Re: adv567.php

Andy Jacobs wrote:
On 20/3/07 10:02 pm, in article 8cCdnTuN1vx6xJ3bRVnyiAA@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx,
"Richard Watson" <tinnedmeat@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Going back to the original issue of Content Management Systems, there's
only one CMS I like enough to use on my own projects, and it's Open
Source. It just so happens that in the Open Source world you
occasionally get a project which attracts the right sort of developers
and result in something that's more use than anything else out there,
open, closed or indifferent.

Is that Plone?

But of course :-)

I've had a look at the site and it's certainly one that interests me. The
trouble is, we've put a lot of time into writing one that I think is really
good

Yes, it's always a shame when you put your own effort into something and
then there appears something that's free that seems to do everything you
want.

1. Published/Unpublished content - when you make a change the original page
stays live until you publish it

Yes, plone has the concept of "states". There are a number of default
ones, plus you can add your own and integrate them into workflows. So as
standard you have "Private" - readable only by the owner or a manager,
"Draft" - viewable but not advertised and "Published".

Members have their own space to work on documents which can stay as
drafts until a reviewer decides to publish them. The exact behaviour of
this is configurable.

2. Backups. Any page you change gets backed up.

Plone (and zope in general) has unlimited levels of undo. Every change
is stored as a new copy in the database, so rolling back to a previous
one is straightforward. From time to time you can "pack" the database
keeping only copies from the most recent N days.

3. Timed content. We can set release/close dates on pages

Yep, got that.

4. Dynamic navigation/sub navigation

Default behaviour is for the navigation to show the top level fully
expanded, and the current level, and then the layers in between e.g.

Main 1
Main 2
Sub 1
Subsub 2
Subsubsub 1
Subsubsub 2
Subsubsub 3
Main 3

5. XML site map generation for Google

There's a product that does this automatically.

6. RSS feeds

OOTB any search or folder has an associated RSS feed. There's a
syndication tab on each relevant object to control this.

7. A basic site takes 2 days to design, install the CMS and everything.

I'd say a basic site is there almost immediately. Each site is just a
"folder" inside the zope instance, so adding a site is just clicking a
thing in a web page. The next step is to set up a rewrite rule in apache
for the site.

How quickly more complicated sites are developed depends a lot on
experience. The templating system is very powerful and the whole OOP
approach means you can override parts of the template without touching
others. To start with you can base all your sites on the standard
template, later you can write your own from scratch.


We've also got news, newsletter and all sorts of other modules.

News and events come as standard objects. Smart folders exist which are
canned searches to show lists of particular types of object. By default
smart folders for news and events are created in the root of the site.
these collate all relevant objects from any part of the site.

Absolutely everything is customisable. Normally you can customise things
in such a way that they don't break during upgrades either.

You can write your own objects with ease (after initial learning curve).
Let's say you're writing a site for someone who sells used cars. You
might have a "car" object. You'd give that object a series of images of
the car, various fields for make, model, year, description. You can add
to that object a "file" field which could be a PDF of an independant
report. You then write some different custom folders to show these
objects ordered by age, model or whatever. All the forms and view
screens for these objects are created automagically - imagine how much
work that saves.

I could go on but I don't want to bore anyone :-)

The main thing about Plone and Zope is that you need to take time to
understand it (this includes its caching features, otherwise it can be
slow). But it's time well spent. It needs a reasonable spec of server
with a fair bit of free memory for best results. Also it's all written
in God's own programming language - python. It's worth knowing a bit
before you start.

Other things it does that I wouldn't be without:

1) If you need it, pooled connections to RDBMS with query caching
2) Scalability to clustered levels without altering your programming
logic (most I have done is 4 front end servers clustered and one back
end storage system)
3) Easy replication between sites
4) Built in caching of objects and http requests
5) Full user management as standard
6) authentication against LDAP (read: Active Directory) for intranet
single sign on
7) Customisable workflow - can't praise this one enough

Also check out all the "products" (modules) here:

http://plone.org/products


--
Richard Watson
"Mail delay is sometimes happened. If, unfortunately, it is happened to
you, please be patience."
.

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