Plone

Plone is one of, if not the, oldest open source content management systems around. Plone is build on top of Zope, an application server written in Python. Plone was the subject of this month's talk at the GTALUG meeting. The presenter was Jordan Baker, who specializes in Plone deployments.

Plone is really intended for large scale, enterprise sites, so while you could use Plone for a personal blog, it would be serious overkill. Plone is very easy to get running, which is major selling point in a enterprise setting, when you can safely promise the site will be working the next day.

Now, I've heard an anecdote that it might take another six months to customize the site if the customer has any special requirements, but all of Plone's core functionality is completely usable during the customization. According to the anecdote, this is the main reason Plone consultants are very well paid. ^_^

Jordan tempted the demo gods and demonstrated a beta of Plone 4, which looks very slick. However, this type of admin interface is available in Drupal, Joomla, and others, which naturally led to the question of why choose Plone. Jordan gave a number of reasons but the the most telling was that he likes Python, which indicated that the choice was more personal than technical. And there's nothing wrong with that at all.