drupal that it has a small
development team, though its 4.4/5.0 rating is higher than Plone's 4.2
rating. Alfresco gets a 3.7 rating, by the way.
-Ken
Scott Paley wrote:
> This is very helpful - thanks!
>
> One can cite that the Royal Bank of Scotland, FBI, CIA and NASA are
> using Plone, and Plone is on the list of approved and secure platforms
> for use at NASA.
>
> I know one of the questions that will come up is examples of sites
> where the platform is used in the enterprise, govenment, or major
> educational settings. Basically, what are the "major wins" for Plone
> in those 3 areas in 2009?
>
> Other topics that will likely come up on the panel:
>
> * Shoot down common misconceptions about open source in general
> * Discussion of the "single company model" (Alfresco) vs. the
> "democratic foundation model" (Plone) vs. hybrid (Drupal)
> and the differences between community and company driven
> projects
> * How does an enterprise properly evaluate open source
> platforms? How is that evaluation different than with
> proprietary systems?
> * General compliance issues
> * Plone's approach to workflow vs. the other platforms
> * Why and when should companies contribute back to the
> project? What's the value? Examples.
> * Standards such as CMIS and RDF, why they're important, and
> on plone.net? <http://plone.net?>), so when potential
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matt Hamilton
This is very helpful - thanks!
One can cite that the Royal Bank of Scotland, FBI, CIA and NASA are
using Plone, and Plone is on the list of approved and secure platforms
for use at NASA.
I know one of the questions that will come up is examples of sites where the platform is used in the enterprise, govenment, or major educational settings. Basically, what are the "major wins" for Plone in those 3 areas in 2009?
Other topics that will likely come up on the panel:
- Shoot down common misconceptions about open source in general
- Discussion of the "single company model" (Alfresco) vs. the "democratic foundation model" (Plone) vs. hybrid (Drupal) and the differences between community and company driven projects
- How does an enterprise properly evaluate open source platforms? How is that evaluation different than with proprietary systems?
- General compliance issues
- Plone's approach to workflow vs. the other platforms
- Why and when should companies contribute back to the project? What's the value? Examples.
- Standards such as CMIS and RDF, why they're important, and when are they not really important.
_______________________________________________
Board mailing list
Bo...@lists.plone.org
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/board
Dylan Jay
Let me give you a concrete example why this is a worry. Recently a
state government main portal here was implemented using drupal even
though there was some large sites already implemented in that
government with Plone. Inside information said one of the main reasons
was one of the big 5 analyst companies recommended Drupal (I think it
might have been PWC).
Seems crazy but it makes sense when you understand how government (and
any large organisation works):
From the managers point of view, if the technology fails you can
blame the vender but if the vender fails you can't blame anyone but
yourself for not picking a better vender... unless an analyst firms
makes the recommendation and then you can blame the analysts. Like all
other forms of business, procurement is about shifting risk. A
managers career can be over if they take the blame for bad decision
but they just are just doing their job if they make the "right"
decision. This is why they pick the "safe" decision not the "best"
decision. This is the essence of why no one got fired for picking IBM.
You could ask why not let the integrator take responsibility? Two
reasons
1) integrators tend to be small so a manager can be blamed for picking
someone "obviously" not up to the task.
2) If there is no obvious integrator to pick (2-3 in their local area)
then the manager has to then choose and therefore made a decision
which they can get blamed for if it all goes wrong. A lot of times
they will also select the "technology" first and integrator 2nd (or
better yet have the integrator recommended to them) and they don't
even think about the possibility of an integrator being able to take
responsibility.
If they look in the yellow pages under Plone they don't get Pretaweb,
they get nothing. If they look for sharepoint, they get microsoft and
microsoft will happily take them out to a game of golf that the
manager will conveniently win, do the sale and then recommend an
integrator. Everyone happy (except the end users and the shareholders
for shelling out $$$).
So what managers really want is a organistion to blame that no one can
blame them for choosing since its the "obvious" choice or recommended
choice.
>
> Its a tough one as I agree what you say about Acquia making Drupal
> easier to sell.... but on the other hand I don't want to ever end up
> with a 'Plone Acquia'.
Well Acquia are doing a lot of things now and have seriously split
their focus but when it started it had a very simple idea. They were
going to be a support company and no integration. That means companies
that were risk adverse can take a contact out with them and feel
comfortable. They is only one Acquia so it's the "obvious" choice.
On 24/11/2009, at 1:25 AM, Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.] wrote:
> Thanks for the valuable write-up. Following up on Matt's point, why
> couldn't the 'Plone Foundation' be the organization/vendor rated by
> the analysts? Let them analyze the staying power of the Foundation,
> the project, the CMS - that has to be a strength of Plone that we're
> not capitalizing on enough.
I'm not sure that would work since they probably have no economic
model with analysing something that doesn't make money.
Another alternative is that we could perhaps create a federation of
Plone integrators purely for auditing/analysts purposes. If you took
all the reasonable sized integration companies and analysed them as a
whole you would come out with something that looked like a large
multinational company with a pretty big turnover.
Or better yet in the proprietary world you have value added reseller
networks attached to companies like microsoft or Avaya and I'm sure
the analysts have models for valuing those. Plone commercially is
essentially a VARs network without the corporation running it in the
middle. Unfortunately that would miss the huge amount of value
produced by internal integrators such as weblion etc but it would be a
start.
Another alternative to to try to educate analysts that software is no
longer about products. Software is now a service. What this means is
that you ask for a solution and will get consultants and integrators
that will produce solutions from the best technology for the job and
often from many technologies. The myth of "off the shelf" systems is
just that, a myth. SAP isn't off the shelf and neither is any CMS.
Then at least managers would look for large integrators that are
suable instead of large product companies.
Unfortunately that's completely the other direction on how Plone is
currently marketed. It's a product and we're producing feature
comparisons as to why Plone is a better product than other CMSes. Plus
educating the market is a lot harder than changing ourselves.
Sorry there's no easy answers. but I'm going to have a discussion with
people I know in the big 5 and find out more about what we can do?
Dylan Jay
Matt Hamilton
All makes sense. I guess this is what I've been thinking about
recently. The fact that the customer/integrator/vendor model that most
commercial CMSs use just doesn't quite fit with the way the Plone
community works. Or rather the Plone community doesn't quite fit with
it, and hence the whole buying process around buying a CMS is
different and often doesn't fit the existing model that customers
might be used to.
>>
>> Its a tough one as I agree what you say about Acquia making Drupal
>> easier to sell.... but on the other hand I don't want to ever end
>> up with a 'Plone Acquia'.
>
> Well Acquia are doing a lot of things now and have seriously split
> their focus but when it started it had a very simple idea. They were
> going to be a support company and no integration. That means
> companies that were risk adverse can take a contact out with them
> and feel comfortable. They is only one Acquia so it's the "obvious"
> choice.
With Plone the is no obvious choice. In fact its more than that, there
almost was an obvious choice by default: Plone Solutions, but they saw
this as being a potential problem for the community as a whole and to
avoid confusion rebranded to Jarn. So as a community I think we are
quite against the general notion of an 'obvious choice'. Or rather
against the notion of *one* obvious choice for *everything*. I know
that there are specific companies in the Plone community that I would
say are the obvious choice (in my mind) for specific sectors or types
of work. But they have got there by proving themselves in that kind of
work, and not because they are the project's founder.
> On 24/11/2009, at 1:25 AM, Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.] wrote:
>
>> Thanks for the valuable write-up. Following up on Matt's point,
>> why couldn't the 'Plone Foundation' be the organization/vendor
>> rated by the analysts? Let them analyze the staying power of the
>> Foundation, the project, the CMS - that has to be a strength of
>> Plone that we're not capitalizing on enough.
>
> I'm not sure that would work since they probably have no economic
> model with analysing something that doesn't make money.
>
> Another alternative is that we could perhaps create a federation of
> Plone integrators purely for auditing/analysts purposes. If you took
> all the reasonable sized integration companies and analysed them as
> a whole you would come out with something that looked like a large
> multinational company with a pretty big turnover.
> Or better yet in the proprietary world you have value added reseller
> networks attached to companies like microsoft or Avaya and I'm sure
> the analysts have models for valuing those. Plone commercially is
> essentially a VARs network without the corporation running it in the
> middle. Unfortunately that would miss the huge amount of value
> produced by internal integrators such as weblion etc but it would be
> a start.
We need to be careful here as we have already tried this to some
degree: ZEA Partners. It is a 'federation of Plone integrators'. The
big issue though that was found with ZEA was things like 'How do you
divide up the incoming work?'. Ie. if Gartner or someone had ZEA (or
analogous organisation) on its list then when a customer contacts
them, who do they then hand the work out to? I know some members of
ZEA already feel that this was a problem and have voiced their
opinions that the only people who got work in ZEA were those 'in the
know'.
Then again, how fo VAR networks do it in the commercial world? Does
each VAR who wants the work pitch independantly to the client?
> Another alternative to to try to educate analysts that software is
> no longer about products. Software is now a service. What this means
> is that you ask for a solution and will get consultants and
> integrators that will produce solutions from the best technology for
> the job and often from many technologies. The myth of "off the
> shelf" systems is just that, a myth. SAP isn't off the shelf and
> neither is any CMS. Then at least managers would look for large
> integrators that are suable instead of large product companies.
> Unfortunately that's completely the other direction on how Plone is
> currently marketed. It's a product and we're producing feature
> comparisons as to why Plone is a better product than other CMSes.
> Plus educating the market is a lot harder than changing ourselves.
I think that this is the best, albeit harder approach, but I think the
WCM market is heading that way anyways. From following the tweets
coming out of the JBoye09 conference it seems like many analysts do
understand this, and with the likes of SaaS and hosted solutions I
think they are moving that direction anyways.
I think the panel discussion at Gilbane should do quite a bit to
highlight this hopefully to those that attend.
> Sorry there's no easy answers. but I'm going to have a discussion
> with people I know in the big 5 and find out more about what we can
> do?
Well actually that is another approach... partnering with one of the
big 5 or similar. Many years ago I had a meeting at Delliote with
someone about Netsight being the implementer of something they were
working on. Alas it didn't come to fruition and interestingly that
person left and is now head of a company specificlly dealing in
Alfresco and RabbitMQ work.
Another idea that I had this morning, which I think could be really
good: an 'Analyst Day' at the Plone Conference. Say we took one day,
maybe a day immediately preceding the conference (when training is
happening in parallel) and invite all the analysts we can find, and
customers etc (basically anyone in a suit ;) ) along to come and find
out about Plone. The day would just have a single track and would be a
mix of 'big picture' roadmap type stuff specifically tailored to them
(ie benefits, not tech details) and some case studies. There were some
fantastic case studies in Budapest, and if we could ask the presenters
to come along a day early and present their case studies then (with a
slight focus towards analysts) then of course present them again later
in the conference proper for the community (with all the technical
guts etc).
What do you think?
-Matt
--
Matt Hamilton ma...@netsight.co.uk
Netsight Internet Solutions, Ltd. Understand. Develop. Deliver
http://www.netsight.co.uk +44 (0)117 9090901
Web Design | Zope/Plone Development & Consulting | Co-location | Hosting
Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]
+1 on your final idea, but perhaps instead set this up on World Plone
Day and in various countries/locations/online. Recorded sessions that
could be watched later on UStream, YouTube, etc. would be invaluable, I
think.
Thanks for the insight on the ZEA arrangement - I was thinking something
like this could be a possibility, but it sounds as if there are some
details that would need to be worked out to make it run smoothly. I
think that the corporate CMS vendors I've dealt with in the past have
usually broken leads out into geographic regions, and just like a
franchise, they attempt to not have too much overlap/competition in the
same geo area. For instance, I know the 1-2 companies who would be the
integrators for a RedDot/OpenText or Day Software project in the Chicago
area. That's been the case for 5 years with those companies (no new
VAR/partners in the region.)
If we did a ZEA+ type organization, we could similarly 'franchise' it,
segment market by region (and alternate or have a bidding process when
there are multiple vendors in a region), and each participating
organization would pay some fee to have some skin in the game and become
a partner of the network. The funds of which could be used for
marketing of the org, but also for Plone in general (i.e., I'm not
looking for a Plone integrator until I know more about Plone.)
We would need some legal help and possibly some consulting from a
national sales/partnerships person from the commercial side. I know a
global partnerships guy at BEA, now Oracle, if there ends up being any
interest later, we might get some advice from him.
-Ken
_______________________________________________
Dylan Jay
Well Acquia and Plone Solutions aren't the same thing. Plone solutions
was a integrator that competed with other integrators. Acquia is a
support company. It's much more like redhat.
> *one* obvious choice for *everything*. I know that there are
> specific companies in the Plone community that I would say are the
> obvious choice (in my mind) for specific sectors or types of work.
> But they have got there by proving themselves in that kind of work,
> and not because they are the project's founder.
When I said "obvious choice" I was really meaning someone to demo
plone and someone to sue, not so much someone to do the integration
work. I think managers are used to evaluating many companies are their
service ability, but I don't think they are used to dealing with
multiple companies to evaluate a single product and for support. See
their confusion?
I get the feeling Acquia helps other integrators get more work rather
than compete for teh same work.
>
>> On 24/11/2009, at 1:25 AM, Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.] wrote:
>>
>>> Thanks for the valuable write-up. Following up on Matt's point,
>>> why couldn't the 'Plone Foundation' be the organization/vendor
>>> rated by the analysts? Let them analyze the staying power of the
>>> Foundation, the project, the CMS - that has to be a strength of
>>> Plone that we're not capitalizing on enough.
>>
>> I'm not sure that would work since they probably have no economic
>> model with analysing something that doesn't make money.
>>
>> Another alternative is that we could perhaps create a federation of
>> Plone integrators purely for auditing/analysts purposes. If you
>> took all the reasonable sized integration companies and analysed
>> them as a whole you would come out with something that looked like
>> a large multinational company with a pretty big turnover.
>> Or better yet in the proprietary world you have value added
>> reseller networks attached to companies like microsoft or Avaya and
>> I'm sure the analysts have models for valuing those. Plone
>> commercially is essentially a VARs network without the corporation
>> running it in the middle. Unfortunately that would miss the huge
>> amount of value produced by internal integrators such as weblion
>> etc but it would be a start.
>
> We need to be careful here as we have already tried this to some
> degree: ZEA Partners. It is a 'federation of Plone integrators'. The
> big issue though that was found with ZEA was things like
ah. I didn't mean with regard to bidding for work. I meant we all
supply out financial details to an auditor so that we can get an
aggregated figure of how much revenue plone makes globally. Question
is, if we release a press release saying the plone integrator network
makes 50M a year or whatever the figure is, then will anyone pay
attention?
>
> Then again, how fo VAR networks do it in the commercial world? Does
> each VAR who wants the work pitch independantly to the client?
They compete against each other and bid for work independently like we
all do. I think in some instances the product company might recommend
an integrator but I'm not sure how they choose which one.
>
>> Another alternative to to try to educate analysts that software is
>> no longer about products. Software is now a service. What this
>> means is that you ask for a solution and will get consultants and
>> integrators that will produce solutions from the best technology
>> for the job and often from many technologies. The myth of "off the
>> shelf" systems is just that, a myth. SAP isn't off the shelf and
>> neither is any CMS. Then at least managers would look for large
>> integrators that are suable instead of large product companies.
>> Unfortunately that's completely the other direction on how Plone is
>> currently marketed. It's a product and we're producing feature
>> comparisons as to why Plone is a better product than other CMSes.
>> Plus educating the market is a lot harder than changing ourselves.
>
> I think that this is the best, albeit harder approach, but I think
> the WCM market is heading that way anyways. From following the
> tweets coming out of the JBoye09 conference it seems like many
> analysts do understand this, and with the likes of SaaS and hosted
> solutions I think they
SaaS really isn't such a good analogy. SaaS is much more like a
product than the plone ecosystem is. SaaS normally is a single company
which can be valued by auditors, selected by managers exactly in the
same way sharepoint or any vendor back product.
A better analogy is graphic design, PR, plumbing, IT management...
Anything that involves people not a product.
> are moving that direction anyways.
>
> I think the panel discussion at Gilbane should do quite a bit to
> highlight this hopefully to those that attend.
>
>> Sorry there's no easy answers. but I'm going to have a discussion
>> with people I know in the big 5 and find out more about what we can
>> do?
>
>
> Well actually that is another approach... partnering with one of the
> big 5 or similar. Many years ago I had a meeting at Delliote with
> someone about Netsight being the implementer of something they were
> working on. Alas it didn't come to fruition and interestingly that
> person left and is now head of a company specificlly dealing in
> Alfresco and RabbitMQ work.
I agree. Anyone with connections to consulting companies, try and find
out how Plone could be made recommendable.
>
> Another idea that I had this morning, which I think could be really
> good: an 'Analyst Day' at the Plone Conference. Say we took one
> day, maybe a day immediately preceding the conference (when training
> is happening in parallel) and invite all the analysts we can find,
> and customers etc (basically anyone in a suit ;) ) along to come and
> find out about Plone. The day would just have a single track and
> would be a mix of 'big picture' roadmap type stuff specifically
> tailored to them (ie benefits, not tech details) and some case
> studies. There were some fantastic case studies in Budapest, and if
> we could ask the presenters to come along a day early and present
> their case studies then (with a slight focus towards analysts) then
> of course present them again later in the conference proper for the
> community (with all the technical guts etc).
>
> What do you think?
I think it's a great idea. Would they come?
There is only one way to find out which is to ask them. Alternatively
perhaps we could do the same thing at a more general CMS conference
that lots of analysts are already at?
Dylan Jay
On 25/11/2009, at 2:28 AM, "Ken Wasetis \[Contextual Corp.\]" <ken.w...@contextualcorp.com
> wrote:
>
> Thanks for the insight on the ZEA arrangement - I was thinking
> something like this could be a possibility, but it sounds as if there
-1
I agree with matt that this won't work and isn't good for plone. An
alliance for the purposes of joint bids seems to only work on a small
scale with a self chosen group that really trust each other. It was
cool meeting blue alliance at the conference and seeing they do this
really well. Part of what makes plone work is that any company can
resell plone and if two companies compete for the same work then the
better company wins. That's inclusive not exclusive and allows the Eco
system to expand.
Dylan Jay
On 25/11/2009, at 2:26 AM, Dylan Jay wrote:
> On 24/11/2009, at 9:46 PM, Matt Hamilton wrote:
>
>>
>> On 24 Nov 2009, at 04:36, Dylan Jay wrote:
>>
>>>> ... Acquia have shown up on a few 'Magic Quadrant' type lists
>>>> from Analysts. Not Drupal, but Acquia. Now Plone is not listed
>>>> there at all as it is just an Open Source 'project' and not a
>>>> 'vendor' in the traditional analyst sense. That said I think that
>>>> is an advantage ;) but I'm sure potential buyeers might not.
>>>>
>>>> Someone recently pointed out that the role of most Gartner-type
>>>> analysts is not to comment on the suitablity of the CMS to your
>>>> particular organisation, but to just comment on whether the
>>>> vendor is going to be around next year or not. Hence why 'Plone'
>>>> is not on those lists as it is not a 'vendor', but it does make
>>>> me think we do lose out a bit on mindshare as a result.
<SNIP>
>>>
>>
>> All makes sense. I guess this is what I've been thinking about
>> recently. The fact that the customer/integrator/vendor model that
>> most commercial CMSs use just doesn't quite fit with the way the
>> Plone community works. Or rather the Plone community doesn't quite
>> fit with it, and hence the whole buying process around buying a CMS
>> is different and often doesn't fit the existing model that
>> customers might be used to.
All I had to do was scroll downs Dries blog and he tells us exactly
how they did it.
http://buytaert.net/gartner-puts-drupal-in-visionaries-quadrant
First Drupal is in the quadrant not Acquia but the reason its there is
a great deal to do with Acquia. What the analysts think is important:
'Here is what Nikos Drakos, Research Director at Gartner wrote about
Drupal's pomotion: "Drupal is in the Visionaries quadrant because of
its use of the open source model to drive adoption and popularity,
while providing enterprise services via organizations such as Acquia.
Its strong content-centric, community and web application foundation
is being rapidly extended with hundreds of modules, including many for
collaboration and social interaction support."'
Dries opinion on why it's important: "Plus, large organizations that
are about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a website
project, don't want to make the wrong technology choice. Instead,
those large businesses call Gartner, or any of the other analyst
firms, to get advice on what technologies to adopt."
How they did it:
"One of the things we've been doing since the inception of Acquia, is
talking to analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and the 451group
about Drupal, and all of Drupal's successes. Almost all of that work
is carried out by Acquia's marketing people, but I've been in several
analyst calls myself."
Ie, paid marketing people who are lobbying analysts and ringing them
constantly to develop relationships. ideas anyone?
Nate Aune
> about to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars in a website project, don't
> want to make the wrong technology choice. Instead, those large businesses
> call Gartner, or any of the other analyst firms, to get advice on what
> technologies to adopt."
Yes, the large businesses look to the analyst firms to tell them what
is a "safe" choice. They don't want to go out on a limb and make a
choice that goes against the common practice. By going with the
recommendations of the analysts, they can always justify their
decision and point their boss to the Gartner report saying that IBM
(or whatever) was a recommended as a good choice for the type of
system they needed to implement.
> How they did it:
> "One of the things we've been doing since the inception of Acquia, is
> talking to analyst firms like Gartner, Forrester, and the 451group about
> Drupal, and all of Drupal's successes. Almost all of that work is carried
> out by Acquia's marketing people, but I've been in several analyst calls
> myself."
>
> Ie, paid marketing people who are lobbying analysts and ringing them
> constantly to develop relationships. ideas anyone?
Yes, if the Plone Foundation had a paid marketing person, I think this
would be a very effective use of their time. Reaching out to the
analysts and showing them Plone's strengths. I know that Matt Hamilton
will be meeting with Janus Boye (who just organized the
http://jboye.com conference in Aarhus, Denmark) at an upcoming
conference in England.
Scott - you and I may want to jump on Matt's suggestion of having an
"analysts day" at Gilbane and invite all the analysts to a session
where we can get them up-to-speed on the state of Plone, and try to
get Plone included in their future CMS reports, or at least get them
blogging about it and getting Plone on the radar screen of larger
organizations.
Nate
_______________________________________________
Nate Aune
> Then he goes a lot into how there can only be one CMS left standing (very
> highlander) and how that can be Drupal etc etc. I can start to see where
> these drupal people get their zeal from now :)
and Wordpress would be the only OSS CMS to survive and all others
would fade away.
> Thankfully Plone's UI seems to be in great hands. The simplification of the
> framework side of plone has had some great noises made but IMHO we seem to
> have a great process for adding features and frameworks but it's unclear how
> that process works for simplifying the framework.
would-be Plone people because it is too complex and unapproachable.
We need to focus on making it more approachable if we want to continue
to attract new people to Plone.
> We have awesome demos of deco and its easy for all of us further down the
> chain to see where we are headed UI wise,
at CMSExpo. I think Dries realizes that Drupal could learn a few
things about Plone's simple and unified UI.
This is also a very telling post comparing Django to Drupal.
http://birdhouse.org/blog/2009/11/11/drupal-or-django/
The 87 comments are also very telling.
> but what would be the equivalent
> of a vision outlining a simplified framework for developing with plone?
> Limi highlighting 25% less code in plone 4 is pretty cool. Wouldn't it be
> great to see 50% less concepts needed to learn plone in plone5?
>> 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.
>
> Dries talks about Distributions which isn't something we've done much with
> in Plone. Drupal seems to be advertising its out of the box intranet
> distribution on drupal.com and Plone doesn't have one and yet Plone is a
> better match.
>
> The points Dries makes about distributions are also really interesting.
>
> "There is a risk involved with distributions as well, which means that we
> need to approach them the right way. The risk is fragmentation, and it is
> why I feel it is important that distributions build on the usability
> patterns set by Drupal core. "
the Plone community. See this blog post I wrote back in 2007 about
creating Plone distros.
http://piktipi.wordpress.com/2007/06/03/natea-creating-easy-to-install-plone-distributions-with-buildout/
We currently have Plinkit (for libraries) and Plumi (for video
portal). Where is the PloneEdu distribution, or the PloneGov
distribution. Where is the distro for newspapers or media
organizations?
For building a social networking site, Wordpress has BuddyPress
(http://buddypress.org) and Drupal has DrupalGardens
(http://www.drupalgardens.com/) for building marketing sites,
OpenPublish (http://openpublishapp.com/) for publishing industry and
OpenPublic, a Drupal distribution for open government.
http://www.phase2technology.com/press-release/phase2-technology-announces-openpublic-drupal-distribution-federal-agency-use-satisfy-
I think if we were to nurture smaller subsets of communities within
the larger Plone community around these distributions, we could start
to see more penetration into these markets. The PloneEdu efforts that
Mike Halm at PSU is leading is a step in the right direction. Let's
hope that this serves as a model for others to follow.
http://weblion.psu.edu/ploneedu
Nate
--
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T. Kim Nguyen
Kim
David Bain
Nate Aune
> The first two distributions that make sense to me are "almost distributions
> already", the pieces are there:
> Plone Mobile (built around the go mobile platform)
http://pypi.python.org/pypi/gomobile.mobile/
http://www.slideshare.net/miohtama/plone-go-mobile
> Plone Social. (putting all the current pieces together, a site that
> simplifies the management of incoming and outgoing tweets, facebook, buzz
> and youtube video)
PloneSocial distro? What add-ons should be included? Would you want to
lead the charge to put something together?
Nate
Steve McMahon
...
What would it take to bundle up some Plone add-ons and release it as a
PloneSocial distro? What add-ons should be included? Would you want to
lead the charge to put something together?
That could be as simple as creating a buildout extension configuration.
In a sense, we now have included with our installers a "development" bundle aimed at add-on/theme level developers:
http://dev.plone.org/plone/browser/Installers/UnifiedInstaller/trunk/base_skeleton/develop.cfg
We could include a subdirectory of such extensions with the installers, but they would have to be generally agreed on and include absolutely no unstable or unreleased components.
Nate Aune
>> PloneSocial distro? What add-ons should be included? Would you want to
>> lead the charge to put something together?
>
> That could be as simple as creating a buildout extension configuration.
>
> In a sense, we now have included with our installers a "development" bundle
> aimed at add-on/theme level developers:
>
> http://dev.plone.org/plone/browser/Installers/UnifiedInstaller/trunk/base_skeleton/develop.cfg
>
> We could include a subdirectory of such extensions with the installers, but
> they would have to be generally agreed on and include absolutely no unstable
> or unreleased components.
they would be approved to be included in the distribution.
Steve - what would it take to identify 3-4 extension profiles, and
include them in the next release?
PloneSocial - adds social networking functionality to your Plone site
(which add-ons are most mature?)
PloneMobile - adds mobile optimized features to your Plone site (go.mobile)
PloneMultiMedia - adds multimedia functionality to your Plone site
(collective.flowplayer)
PloneMultilingual - adds multilingual funcitonality (LinguaPlone)
I think this would go a long way to making it easier for newcomers to
Plone to evaluate the rich ecosystem of add-ons for Plone without
having to troll through the 3,000 add-ons at plone.org/download trying
to find the best ones.
I could also see a lot of value of making bundles targeting particular
vertical markets:
PloneEdu - faculty/staff directory, bibliography, subsites
PloneGov - forms (PloneFormGen)
PloneNpo - donation forms, volunteer signup (PloneFormGen)
Imagine if you are from a university, government agency or non-profit,
and the first time you download Plone, there is an installer profile
made just for you, that guides you through the benefits of why Plone
is right for your particular industry and shows you the value-add of
these additional modules. I think this could be incredible beneficial
in helping Plone to get greater adoption in these markets.
Nate
--
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Nate Aune - na...@jazkarta.com
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Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]
The buildout approach was exactly what I was thinking when reading
Nate's last email too, Steve :)
Niche/Type-of-Site/Industry-specific Distros are something we've talked
about for a long time. I recall a few of us on this list doing so at a
BoF at the Seattle Conference.
But we didn't yet have buildout at that time - it seems like such a
simple solution, but the tough part is, as you pointed out, we need to
vet the add-ons that each cfg will list, and I suspect there could be
some tug-of-war over which products are in/out.
So, perhaps we could make use of the same type of voting system used for
PLIPs before a new release of Plone comes out, where you get X votes to
cast and have to rank your favorite products? Have it be a community
effort, of course, but at the same time get results quickly.
This (and then the testing/vetting) seem to be our only 'real' obstacles
in getting the category cfgs as part of the installer/svn releases, right?
-Ken
David Bain
Dylan Jay
> Good reference to identify baseline features that could be in a
> Plone Social distro/buildout.
>
> Sharepoint's available social features:
> http://www.nonlinearcreations.com/blog/index.php/2010/02/18/enterprise-social-computing-features-comparison-moss-2007-vs-sharepoint-2010/
I think you need more than just addons as Plones UI out of the box is
still more public site orientated than collaboration.
In which case Jive SBS is a pretty nice UI that people like but
functionality wise is not that much different from Plone.
http://www.jivesoftware.com/products/whats-new
Cyn.in seems to be an attempt to replicate this but in my opinion it
misses the mark.
I'm pretty sure some well aimed plugins to replicate jives UI would be
very popular since jive is $$$ and takes a lot of hardware to run.