[Evangelism] CMS smackdown

[Matt Hamilton]

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
ma...@netsight.co.uk

Telephone
+44 (0) 117 909 0901

Web
www.netsight.co.uk

Address
40 Berkeley Square, Clifton 
Bristol BS8 1HU

[Armin Stroß-Radschinski]

Hi Matt,
do not make yourself pain with hate. Avoid playing this game. Make it
proactive!

Hate is something not pointing to solutions so you should waste one
point for:

1. I hate that it makes pain to find something we really hate. But we
know challenges!

4 points the community is currently turning from flaws into solutions:

- Ripping out stuff is still a task not automated!
- The old documentation still does not match the standards recently
created docs meet.
- The value that comes from Plones evolutionary continous development
quality is not as obvious as it should be. (is that fake?)
- Former revolutionary Plone concepts are now very common. New
concepts are not recognized that well related to their genereal value
for the whole Software & CMS world (Transmogrifier, Diazo)

Armin

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[Dylan Jay]

Take a look at http://www.slideshare.net/djay/plone-pwns

for positives. Personally I'd go for security and permissions model even for a technical group. 

For negatives perhaps not enough emphasis on ttw as talked about in http://djay.posterous.com/template-customisations-are-evil but which is being remedied with the three d's. 

Or that it's democratic nature makes new ideas slow to get done however that's really a good thing as it means a single company can't drive product down a dead end by jumping on a band wagon. 

I agree with a armin that negatives should be positives in disguise. Everyone else will do that :)

Dylan Jay

Technical solution manager

PretaWeb 99552830

[T Kim Nguyen]

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

[Dylan Jay]

On 29/05/2012, at 7:41 AM, Dylan Jay wrote:

> Take a look at http://www.slideshare.net/djay/plone-pwns
> for positives. Personally I'd go for security and permissions model
> even for a technical group.

Actually there are two slides in there that need explaining.
The key point about the w2tech market share slide is plone enjoys high
market share in the top 100,000 sites. This graph is old, the latest
now shows Plone above drupal for larger sites. The important point is
that this explains why many people won't have heard of Plone. Using an
expression I stole from the drupal community, Plone is truely "the
elevator that goes all the way up".
The point about realstory map slide is that Plone is the ONLY single
product that features in three categories. All the others are large
vendors with multiple products, such as MS, Adobe etc. No other open
source CMS does this. This attests to Plone's flexibility. The fact
that it gets used widely for both internets and public websites also
shows it's flexibiliy. Again it is the elevator that goes all the way
up. "Don't get stuck when your needs outgrow your CMS".

With regard to security I think the @lulsec slide is really powerful.
Both fbi.gov and cia.gov sites would have been targeted heavily.
Neither were hacked. If they could have hacked them they would have.
Both are Plone.
The stats on vulnerabilities vs Drupal etc you have to be careful
about as you have to show that Plone is widely used and exposed
otherwise they will dismiss them thinking incorrectly that the
vulnerabilities do exist in Plone undetected.

Hope that helps.

[Paul Roeland]

On 2012-05-28 17:04, Matt Hamilton wrote:
>
> 5 Things I love about Plone:
>

we think about upgrades. Sure, they were bumpy sometimes, but we beat
the competition's "Computer says nooooo" approach...
That also means we build sites that are meant to last, not throwaway
brochureware.

[Matt Hamilton]

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

[Matt Hamilton]

On 28 May 2012, at 18:01, Armin Stroß-Radschinski wrote:

Hi Matt,
do not make yourself pain with hate. Avoid playing this game. Make it proactive!

Don't worry, I very much plan to. Maybe it was not obvious from the 'hates' in my list, that I want to spin them to positives if I can. btw in case it was not clear the format '5 Things you Love, 5 Thing you Hate' is specified by the event organiser. So whilst the word 'hate' is strong, it is what is being used in the event.

Hate is something not pointing to solutions so you should waste one point for:

1. I hate that it makes pain to find something we really hate. But we know challenges!

4 points the community is currently turning from flaws into solutions:

- Ripping out stuff is still a task not automated!
- The old documentation still does not match the standards recently created docs meet.
- The value that comes from Plones evolutionary continous development quality is not as obvious as it should be. (is that fake?)
- Former revolutionary Plone concepts are now very common. New concepts are not recognized that well related to their genereal value for the whole Software & CMS world (Transmogrifier, Diazo)

I especially like the latter two points. I mean, how many other CMS projects have CI clusters doing testing and the likes? (actually… that may not be a rhetorical question… I will investigate). And also the fact that Plone (and Zope) were so ahead of their time that many didn't quite understand them. Concepts such as NoSQL are now becoming popular.

I'm going to have to talk fast ;)

-Matt

[Maurizio Delmonte]

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 4:48 PM, Matt Hamilton <ma...@netsight.co.uk> wrote:

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.

from this point of view you describe, I found this list quite interesting:

http://www.liferay.com/products/liferay-portal/tech-specs

the whole section here is interesting, actually:

http://www.liferay.com/products/liferay-portal/overview

hth,

Maurizio

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[T. Kim Nguyen]

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

[Ken Wasetis [Contextual Corp.]]

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

--
Ken Wasetis

President& CMS Solution Architect
Contextual Corp.
office: 847-356-3027
ken.w...@contextualcorp.com

[wraphd]

For an edu audience I do agree that appealing to the "unfettered flow of
information" value embodied in university missions can be quite powerful.
Most university administrators (who of course are the ones making purchasing
decisions) are, or were at some point in their careers, academics, and as
such are proud to be a part of a community of that openly shares ideas and
pushes each other forward. When they learn about open-source software they
immediately see the analogue to what they value so much in their academic
fields, and they are sold.

T. Kim Nguyen wrote

>>> On May 28, 2012, at 11:04 AM, Matt Hamilton &lt;

> matth@.co

> matth@.co

>>>>>
>>>>> Telephone
>>>>> +44 (0) 117 909 0901
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Web
>>>>> www.netsight.co.uk
>>>>>
>>>>> Address
>>>>> 40 Berkeley Square, Clifton
>>>>> Bristol BS8 1HU
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>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Evangelism mailing list
>>>>

> Evangelism@.plone

>>>> https://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/plone-evangelism
>>
>>> NETSIGHT
>>>
>>> Matt Hamilton
>>> Technical Director
>>> Email
>>>

> matth@.co

>>>
>>> Telephone
>>> +44 (0) 117 909 0901
>>>
>>>
>>> Web
>>> www.netsight.co.uk
>>>
>>> Address
>>> 40 Berkeley Square, Clifton
>>> Bristol BS8 1HU
>>
>>
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> _______________________________________________
> Evangelism mailing list

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