Any tried Plone?

[zulufox]

Currently I use Mambo 4.5 as my CMS.

The reason that I wanted to use Mambo was because Mambo 5.0 was supposed to be just incredible (XML based design, huge feature list).

But the mambo dev team is only 5 or so people, so development is snail racing/nail growing slow.

Example:

Last May, (when mambo was at version 4.5) Version 5.0 was supposed to be released in beta form in August. Now it IS august and version 4.5.1 was just released in beta form. 5.0 is sounding more and more like vaporware.

So I started to look into Plone... but it is hard to find quality reviews of CMSs so I was wondering if anyone had any experiences with it.

[Warren]

I used Siebel when I worked for a Top IT company a few years ago. That was a great CMS but a big expensive for the average company to afford.

I would suggest that you list out exactly what you want from a CMS, in terms of what you need it to do in order to support your business. And then match up the various products out there that meet your requirements in your price point.

Many people see a CMS as a silver bullet. It isn't. In fact, Gartner quotes that around 70% of CMS implementation projects fail, mainly because the CMS doesn't mold to the business but rather they try and get the business to fit the CMS.

Warren

[ttishgar]

We use Plone as a sales portal to support over 200 employees. It replaced a static sales intranet that I built and managed by myself--that was a major headache! It enables our business users (Marketing, Finance, Legal, Client Services, etc.) to post information to a Web site without having to know much HTML. In other words, Plone helps to distribute the responsibility of keeping things up to date. The response so far (it has been up for almost a month) has been very positive to the change.

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU WANT TO SET UP PLONE:

It took a couple of weeks for me to get it running just like I wanted it to. That includes customizing the look/design of Plone--we wanted the look to match our branding standards. I also added Editize (a Java-based applet) so that our business users could futher format text on the Web site (replaces the main editing window). And lastly, I installed a few products/plug-ins to do things like polling the Sales team about new products, etc. Overall, I'm very satisfied with it. It is a GREAT portal solution!

THE BAD:

Plone is missing version control. I feel that this feature is important for large companies that want to keep previous versions of documents/create a paper trail. It does have an "undo" feature which is nice if you need to go back a few steps, but that's not powerful enough if you ever want to look at v1.1 of a document that is now in v5.6. It was not critical for us, so we're dealing without it.

FINAL THOUGHTS:

You must prepare to migrate all of your current content/documents into Plone. A CMS/Portal is a repository of information--once you're using it, you're USING it! Basically, you have to come to a decision that this is the right solution for you for awhile--you don't want to realize that your solution doesn't fit six months down the road as you'll need ot migrate all of your content OUT of this solution and into another one. What a painful mistake to make, especially if you have tons of content.

At the end of the day, I'd highly recommend Plone to you if you need/want to build a portal. It is a slick solutions that works well. And, the price is right! Of course, if you want a CMS (which is different from a portal), there are many other solutions out there that are either open source or closed source that are affordable for small companies/organizations. I'd suggest researching CMS solutions at [cmswatch.com...] - that was a great place for me to learn about the various CMS options.

Best of luck,
Tomer Tishgarten

[edited by: Woz at 2:27 am (utc) on Aug. 20, 2004]
[edit reason] No Sigs please, see TOS#13 [/edit]

[bakedjake]

Plone rocks. Done. :)

I'm a huge python fan, though. So I'm biased. But it really is sweet.