With so many open source CMS to choose from, how can you find one that meets
the needs of your organization? This workshop will explore the features and
functionality of Plone, a popular open source content management system. We
will also compare it to other CMS such as Mambo, Drupal and PostNuke.

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Presenter: Nate Aune, Jazkarta.com
Notes by: Alison
A Plone Boot Camp will be offered later this year. Contact Nate for more information.

Attendees wanted to cover - templates, scalable,

What is plone?

• open source content management system
• freely downloadable with GPL license
• international development community

Who is using plone?

• Oxfam America
• US Aid
• United Nations
• National Health Services (UK)
• Open Source Development Labs
• Greenpeace
• Street Football World
• Mars Rover Site from NASA
• votewatch.us
• publicknowledge.org
• humanrightsnetwork.nz

Why plone? Compared to other CMS

• has all the basic content management features
• workflow tool
• 100+ add-on products
• features include full-text searching and indexing and syndication
• designer friendly
  • xhtml-validated templates
  • change site with css
  • designers and coders can work simultaneously without stepping on the others toes
• easy to use
  • strong focus on end-user
  • most users need minimal training
  • drag-n-drop uploading of content (with user account and webdav connection)
  • word doc transformed into html, jpeg into photo object which generates thumbnail

• accessibility
  • Section 508 compatible
  • W3C's AA rating for acessibility
  • only cms that works well for blind people
• modular
  • solid foundation
  • add and remove plug-ins with one click
  • extensible as your needs grow
• scalable
  • apache in front which proxies requests to plone
  • ZEO (zope enterprise objects) - load balancing
  • pound
  • Squid - where you're going to get slashdotted

• multilingual
  • translated out-of-the-box into 40+ languages, more than other CMSes
  • supports left-to-right languages

Notes:

• Oxfam America's phone site raises 14 million. It got almost half of its yearly visits after the tsunami disaster.
  
• Plone was named after a band.
  
• Plone has a steep learning curve.

What about support?

• free support
  • mailing lists/newsgroups
  • IRC chat (average 120 users in channel at a time)
  • plone.org/documentation

• commercial support
  • opensourceexperts.com
  • zope.org

• Books
  Definitive Guide to Plone
  • Building Websites with Plone
  • Plone Content Management Essentials

And hosting?

• self-hosting
• free hosting
  • objectis.org
  • ingenihosting.com

• commercial hosting
  • settai.net
  • imeme.net
  • nidelven-it.no/hosting
  • interlix.com

What can Plone do? - Answer

• workflow - DCWorkflow
• Mac - (connect to server), Windows - (name unknown)

Demos