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On Tuesday 15 February 2005 5:53 pm, Matt Lee wrote:
No I don't want to stick to php! What I also want is to avoid tables! Most systems sort the display of data out by using tables. I wanted to avoid tables and use css to sort the data!You want Plone. Seriously.
Having tested Zope/Plone for use with our own website, I have to temper Matt's enthusiasm a little. Plone can do the non-table layouts using CSS but only in a limited way - the templates and final appearance of the site are quite rigid. Despite lots of claims that the single (75Mb) data file for Plone is transferable between installations (for backup / testing purposes etc.), I was unable to get any data files to operate on alternate systems. Whichever direction I tried, it failed - not "that looks a bit odd" but "HTTP 403 Forbidden" or "HTTP 500 Internal Server Error", other cryptic Plone engine errors and simple "unauthorised" messages. Plone does not integrate well with other site features like an external archive, existing database scripts and external programs. You can extend it with Python but it cannot bring external non-Python content into the CMS pages. Plone also requires unusual changes to your Apache config that can break other sites or processes on the same server. I spent many hours getting Plone to operate on a test server and the installation instructions are confused and inaccurate in places. Personally, I found Plone was slow, cumbersome, difficult to secure, difficult to adapt and impossible to backup or transfer between sites. You may have noticed that the updated DCGLUG website doesn't use any CMS - it uses an enhanced version of the existing Wiki. I tested WordPress, Mambo and phpWebsite extensively. I trialled a wide range of other CMS tools and I liked only one - Catviz. It wasn't what we needed for DCGLUG but it appealed to me.
100% CSS, no tables for markup. Accessible, XHTML. In short: It rocks.
Until you need to work it in with non-Python external routines and until you want a backup of that immense Data.fs file. Sorry, Matt, our experiment with Plone has left me completely underwhelmed and I bitterly regret the MONTHS wasted on testing it. I should never have used Plone for the dcglug test website on my own server, I cannot recommend that anyone else tries it and I feel obliged to point out the horrors of my experience to those who ask for an honest recommendation. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.dcglug.org.uk/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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