[imc-cms] fwd: Re: [Plone-developers] Indymedia.org CMS Developers Survey - please read!

Sun Feb 11 10:54:53 PST 2007

----- Forwarded message from Jon Stahl <jon at onenw.org> -----

Date: Sat, 10 Feb 2007 23:08:38 -0800 (PST)
From: Jon Stahl <jon at onenw.org>
To: plone-developers at lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Plone-developers] Indymedia.org CMS Developers Survey - please
 read!

Ryan-

I'm not a "core" developer, but I am part of the team at ONE/Northwest who
have implemented nearly 100 sites for smallish environmental nonprofit
organizations.   So I can take a start at it, and let some of the more
experienced folks here try to fill in some more of the technical bits.

INDYMEDIA CMS DEVELOPERS SURVEY
Please fill in as many questions as you can. When you are completed,
you should email your responses to imc-cms at lists.indymedia.org

1) Survey Part 1 - Personal Details
   a) Your name?

Jon Stahl, ONE/Northwest (www.onenw.org)

   b) Your geographic location?

Seattle, Washington USA

   c) How long have you worked with Plone and what work do you do
      with the project?

We're a nonprofit technology & communications strategy shop that works with
environmental nonprofits here in the Pacific Northwest USA and British
Columbia, Canada.  We have developed around 100 Plone sites in the past 2.5
years. 

We're not core Plone developers, but we have contributed to and written
several add-on products for Plone.  In addition, we ran Plone Conference
2006, the fourth annual worldwide Plone community gathering, and have helped
start local Plone user groups in Seattle WA, Portland OR and Vancouver BC.

   d) Do you work on any other CMS projects?

Nop.

2) Survey Part 2 - CMS Basics
   a) What programming language is Plone written in?

Python.

   b) What is the backend database used by Plone?

The Zope Object Database (ZODB)

   c) Are there other servers required (application server, Tomcat,
      etc)?

Plone runs inside the Zope Application Server.  http://www.zope.org

   d) How do you describe the overall software design of Plone?

   e) Can you give details about real-world scaleability
      considerations for Plone?

The ZODB can handle hundreds of thousands of content objects.  A properly
configured and cached Plone site, fronted by Squid or Varnish, can handle
hundreds of requests per second.  Zope has clustering support via Zope
Enterprise Objects.  

I'm sure others on this list who have deployed big, fast Plone sites can say
more.

3) Survey Part 3 - CMS Functionality
   a) A core feature of our software is the ability for anonymous
      users to post media to appear on the site. Is this easily
      added to a site using Plone?

Yes.  Plone has a rich, fine-grained permissions and workflow system.

   b) Can you describe the site search functionality available?

Plone has built-in searching of all content.  Full-text indexing is handled
by several add-on Products.

   c) How is RSS/XML/RDF support included?

Plone supports RDF out of the box.  RSS 2.0 can be added via an add-on
product.

   d) We would like to have one server per site which allows many
      instances of actual websites, each with different admin logins
      and different websites altogether. Is this easy to set up with
      Plone?

Yes.  Each Zope instance can handle multiple Plone sites -- how many depends
on available server resources.  A server can have multiple Zope instances
(again limited by server resources.)  All sites within an instance share the
same add-on Products, which can either be a benefit or a limitation
depending on your use-cases.

   e) Can you describe the multimedia support in the software? We
      allow users to upload and manipulate online all types of media -
      mpeg, mp3, ogg, jpg, pdf, etc. 

This is handled via add-on Products.  You'd want to check out the
Plone4Artists bundle at http://plone4artists.org for more details.

   f) Internationalization is very important to us. Many of our sites
      support 2-3 or more languages. Can you describe how this is
      accomplished in Plone?

Plone has very strong internalization and localization features.  Plone has
been translated into over 35 languages.  It features extremely strong
support for multi-lingual content. The heart of Plone's i18n is an add-on
product called LinguaPlone. http://plone.org/products/linguaplone.  

The GNOME web team recently chose to use Plone, in large part because of its
i18n features.  See http://live.gnome.org/GnomeWeb/CmsRequirements/PloneEval
for their eval.

   g) What types of anti-abuse or anti-spam measures are in the code?

   h) Is there a calendar included in the codebase? 

Yes

   i) How do you describe how a user would edit a given piece of content
      on the website, or briefly describe the model used in this part
      of the functionality?

You go to where you want to edit, login, and edit content in place with a
WYSIWYG editor.  (You can login first, too.) 

   j) How do you describe any type of user moderation system that
      is built into Plone?

None. This would be custom programming.

   k) What types of integration is there with P2P networks?

Unsure.

   l) Another important feature for us is networking between the
      websites. If we want users from one website to have rights on
      another website in the network, how could we do this?

Plone's PAS (Pluggable Authentication System) could enable this.  The most
common way that larger Plone customers do this seems to be by setting up an
LDAP server and authenticating against it.  There are probably other ways to
do this as well.

   m) We are concerned with the ability to easily rsync pages from a
      website to other servers and setup a type of mirroring scheme.
      How would this be accomplished with Plone?

Probably via CMFDeployment.

4) Survery Part 4 - Miscellaneous
   a) What do you believe are the top selling points for Plone?

Ease of use, internationalization, accessibility, software quality, ease of
doing complex customizations.

   b) From what you know about the Indymedia network, how well do you 
      think IMC would mesh with the development community for the CMS?

I think IndyMedia probably has a lot of people whose primary web development
experience is PHP and a relational database.  Plone isn't PHP, and the ZODB
isn't a relational database.  That will probably freak you out at first. ;-) 

But the Plone community is a pretty amazing group of smart, productive
people who do great work together in an open, democratic and consensus
driven way.   So is IMC.  

   c) What are the top 3 areas you believe the development team for
      the CMS needs to be improved?

I wouldn't change much about the core Plone development team -- they are
smart, fun and talented.  There is always the need for more talented
developers who are serious about producing, maintaining and documenting high
quality software.  

   d) Where do you see Plone in five years?

Everywhere. :-)

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