No subject

rather solid.

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

LimeWire is a participating developer of our community, or was, and at
one point talked about adding support for Plone / Zope to run as a
torrent tracker for vodcasting and the like.  I think this would be
easier if Zope's integration with the Twisted networking toolkit in
2.10/11 were to improve.  As I understand, it works very well, but I
don't entirely get the impression it is quite flexible enough to allow
use of Twisted protocol implementation in ZServer.

>    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?

You could invest in improving the behaviour of Plone for "Acquired"
users - those which come not from the current site, but from a level
above.  You can also look into tools like SubPlone which are designed
to make portions of a site all sharing one membership, search, etc..
appear as separate sites, and you can use something like LDAP or a
centralized SQL database.  Some people have even shared login cookies
between Plone and legacy applications so that logging into one
application with the browser keeps them logged into any.

>    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?

You can use CMFDeployment to push a static version of anonymous
content.  Better than this type of mirroring would probably to geo
load balance, but I'm not sure how much work has been put into
determining if this is possible.  Zope Corporation sells a proprietary
solution which could theoretically be used for this purpose, but it's
not in use on plone.org, zope.org, etc..  I really have to wonder why.

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

Architecture, Scalability, User-Orientation, Accessibility,
Internationalization, Flexibility

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

Just took a look at the site, I think indy media folks will enjoy
working with Plone.  Some of our developers go to SXSW and/or are
producers of independent media themselves.

My primary gig for the past couple of years has been ACM SIGGRAPH, the
international organization for generation and dissemination of
information on computer graphics and interactive techniques, which has
strong connections to all corners of the media industry.

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

Too many excuses from Plone 1.0 are still prevalent today, too many
people subversively push away new contributors in the community, in a
very territorial manner.  There is too much assimilation into a mode
of thinking that things which are difficult to do in Plone are
*probably* being done "Wrong" anyway.

Have you ever heard of the "Tyranny of Competence"?  The Zope
community has always suffered from it in a bad way, Plone improved
upon that but also took a few too many lessons from the story of Zope,
IMO.  Essentially too few people hold the keys, and while it is great
to work in a community of people who are generally nice, all too often
you have to make friends with people to even get access to
documentation or updated code.  Everyone will state that if you don't
like the way Zope or Plone does things, they are designed to be
replaced bit by bit, but there is often very bad documentation in this
area.

There are some long-standing issues IMO with Zope Corp.'s sole control
of the f/oss project, the Zope Foundation has been slow in forming,
was based on lessons from the Plone Foundation which I think is rather
flawed, and the new Chairman of the foundation who just took power is,
as far as I can tell, sort of a schmuck, if not a nice and very smart
guy.  I'm not sure he's a politic-ninja.

>    d) Where do you see Plone in five years?

Hopefully running on more application server platforms[1] with less
dependence on private XML schemas.

Drop me a line if you want some strategy help.

[0] http://pythonology.org/success&story=rackspace
[1] http://www.openplans.org/projects/pu

-- 
Justizin
Director of Application Architecture
Auxilium Group / Gnudyne(tm)

"Without struggle, there is no progress"
  -Frederick Douglass