Dec 29 2004
Plone Again?
I’ve been creating a lot of reports at my new job, using ReportLab and pyntkit [1]. It’s been great to a) be so productive, and b) use so much Python.
It seems like there’s a lot of potential task “sweet spots” here that could use some sort of content management / workflow tool. This all coincides very well with a recent Slashdot review on two new Plone books, which led me to the online Plone Book. I’ve gone back and forth with Zope, and have usually thrown up my hands in frustration. There’s a fair number of entries in this blog about these two frameworks, and all the re-designs I’d planned to do using them. Each and every one was ultimately backed out in favor of a more mundane, but easier to understand LAMP architecture.
A few months ago I picked up Webware, and have been very happy with it. It’s great for a lot of the programming I want to do, but doesn’t have a lot of the bells and whistles that Plone does. Which is another reason I like it. With Plone, the sheer number of bells and whistles gets kind of confusing if all you want to do is make a simple application. Plone also requires you to pretty much give your site over to it. I’m not sure it’s realistic to have a portion of your site be straight static stuff, and the rest be Plone. It’s much more of a complete solution.
The worst part about the b&w (bells and whistles) was the terrible documentation. I’m a relatively bright guy, I enjoy new things, but the learning curve on Plone / Zope was atrocious, largely because there just weren’t any good books on the market that could explain the system to me in a way that made sense to me. They all seemed to gloss over big chunks of important stuff.
And yet, despite my frustration, Zope and Plone have continued to grow. The Plone sites page is tremendously impressive. So, after checking out this new (June 2004) Plone book, I’m starting to believe that I can actually make some useful stuff for work with Plone. We’ll see.
[1] – Dave and I are really close to releasing an actual “release” on pyntkit. I’m working on documentation. As you can see, I’m the kind of person that hates poorly documented tools.
