On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 03:09:42 -0600 Callum Lerwick <seg at haxxed.com> wrote: > The Plone development team is/was a total failure. Plone 1.0 was a > glimpse of what could be possible, but in reality it was completely > useless to anyone but Zope gurus who are able to hack the hell out > of it to make even minimally useful. Mind you, the selling point of > Plone is its supposed to be useable by completely non-technical > users... Heh - my first gig as an independant contractor was at a place in Champlain that used Zope/Plone to host about 2 dozen CMS sites. I was to create a new Plone Product for a digital library with a MySQL backend. It was interesting, but not a very nice learning curve (plus I don't pride myself in Python programming skills). Thankfully I had one of the Plone gurus who worked in the office at the time hold my hand through the entire process. <snip rants> :) > And Debian is a complete failure as usual for taking nearly a YEAR > to get 2.0 into UNSTABLE, yet they have Zope packages that are > terrible and don't even work out of the box in testing... For these kinds of tools I always do a source build instead - which I must say in Zope 2.7 has been improved quite a bit since 2.4/2.5 - I was able to install Zope 2.7 / Plone 2.0.5 in a fairly short amount of time recently without incident. Plone install is simply untarring and copying to the Products directory. I'm pretty much a Slackware convert now though so I don't mind this type of administration. :) <snip more rants> :) > The extensions out there are still kind of terrible. Is there a > Forum that doesn't suck? CMFBoard is the only actively developed one > I've been able to find, and its still a bit buggy and lacks such > essential features as being able to move topics to different > forums... I think Zope has this problem in general, products are not well maintained or do not cooperate with other products very well. I tried to install the Plone Collector product recently, but that required upgrading the Archetypes package, which when I tried to upgrade that caused havoc everywhere else. No notes in any Changelog about required package dependancies. DLL-hell in Zope! Documentation on many products is an absolute joke. Some Zope developers do a decent job, but many do not. Documentation in general on the Zope site is putrid (except for the books). Too many stale user contributed "HOWTOs" show up in the search engine, many of which are too outdated to be reliable. I always think someday I'll give Zope/Plone a longer look, but I just can't bring myself to trust its stability/maturity to make this leap. Now I'm ranting! Josh