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 Are Zope-based products really usable?
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Posted by on Saturday September 13, 12:10PM, 2003
from the dept.
I have been looking for a good-yet-cheap CMS for some time, yet the various Open Source offerings do not seem to provide the same functionality or ease of use as the commercial ones do.
Is this just a matter of perception? I know that few OS projects have good documentation or presentation, because they tend to be developers' playthings, rather than customer-oriented solutions. Yet I see examples like www.cbsnewyork.com and cybercentre.greenpeace.org, which give me some hope that 'user-friendly' sites can be developed.
So are Squishdot, Plone, etc. really any good? Can they compete with commercial offerings like www.membergate.com? Is customisation feasible, as for example a decent threaded Discussion Forum module?
I can't find the answers to questions like these, yet there must be many other people wondering about the same issues. The potential seems to be there, but finding out what really is possible (and 'sexy') is surprisingly difficult.
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Yes and No
by on Wednesday September 17, 02:33PM, 2003
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They really are that good, just maybe not that well packaged. All of the Zope options you mentioned are fully customisable once you learn the necessary scripting and templating languages.
Squishdot, for example, is just such a Discussion Forum module...
I'm suprised you can't find the answers, since they're staring you in the face in the sites you list that are implemented using the technologies you mention :-) Look at https://squishdot.org/sites.html for a list of Squishdot sites.
One intersting point. I've never heard of "MemberGate". What happens when they go bust? With open source, you have the source code and can find someone to maintain it or do it yourself. That simply isn't an option with commercial offerings...
Anyway, do reply if you have more questions :-) |
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Re: Yes and No by on Friday September 19, 01:27PM, 2003
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:-) by on Thursday September 25, 02:42PM, 2003
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Re: Yes and No by on Monday October 27, 05:53AM, 2003
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Re: Yes and No by on Thursday April 20, 04:56PM, 2006
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WTF is your major malfunction? by on Friday April 21, 02:58PM, 2006
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Re: Are Zope-based products really usable?
by on Friday September 19, 03:19PM, 2003
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| Plone is really the best thing since sliced bread CMS-wise espacialy with EPOZ as WYSIWYG Editor. Most things you need are allready included (like publishing Workflow), easy to skin/theme and it is easily exensible. Have a look through the News at plone.org and find out what products are available. Most of them just run out of the box only little customization is needed. It can compete and even outperform comercial solutions. the major drawback is the poor documentation. A nice Boardsystem is available on www.zoper.net |
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The problem with Plone... by on Thursday September 25, 02:44PM, 2003
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Re: The problem with Plone... by on Wednesday October 08, 05:43PM, 2003
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Re: Are Zope-based products really usable?
by on Saturday September 27, 11:27PM, 2003
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Zope products are excellent. Easy to modify, scalable and stable. Zope documentation is notoriously bad, but having said that, the community, which can be tapped through mailing lists, is extremely knowledgeable and helpful. Plone is a great out of the box product, but uses Page Templates, which (in my opinion) give no benefit and add a layer of complexity. Squishot currently does not use ZPT (Zope Page Templates) and is a great, customizable product. My site, modscape.com, is a Squishdot site and shows that they all don't have to look the same. Customizing Zope products is basically only limited by your creativity. One of the main reason I love Zope is the flexibility it allows me. That's from a guy who's primarily a designer, not a developer. In addition to all that, Zope and Squishdot are free. I'm not sure if you can get anything cheaper than that. :)
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Re: Are Zope-based products really usable?
by on Thursday November 06, 03:39PM, 2003
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Useable is dependent on what you are willing to do.
I teach in a small technical college and we teach Zope as the main tool in our course on CMS. I was hired primarily to teach that course and a follow-on course. In the CMS course we look at a lot of instant website products including Squishdot.
I run a team project in that course that I call the Zero to Website Challenge. Students get about one week of class time (4-6 hours usually) to build a weblog on a given topic with customized appearance and sample content. We do this with Squishdot and I hav yet to be disappointed in the results. To date the students were taking this course at the same time they were taking HTML. So for many they had little or no HTML skills when we started to tackle Zope. By the end of the quarter the had all built several websites using the various tools. Some of those projects have become working websites for organizations the students are involved in.
One other thing about Zope, with a little effort from a knowledgable Zope developer its possible to integrate several Zope products. In class last quarter we extended Squishdot with the exUserFolder to create a simple membership option and added RDF Summary to show a feed from another site.
Its all about flexability.
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The speed challenge... by on Friday December 12, 06:16PM, 2003
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