My Technology Blog

Zope Plone Review

Zope was the first package that I tried, and it is a very good CMS. From what I had read, it seemed like a very power solution, that could be adapted to multiple applications. I also read the warnings about the steep learning curve, but I didn’t mind investing the since I was hoping that the reward after the fact would be worth the effort involved.

If you want to manage a large amount of documents, and users, then it is a good way to go. It would be a good fit for a company that wanted to share a large amount of documents with their customers. If you want to support things like photo galleries, blogs, and forums, then this is not the way to go. You can do some of these web 2.0 functions, but you will be very limited (see the aircraft carrier comment below).

Pros:

• Very well written code, and good documentation.
• Written in Python (can be a con for some people).
• Very good user management, and access controls.
• Integrated (you do not need to install MySQL, and PHP, since it has its own database)
• Seems to be more secure than other systems like Drupal and Joomla.
• Looks professional.

Cons:

• Very steep learning curve. You will need to dig deep into the ZMI, and DTML to make almost any changes.
• Integrated. I prefer to have a combination of external files, and a standard database.
• Not very user friendly to non technical users.
• Not very good web 2.0 support (blogs, forums,streaming media etc.)

Background

I have been playing around with different web server software solutions for the past year and a half, and using these packages to create different types of web sites. I have been working with a few people that are trying to do serious work, but it is mostly a hobby. I have not previously invested a large amount of time in any of these solutions, which allows me to be more unbiased, and I am looking at it from from a typical users point of view.

Initially when I started out, I really wanted to pick one very powerful CMS, and then use it for every web site. If there is one thing that I have learned through this whole exercise, is that this is clearly not the way to go. I will get into some of the reasons in a later postings, but a good analogy to why this is not a good idea, would be building an aircraft carrier to go water skiing. It might be possible, and you could do lots of other things too, but it is not very practical.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 5th, 2007 at 10:19 pm and is filed under CMS, Web Server Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.