[haiku-web] Re: CMS

Charlie Clark wrote:
On 2006-03-22 at 00:12:38 [+0100], Waldemar Kornewald <wkornew@xxxxxxx> wrote: 
Hi Charlie,
which CMSes would you suggest? You said that you have much experience on
this topic. We have spent waaay too much time on this and still only
Plone seems to be easy enough to use.

It is also feature-complete and tried and tested. It can also be slow as a pig under heavy load but there are ways of dealing with this.

Slow? It was unusable on my computer. That's why I hoped that it can be optimized. There seemed to be a few articles on the Plone website.
Somehow, the site even slows down Firefox... :(

The Plone guys have put a lot of effort into making it easy to work with Plone. But you also have to consider the needs of the site maintainers and in my experience none of the alternatives come close to Zope for add-ins and stability. As I've said, you can use Mailboxer to integrate mailing lists, XUF to hook up to external memberships. As it's sitting on a full-blown application server you can write what's missing fairly easily. 

But we can easily integrate all of that into Plone if we have to, right?

I haven't looked at the competition for a while but apart from OpenCMS or Typo3 I haven't heard of many systems that have enough developers around them to ensure viability. I've been able to do everything I need with Zope and I can only recommend a system that I would be prepared to work with. 

OpenCMS and Typo3 were not intuitive enough for us.

Just look at the add-ons you get for Zope/Plone:
http://plone.org/products


There even is a usability issues tracker...nah we have Trac. :)

From what I've read I think that the proposed site is similar to http://www.dzug.org which uses Zope but not Plone.

Only at a basic level. The problems start when creating content. You must enter an ID (why should I care!?) and sometimes you must enter paths which I don't understand at all. Again, we would have to read the documentation in order to understand the CMS. That's not what I want.

A key issue for any system is maintainability. I'd rather do without a few features for a system that I knew I or someone could and would maintain than go for an all-singing, all-dancing system that I can't maintain. 

Agreed. I've sorted everything by priority, now. Maybe that helps.

I consider neither general internationalisation nor tight forum/e-mail integration to be mission critical. You might want to have a few articles in different languages but that doesn't need a full multilingual CMS. Forum / e-mail integration requires a common storage system which is kind of difficult if the mailing lists are hosted elsewhere. However, there is a Zope Product which stores e-mail in an external RDBMS but I think it's fine to run Mailboxer next to zForum and just tell the catalog to search both.

Internationalization can be very simple, but it is important to reach new markets. When you switch the language it must not mix with English content.

Forum+email integration is not very important. I think that it would even be acceptable to host the mailing lists, ourselves if we can get it, but we can as well just clean up our forum and not have forums *and* mailing lists about the same topics.

We don't have a lot of resources to put on this so if you're going to do the most work then I'd be happy to go with whatever you want and simply focus on making Trac do what we want. Other than that: please let us go with Zope.

What do you mean with "the most work"? :)
Content creation? Yes.
But I am not a Zope or Python programmer. I could learn it, but I'd have to invest a lot of time to get something done. That's not good.
Small changes like some of the ones we plan for Trac are not a problem for me. I'm willing to read Plone+Zope tutorials and learn how to use, customize, and maintain it (if we want Plone or whatever). IMHO, we need at least two people who can maintain Plone, so we don't rely on only one person.

RailFrog 0.5 was released today. It's not targeted at production use. Just a first step. Let's wait a little bit longer and see if their query-based idea can be made usable enough...otherwise, go with Plone.

Bye,
Waldemar
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