O'Reilly Interview with the Plone Founders 124
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."
I am going to sue these people. (Score:4, Funny)
Re:I am going to sue these people. (Score:5, Informative)
Not Bell. (Score:1)
Antonio Meucci.
Bell didn't invent the telephone, US rules [guardian.co.uk]
Re:I am going to sue these people. (Score:1, Offtopic)
Alexander Graham Bell.
Shhhh! You don't want *him* to be sued too, do you?
Re:I am going to sue these people. (Score:3, Funny)
Re:I am going to sue these people. (Score:2, Funny)
A bit telling (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Zope is just confounding. Plone makes it easier to get some things done. But sooner or later you are going to have to create a template or a script and then you'll be scratching your head and saying "wtf".
When I was first using plone it would take me hours to find where some text on the screen was being produced or where to go to change it. I am still perplexed about where the actions for the user bar are for example. And of course sooner or later everybody will get a visit from the "spammish aquisition".
I am waiting to see what zope3 and plone 2 are going to be like. I hope they make it easier for mere mortals to use them.
Re:A bit telling (Score:1)
so i'm left confused, what exactly is supposed to be made easier by this? it sure seems like a possibly good idea gone wrong.
Re:A bit telling (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:A bit telling (Score:1)
Re:A bit telling (Score:3, Informative)
Then of course to go further, you have to read some doc, but just like with all powerful software.
Re:A bit telling (Score:2)
Because it has a log of stuff built in. User authentication (properly abstracted so it works against pretty much everything), database abstraction, authority delegation, workflow, templating, etc. You get a lot out of the box. With all that power you also get complexity.
Plone is self documented (Score:5, Informative)
Plone is still in a deep lack of being documented. For example "Plone for web-designers" is till missed. Many API details I still have to get from the source code itself.
Also, one of the best Plone's documentation is a set of already existing and still being actively developed Plone applications.
But in general Plone still keeps guiding app developers, and thus leaves them more chances for future interoperability.
I wish that one of issue collectors/trackers in Plone will stabilize. Currently I use CollectorNG, which can already beat Bugzilla. I am not sure what PloneCollector developers want to achive by completely rewriting CollectorNG. As for official Zope/Plone issue collectors - they are kind of primitive.
Another wish: Zope and Plone sites will have forums with functionality of CMBoard, which I think is beating PHPBB already.
Re:Plone is self documented (Score:2, Informative)
Also, because PCNG is built using Archetypes, the hooks for TTW schema editing have been backported to the Archetypes project, allowing for simplified development of TTW schema editing for ANY Archetypes based pieces of web content.
Re:Plone is self documented (Score:2)
Plone 2, Archetypes (Score:5, Informative)
I think things are getting better - much better, much faster. Soon-to-be-released Plone 2.0 and Archetypes are contributing to this - the learning curve for all aspects of Plone is getting flattened.
Zope has a "Z-shaped learning curve" -- or so goes the saying; this is becuase Zope (well, Zope 2) has a deep tree of class inheritance - a "deeply object oriented" system (to borrow a phrase from Jon Udell, not sure if that's his intended meaning). When someone tells you to "read the source" -- that's usually becuase Python is remakably easy to read -- but you still you end up with a task that's fairly involved and somewhat academic (not to discount this - once you get it it is quite rewarding).
What the CMF and Plone do is put a "wide-not-deep" framework on top of the Zope app server to abstract most of that tedious, academic learning curve for serious developers. The CMF hard-codes a really simple MVC-like design-pattern for best practices for component-oriented development, where lightweight components interact (global "tools" like search/catalog, workflow, etc and content objects in folders/containers (the model) - and UI/automation skin code (view/controller)). Each component is lighter-weight and pluggable (with defined interfaces and unit-tests), and CMF, Plone, and unrelated Zope 3 development are working towards not just pluggable components, but user/admin configurable components. The Plone 2 control panels are a good start towards making this more human. The ease-of-development and deployment story is getting better. The UI is also more configurable in Plone 2 via CSS.
Getting better by the minute: Archetypes [plone.org] is the secret weapon for Plone's future success; Archetypes makes schema-based development for content items, along with relationships among content items, not just easily possible, but much less tedious. It's architecture, in many ways (though it is still maturing [sourceforge.net]), is superior to the same concepts in WinFS in M$ Longhorn. Archetypes will make development of content types easier to learn and develop day-to-day, whether you as a developer prefer to live in Vi (or Emacs), UML modelling tools, or a web-based schema editors. Simple, usable, documented examples for Archetypes development in Plone are popping up every day. Developing global CMF tools (singleton services/utilities for all objects in the site) has always been trivially easy, but underdocumented. Plone 2 is making the UI easier to customize, and I expect that forthcoming books [zopezen.org] and improved documentation [zopezen.org] on Plone 2 will make this straightforward.
Keep in mind, the Plone/Zope/Python stack is much less complicated and easier to learn than equivalent technology stacks in Java app servers (and less messy than inline web apps in PHP/ASPX/etc). And seriously, if you have to say WTF, say it on #plone on freenode or the plone-users [sourceforge.net] list - there's a high likelyhood that someone will have an answer to just that question... ;)
Mod Parent Up, Please (Score:2)
Re:Plone 2, Archetypes (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Plone 2, Archetypes (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:A bit telling (Score:4, Interesting)
While Zope documentation can be kindly described as minimalist, Plone documentation simply doesn't exist and what little there is is 100% wrong. Hell, I've had some of the plone developers send me solutions to problems and their solutions don't work (usually because they've skipped 2-3 major steps in their directions, assuming that I know as much about their undocumented product as they do).
I think Plone is a great project, and it will likely become an integral part of Zope, if you want to do anything other than slap a different skin on it you are SOL. I'm particularly bothered by the fact that they override many of the default behaviors of Zope/CMF and there is NO way around it so it is not possible to port a Zope/CMF product to Plone without completely rewriting from scratch.
straw person... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:straw person... (Score:2)
I'm not saying the plone isn't good (it is, it's an incredible product really) just that it isn't strictly necessary. CMF is lighter weight and easier to manage. And I've had plenty of trouble getting anything written for CMF to work in plone. Plone takes over form processing and there is no clearly documented way around this that works. To reiterate, there are several documented ways to get around the form mangling, none of
Re:A bit telling (Score:2)
Comparing Zope to PHP, I think most people will come to the conclusion that not only is Zope easier to develop for, but also it's easier to maintain since it gently encourages you to move your data-access/queries into a seperate space.
I've had a Zope server running without a single hickup for
Size does matter. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Size does matter. (Score:2)
Anyhow, even if they *did* mean 8 binary digits, if they printed them with a HUGE font size, then the article could be quite large indeed.
Re:Late-night uncaffeinated dyslexia (Score:1)
In my case, after reading the headline I was thinking for a second that O'Reilly had tried to interview some hacker known as "the Plone", and that the interview had gone horribly wrong.
What's Plone? (Score:4, Informative)
Plone is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, a portal server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities. A versatile software product like Plone can be used in a myriad of ways.
Who uses Plone? Many organisations. NASA / Jet Propulsion Labs, Lufthansa, the Austrian Government.
Re:What's Plone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does anybody else find it slightly amusing that Plone is running on Sun's network - on Sun hardware no less - and no Java in sight? ;)
Re:What's Plone? (Score:5, Informative)
Zope is a web application server. It is written in python. It has a builtin web server or you can run it behind apache, squid, whatever. It maintains all data in a object-oriented database. What zope does is generate dynamic html pages on the fly. You write a page template and when the user GETS that page, the variable information is inserted and then returned to the user.
Another feature is that a Zope website -- and much of Zope itself -- is managed via the web. And it has a very sophisticated security and permissions facility. It uses the concept of "roles" to which permissions and access to objects can be attached.
CMF (Content Management Framework) is a zope application that creates a set of services for the website developer: navigation, calendar, new items, workflow, etc. It also provides the basis for css-based "look-and-feel".
Plone, as was noted in the interview, started out as a CMF "skin." It has evolved into kind of a "CMF best-practices". It's philosophy is -- in part -- to permit the creation of *sophisticated* web content in a collaborative environment by users who know little or nothing about html, etc.
There's lots more to be said, of course. But I've been using Zope for two years, and Plone for nearly a year. My preferred scripting language is Ruby, but Zope/CMF/Plone is so valuable, I went out and learned Python in order to read the source code. Today, most of my work involves writing a page template and maybe some snippets of python code to go along with it -- often less than ten lines. Simple.
If your need is collaborative web content creation/management, web portals, etc., and Joe Sixpack is your user, then Zope/CMF/Plone is the way to go.
A very satisfied user,
Kirk
Re:What's Plone? (Score:1)
God bless you. Anything not to have to RTFA.
Virtual +1 informative to you (Score:2)
litte plone commercial (Score:5, Informative)
I really liked them talking about increasing 'mind share' in the interview, because when I had to set up a new website for my local political party youth organization, the hardest part was convincing people that plone is exactly what we wanted - they never heard of it and it takes quite some time to explain the whole thing to people that aren't geeks at all.
what we wanted was:
Plone fit the bill and I think we can be quite happy how well it works, if you never tried it out: take the time and toy around with it a bit. The learning curve is a bit steep at the beginning (at least for the person that sets the whole thing up), but afterwards it is really a beautiful piece of software.
What exactly *is* Plone? (Score:4, Informative)
I may be utterly wrong -- I'm a little surprised that I couldn't immediately turn up a simple explanation of what these things are on the web. If I'm missing something here, can someone clarify?
Re:What exactly *is* Plone? (Score:5, Informative)
Zope is a Python-based, Web application development system. It runs on *nix and Windows, and I'm pretty sure Macs as well. One of its key strengths is that it allows Web page designers, content generators and Web logic coders to work together without stepping on each other's toes - that's a big challenge with most Web application tools. You do all your work within Zope using a Web-based GUI, which is another unusual feature. There's a lot more to Zope than this, but that's enough for starters.
CMF is a Content Management system that runs on top of Zope. Content Management is for those sites where you want relatively non-technical people to be able to contribute "content" without having to worry about HTML and other nasty techo stuff. Think of people providing articles for your local school's newsletter - they should just be able to supply ASCII text, and someone else deals with typesetting and page layout. In this case, the "someone else" is CMF. There's more to CMF than that, BTW...
Plone sits on top of CMF, and adds extra tools such as workflow to CMF. In the school newsletter, you would probably have an editor who checks all the incoming articles, fixes typos and ensures nobody's said anything nasty. The contributor of the article would send it to the editor, who would then either accept or reject it. The "workflow" in Plone lets you implement this editor-type role in software. Again, there's a lot more than Plone than that...
Hope this helps a bit. I really like Zope, but as many people have said, getting your head around it is a bit challenging at first. Unlike many tools, 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, which I think is where many people struggle with it.
Re:What exactly *is* Plone? (Score:3, Insightful)
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 gettin
Re:What exactly *is* Plone? (Score:5, Insightful)
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? (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, we are trained in this world to accept only the rational and the logical. For a while, we were all able to escape that together. As children, we do not separate the possible from the impossible which is why the younger a mind is the easier it is to free, and why they were able to create Plone out of nothing but five letters and some hype. But now the rules have reasserted themselves. And it is harder tha
Re:What exactly *is* Plone? (Score:2)
This is one of my pet peeves though -- nothing requires a CMS to do any HTML publishing whatsoever. There should be some more specific term for CMSes (WCPS, web content publishing system) that are mostly used for maintaining web sites (which, granted is majority of things called CMS nowadays), since it'd make more sense for l
Zope - a dream come true. (Score:5, Interesting)
If you don't have a knack at OOP *and* aren't willing to read through some messy, redundant and unfinished third party code experiments you're gonna have some hard time getting going with it.
Beyond that Zope is nothing less than the ultimate refrence for the way all server side stuff will be done in the future. Zope comes with a fully integrated object relational Database, runs with and on, what I call the fully GPLd equivalent to Java, Python and is an absolute breeze to develop with.
Technology wise Zope makes BEA,
OT! WTF? (was Re:Zope - a dream come true.) (Score:2)
I am *absolutely* positive that I wrote 'weedy' (as in 'weed') as the code isn't 'messy' but 'entangled'. 8-O
Are there people editing comments for readability? I'm shure there's no 'bot substituting 'messy' for 'weedy'.
Fact is, somebody or something edited my comment. That's fine, I'd just like to know who and ho
Re:Zope - a dream come true. (Score:1)
Re:Zope - a dream come true. (Score:1)
Re:Zope - a dream come true. (Score:1)
That is a little presumptuous. Anybody can say the same about their favorite tool or framework.
Re:Zope - a dream come true. (Score:1)
[Python is] what I call the fully GPLd equivalent to Java...
Python is not "GPLed"; its license is an OSI-certified BSD-style license.
Also, being "equivalent" to Java is not really Python's goal. Python strives to be considerably higher-level than Java, and incorporates more unorthodox features, such as generators. Python could better be described as a semantic cross between Java and Lisp, with more pleasant syntax than either.
The problem with Zope (and Plone) (Score:3, Interesting)
First, Zope's internals are overly complex and sometime guided by ideological choices (the object database IMHO). It's a closed world with its own culture and logic. Its culture doesn't promote interoperability (again that's my feeling). It takes you out of the Web and into Zope Universe (after all this year, there are still problem when you want Apache and Zope to talk together, eg. Digest authentication).
Zope is often dubbed (I think Jon Uddel first said this) "Python's killer app" but I find it very non-Pythonic: overly complex, non-explicit and un-welcoming. Plone adds another layer on top of CMF, Zope, the object database... it is very difficult to understand.
I think that the best web setup is still a light and fast frontend (and PHP is good at that), a solid Database (PostgreSQL is better than a lot of people believe) and a third "business logic" tier which can be a separate application or shared between the frontend and stored procedure in the database. It's not the perfect theorical model but it's manageable, it stays simple (if you work hard enough to keep it simple) and you can evolve a simple website towards this model without restarting from scratch each time the requirements change ("embrace change", remember?).
I'm fascinated by Zope and Plone because they do so much and frankly, I don't know if I'd be able to write such a piece of software. But I think it goes in the wrong direction: the application server direction. It tries to coerce the light, simple and stateless nature of the Web into the heavyweight transactional world of corporate applications, just like the Java world does (Java Server Faces seems to make it worse). It is difficult to make a good Web application, but it's even more difficult when you fight against the Web and the way it works.
Re:The problem with Zope (and Plone) (Score:3, Interesting)
It took me a while to set up Zope/Plone. There's a nasty bug in Debian's distribution of Plone, but thankfully there's a super easy workaround in the BTS [debian.org]. It also took a couple visits to #plone@irc.gnu.org to set up an actual Plone instance, but in retrospect it wasn't that hard. I got the Apache passthrough working
Database Connectivity (Score:3, Interesting)
How does it compare to eZ? (Score:2)
Re:How does it compare to eZ? (Score:1)
Plone is big, it's a full Intranet-in-a-box. If EZpublish is enough for your site, you don't need Plone.
But you should do this (I did it). Take one or two days and prepare 2 mock websites (a standard corporate site and a community/portal site). Download a few 'CMS' and try them with these sites. It seems obvious but you'll discover a lot not only about their capabilities but the way you're at ease with them or not.
If EZ Publish is too little you should check Drupal. But test
LIES! (Score:1)
It's dangerously unstable (Score:2, Interesting)
It would make far more sense, to me, to store things in separate files. That 'all your eggs in one basket' thing, you know.
Re:It's dangerously unstable (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's dangerously unstable (Score:1)
Re:It's dangerously unstable (Score:2)
If this incident is a KO criteria for you, I'd suggest you reconsider your evaluation strategies.
I'll bet my right arm that a corrupted ZopeDB File is easier to restore than a corrupted Outlook file. The other difference between them being that Outlook has a huge track record of being unstab
Re:It's dangerously unstable (Score:1)
For All It's Merits... (Score:2, Informative)
Incorrect on both counts... (Score:2)
Mailing lists [plone.org] (or nntp/www via GMANE) are where all the discussion lives. Between the Plone users, developers, archetypes lists etc, I would guess about a volume of 600 messages a month, and equally that volume on the various Zope lists. The community discussion is VERY active.
Resource hungry? Yes, well so is PHP, JSP, and any other system relying upon a VM. You can serve pages statically out of Zope, even from the filesystem, with the right add-ins. And by simply spending 5 minutes adjusting your ca
Re:Incorrect on both counts... (Score:1)
You're missing my point. If you want to showcase a product such as a CMS, then make your site show it's features so that users can see these features in action. Why can't a forum discussion module be built into Plone? Why can't it get a feed from GNAME and incorporate it into Plone. Show us what it can do. What this says is "It's too difficult" or "we don't consider discussion forums worthwhile". Doesn't really make sense. From a community point of view Plone.org still looks like a ghost town to me (r
Re:Incorrect on both counts... (Score:2, Insightful)
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 larg