December 17, 2002

Thoughts about Plone

I've been evaluating the BETA of Plone. See the documentation at: http://plone.org/documentation/. I'm posting my first impressions here.

Plone sits atop the Content Management Framework, which in turn sits atop Zope. Zope is perhaps the most active of the open-source CMSes. It is written largely in Python, a nice cross-plaform (Win, #nix, Mac 9/X) scripting language.

Here are some random thoughts, in no real order:

It is a little too "member-centric" for a public facing website. These member-related features (home folders, sign-in forms, etc) should be more hidden from the public. Likely, this just means modifying the template. Other than that, user authentication seems well done.

Administration is a bit counter-intuitive (setting up roles). There is no centralized administration screen (that I could find). As the site "owner," you need to go to the folder in question and assign the roles there. Its not a deal-breaker, but some form of centralized administration screen would be nice.

Once assigned, the roles seem to be flexible. A single user can have a "member" (ie, contributor) role in one part of the site, and an "owner" (with the power to approve) in another. So, in a district, a user could have complete control over their corner of the site, but when they wanted to post news items, there would be a workflow in place for approval. Very nice.

But, I haven't been able to get this workflow to actually work. The roles are a bit goofy. For example, I made a test account into a "member" (the lowest level) for a folder. But this user couldn't even see that folder until I made it a manager. Either I'm doing something quite wrong, or something still isn't quite right. This is beta software, so I'm inclined to blame it! :)

I managed to completely break Plone at one point. I'm not quite sure why. It fired back up just fine after a few fun error messages. I've also learned not to delete the main index page. There doesn't seem to be an easy way to get it back. When I tried the versioning feature, it wouldn't bring that page back. Not quite sure why. Heh.

Each content piece has a number of properties (language, keywords, contributors, etc), so there is some support for metadata. I think I'd rather there not be a keywords feature. I'd much prefer a simple taxonomy or controlled vocabulary interface. There doesn't seem to be any support for a taxonomy (certainly not for the navigation).

You can put publication and pull dates on each piece of content. There doesn't look to be any functionality to put in reminders (ie, "this page is 1 year old today...would you like to edit it?").

I don't quite get the point of the little calendar on the sidebar. It makes the system look a bit weblogish. After browsing through the plone.org site, I'm still not sure--there don't seem to be any links from the calendar. Hmmm...

So far, I'm reasonably impressed with it. I think it probably has a fair amount going for it:

  • Easy install/setup
  • Based on Python, a easy to work with language
  • Fairly decent default template (although you'd probably want to change the look and feel for most projects--see http://plone.org/about/sites/view for a list of sites that use Plone.)
  • Extendable
  • Very active development community around Zope, CMF, and Plone
  • Nice "news" functionality
  • Decent navigation (although some graphic design would probably be in order)
  • Good "buzz." See http://www.mindjack.com/events/oscom.html


But there are some things that would need changing...

  • A better administrative interface.
  • Clearer workflow (I think the features are there, just not well implemented.
  • An event calendar
  • Taxonomy/Thesaurus support
  • Interface work--some of the interface needs to be simplified and changed
  • Ties with other apps (ie, using MS Word as an editor; there is already a tie with Open Office.
  • WYSIWYG editing (at least I didn't see it on my Mac)
  • Reminders to edit potentially stale content
  • Attach versioning information to an object (folder or piece of content)

I haven't yet taken a hard look at Zope's Content Management Framework. I'm wondering if using the CMF as a starting point might be better than using Plone. I'll keep looking...