[Web4lib] Drupal & Plone

[Darci Hanning]

I've been developing with Plone since last November (it's the core of our Plinkit webhosting/CMS solution for Oregon public libraries). I would agree that if you want to heavily customize the look/feel and/or feature set of Plone and you're not using other skins or add-ons (Products in Plone parlance) that are readily available for Plone, then the learning curve can be a bit on the steep side for the developer. The good news is that the look/feel of Plone is completely CSS driven. The bad news is that it's completely CSS driven ;-)

The upside of Plone is that it is infinitely customizable, especially around roles and workflows that can be adapted for any use case. And the Plone community is uber-friendly (as long as you communicate that you've tried to figure it out on your own first ;-) in both the mailing list (archived) and on irc.

Additionally, for content providers, it's a breeze to use -- comes with a WYSIWYG editor used through a web browser by navigating to the page to be modified or navigating to the folder to add new content and having at it ;-)

You can see one example of a public library district project using Plinkit/Plone with a fairly different look/feel -- a free skin that can be downloaded from plone.org. All I had to was install it and change the default banner. See: http://unioncounty.plinkit.org/

I can't speak for Drupal as I have never used it. As others have stated, it's based on PHP/MySQL so if those are familiar technologies, that might be the way to go.

--
Darci Hanning
Technology Development Consultant
Library Development Services
Oregon State Library
250 Winter St. NE
Salem, OR  97301
503-378-2527
darci.hanning at state.or.us  

> -----Original Message-----
> From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org 
> [mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of 
> Lawrence Milliken
> Sent: Tuesday, August 08, 2006 9:21 AM
> To: Web4lib at webjunction.org
> Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Drupal & Plone
> 
> I've been working on a redesign of our library website using 
> Plone and have really liked working with it.  The learning 
> curve for the developer, if you are doing much customization, 
> is kinda steep but for most normal user Plone is easy to work with.
> 
> If you want to write custom products it helps if you have 
> access to someone with a little Python but you can teach 
> yourself too if you have to.  And the developer community is 
> extremely helpful.  
> 
> It is also caches and proxies behind Apache very well, which 
> you would definitely want to do for production.  An company 
> called Enfold has a well regarded Windows installer and proxy 
> server for Plone as well but I run my Plone site on Ubuntu so 
> I haven't tried the Windows stuff myself.
> 
> A demo version (striped of almost all references to my current
> employer) of what I've been working on is available at 
> http://www.butterflysmack.com:9080/Plone if you'd want to 
> take a look.  It is on a friend's test server and is 
> unoptimised (i.e. slow). 
> Hopefully the real production version will be up at my school 
> sometime this year (the issues with it are political not 
> technical, btw).
>