[Web4lib] Plone

[Thomas Bennett]

Our library has been using Zope since 1998 which Plone is a product that runs 
on Zope.  I've created various Plone sites for special purpose use such as 
Library faculty pages, podcast test, General Education Task Force, Library 
Reference Wiki, and others.   There are some here wanting to move the Library 
site to CMS on Plone now.

Zope/Plone can be run stand alone but it is safer to run Apache or Squid and 
Apache in front of Zope and use Virtual Hosts from Apache.  Using Virtual 
Hosts allows you to setup multiple URLs for one Zope instance.  Also, you can 
separate the components of Zope and run the Zeo storage server and Zope 
becomes a client of the storage server.  Running Zeo allows you to run 
multiple Zeo servers and or multiple Zope clients for fail over and/or 
redundancy. Zope can be configured to communicate to multiple Zeo servers and 
if the first client configuration fails to communicate it will fail over to 
the second client communicating to another Zeo server.  Multiple Zeo servers 
can connect to the same object database to allow distribution of the load.  
Caching is available through Plone with Cache-Fu and can also be set up in 
Zeo server.  Google Zeo Server for some helpful sites.  With my experience I 
have found many helpful support outlets for Zope and Plone with the two main 
outlets being the plone list and irc channel.

Between Plone and Drupal, I think your main concern should first be do you, or 
your support people, want to support PHP or Python.  With Zope all of the 
objects are in an object database, one file on the file system, and you can 
use database adapter products to connect to other databases such as 
PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, ODBC, and others to use data already stored and/or 
in use on these databases.  With PHP each page is on the file system directly 
and you can connect to the popular databases also.

In Plone there are multiple choices for blogs, wikis or other products, I 
don't know about Drupals choices.

They are both Open Source and free and I would say download and install both 
and start making pages, add wikis, blogs, etc and see which one allows you to 
do what you want to do or at least which one allows you to almost do what you 
want. ;-)  

Thomas





On Saturday 09 June 2007 07:34, Andrew Hankinson wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> I've been given the task of evaluating Plone for a small-to-medium
> size research website.  Having never used it in production, (only
> just playing around with a local demo) I'm not quite sure of its
> capabilities.
>
> Is there anyone out there who uses Plone and likes it?  How does it
> compare to Drupal? (the CMS that I do know).  Any and all thoughts
> would be appreciated!
>
> Andrew
> _______________________________________________
> Web4lib mailing list
> Web4lib at webjunction.org
> http://lists.webjunction.org/web4lib/

-- 
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Thomas McMillan Grant Bennett		Appalachian State University
Operations & Systems Analyst		P O Box 32026
University Library				Boone, North Carolina 28608
(828) 262 6587

They say a picture is worth a thousand words.  As videos could be 25 pictures 
per second and might last several minutes, how many words is that? 
- Linux Journal, July 2007

Library Systems Help Desk: http://www.library.appstate.edu/help/
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