O'Reilly Interview with the Plone Founders

Alexander Limi writes "Just in time for some light weekend reading, O'Reilly's OSDir.com has published a byte-sized interview with the two founders of Plone. This is a nice follow-up to the earlier discussion on Slashdot, and covers a lot of the unanswered questions people directed to us earlier as the surprise winners of the O'Reilly COMDEX competition."

A bit telling

[Saven Marek]

This says a lot about good documentation and decent ease of use. I've seen many perfectly intelligent people come up against the brick wall of Zope's usability, and sit there scratching their heads going "wtf?". Luckily zope IS very powerful, otherwise it'd never end up being used.

While it's testament to the skills of the plone team that now there's a solution, and indeed that's the OSS way - if a solution is needed someone will write it - the years that zope's existed WITHOUT some kind of help it desperately needed is telling.

Re:A bit telling

[jalet]

Perhaps you could... try it.

Re:Michael is a horrible editor who should be fire

[miu]

Every now and then the editors will pick a comment that is offtopic, inflamatory, and critical of the editorial staff (this one is a prime example) and $rtbl everyone who mods it up. This is cruel, unfair, and presumably very effective.

I'm not sure how effective it is to take away mod privs forever. I changed accounts a couple times because of I lost an email addresses or lost mod privs, but when this account lost mod privs I decided I didn't care enough about moderating to create a new one. I don't meta-mod anymore and I don't browse slashdot as often as I used to, the site is not nearly as interesting to me now. Who knows, that might just be the point of $rtbl.

I realize that Slashdot is their site, but ignoring or blacklisting anyone who complains (or mods up someone who complains) removes the only thing that a web news board has to offer. The editors have made the decision that some users are too much trouble to keep, they are a large site and can afford to make those sorts of decisions, but I think they make the site that much less interesting when the majority of moderators share the views of the editors.

Re:What exactly *is* Plone?

[Qbertino]

Err, well, you've missed the mark a little.
Here's my quick standard reply:

Zope is an open source Web Application Server, developed allmost exclusively in Python (some speed parts in C) with an integrated object relational database, aka ZopeDB and a web frontend with access to all interal components.

That pretty much summs it up for Zope. :-)
Now for Plone:

Plone is a CMS and a content syndication system programmed for and with the Zope Appserver. These Zope Applications and 'addons' are very easy to develope and install on Zope (naturally, if you consider the description above) - think 'plugin' - and are called Zope 'products'.

So Plone it a 'tad' more than you're standard CMS, be it slashcode/e107/Nuke/whatever, since it can very easyly utilize the vast power of the underlying Zope and other products, like Webshops, syndication mechanisims or webcrawlers and data-mining bot's, just to mention a few. Zope actually severely blurrs the edge between database, application and frontend and leaves it completely to the developer where to draw the line between those components.
Imagine an appserver where you can just drop of data for storage at whim without having to mess with DB abstraction layers, conectors and stuff, that comes with a full featured web interface where you can track and modify the inerts of your appserver either by custom coding (in whatever language you fancy that has conectors to Zope, Perl for instance) or by using the interface options and elements - which you can of course provide with your own extensions.
That's what Zope and thus Zope/Plone is all about.
That one can't exactly say what Plone is in standard terms actually shows the power of Zope. Basically it's whatever you make of it.

Re:What exactly *is* Plone?

[stuntpope]

Good description, but I disagree with your assessment that "it's difficult to 'start with the easy stuff and learn the tough stuff as you go along' - Zope doesn't really lend itself to that approach."

On the contrary, with built-in authentication, roles, template engine, through-the-web editing, etc, etc, Zope makes it easy to build simple sites quickly with little digging into documentation. Heck, the outdated built-in tutorial is good enough for that, and the Zope Book (free online) is very good at getting you headed down the road to more complex web applications. Plone has done a great job of taking the framework that is the CMF and polishing it into a more 'approachable to mere mortals' product. That said, I'm one of those who don't believe Plone is the answer for all Zope application problems. Also, if you've never done web development using PHP, ASP, JSP or the like, then you'll have more than just the Zope learning curve to climb (thus you'll hear the complaint, "where's the content on the screen actually coming from?").

From what I've seen as a long time Zope user/developer who has management 'buy-in' and other developers now using Zope, the Perl hackers and people comfortable in a *nix environment take to Zope well. They know how to dig for answers. The developers raised on a diet of VisualBasic and who think Access is database development are flummoxed because they no longer have an IDE telling them what to do, and they don't grok using the source (by the way, there's also the DocFinderEverywhere product, quite helpful). I know this comes across as a flame, but it simply is what I experience at work. I don't deny that Zope suffers from confusing, often outdated, inconsistent and even contradictory documentation, but there are plenty of resources. The resource sitting at the keyboard is also critical.

Re:It's dangerously unstable

[geniusj]

he should have had backups.. you can take exports of it as well in both Zope export format and XML.

Re:Plone 2, Archetypes

[Malcontent]

My biggest wish for plone and zope is a more productive working environment. I really miss my filesystem tools like grep. The find button does not work great at all and takes too long.

I keep thinking it would be great if there was a cvs like tool where you could check out the subtree to your hard disk and work on it with your favorite editor and then check it back in.

If not that then an eclipse or a jedit plug in would be awsome.

Re:Incorrect on both counts...

[AShocka]

If you look at that IRC count and rank that as popularity, you could be right.

But someone else might look at that and see Drupal:16 Plone:76, the Drupal users found what they needed in the docs and forums so didn't need to go on IRC, where the Plone users needed too.

Again, for all the good points you are presenting, why is this not clearly documented on the Plone web site. Then users would know what type of CMS and developer community they are getting. There might be a larger adoption base and larger customer satisfaction rating.

It may be great for developers. But what if I am a manager of a small to medium publication (wasn't Zope first developed for a newspaper publication?), I'm looking for something. I do want real information about this product. I look through the web site and download the Plone book. Really, the book nor web site do the Plone community any justice as a true knowledge base.

If it is such a good product, and if it really should be deployed more, then what everyone is saying here needs to be presented on the web site and in the book.

Also, I see a lot of people really frustrated by the Zope books out there. Maybe there is need for just one good Plone/Zope book.

Industry is littered with a history of superior products failing, why, because often they were not presented or marketed appropriately.