python.org CMS

[Tim Hoffman]

Hi Aahz

I have been actively devloping with Zope for 4 years now and I think it 
is a good solution. Admittedly most of the applications and sites I have
developed with it have not utilised Plone but almost all have been based 
on CMF, the work I have done with plone makes me feel it is a good 
platform to build/base python.org on.

The only fly in the ointment I see (at least for an out of the box 
Plone/Zope deployment) is the requirement for the content to be in the 
filesystem.

Having said that, if you configure Zope with Directory Storage ( 
http://zope.org/Members/htrd/DirectoryStorage) then
the content would in fact be in the file system, so even that issue
is resolvable without much effort.

Zope/Plone workflow I think is more than adequate for what you want,
as well as its security capabilities. It just needs a little planning.

Lots of people say the learning curve is steep. Well I feel like any
sophisticated piece of software that is different from what you know,
has a steep learning curve, especially if it solves problems in 
radically different ways. Certainly for the sort of customisations
I could envisage you would want to make to a basic plone/zope config
it would not be likely to tax anyone too much, and I am sure there are
more than a few Zope/Plone gurus around who can lend advice. Most 
competant people I have worked with have been able to be quite effective
with Zope in a fairly short space of time.

my 2c worth.

Tim

P.S. I could probably volunteer some of my time (except whilst I am 
sailing from Darwin to Broome in a 40' cat next month. ;-)

P.P.S Plone won't cause a problem for Lynx. Have a look at the plone.org
site with Lynx to see.



Aahz wrote:
> The team for www.python.org is taking another crack at considering a
> content management system for handling the website's content.  This is
> particularly important considering, for example, how far beind we are in
> posting job ads -- getting the community to do our grunt work for us is
> the primary motivator.
> 
> Right now, Plone/Zope2 is the primary competitor simply because it's
> well-publicized, but none of us really has that much experience with
> websites whose core maintainers are going to be programmers.  ;-)  We'd
> like to know if there are other packages available that can do what we
> want; we're more interested in getting information about each package
> than in package comparisons.  We're also interested in hearing about
> experiences creating custom systems.
> 
> Here are the primary criteria that we're working with:
> 
> The data must be stored in a plain text format that would allow direct
> access if the main system was not functioning.  This doesn't necessarily
> imply the ability to circumvent a web based layer by editing text files
> directly, though there does need to at least be an easy way to export
> and import such files for people who want to use a Real Editor [tm].
> 
> Workflow is presumed to be a hierarchial publish reject model (in other
> words as simple as is possible to begin with).  We'll need both
> coarse-grained and fine-grained security (giving people a variety of
> access levels to large and small sections of the site).
> 
> The system needs to work with browsers that have limited functionality
> (i.e. Lynx).