Advice for a replacement for plone.

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Ken Seehart <ken at seehart.com> wrote:
>  I want a new python based CMS.  ... One that won't keep me up all night ....
> 
>  I've been fooling around with zope and plone, and I like plone for some 
>  things, such as a repository for online project documentation.  However 
>  for general-purpose web development it is too monolithic.  Is there 
>  anything out there with the following properties?
> 
>  0. Web page being developed is a typical small business home page (i.e. 
>  not a newspaper or a blog).
>  1. Page owner can edit pages on line with no expertise (plone does great 
>  here).
>  2. Main page does not look plone-like.  For an example of a main page 
>  that does not look plone-like, see http://www.arbitrary.com/  Note the 
>  lack of CMS style navigation widgets.
>  3. Item 2 should be reachable with nearly no effort (plone fails utterly 
>  here).
>  4. Target viewer (not the owner), should /not/ see something that looks 
>  at all like a CMS system, but rather see exactly what the page owner 
>  wants the page to look like.
>  5. Page owner should be able to view and navigate the tree of contents, 
>  and select pages to edit with a wysiwyg editor (plone does great here)...
>  6. ... But the target viewer should not see this tree.  See items 2 and 4.
>  7. Potential to add python scripted pages of various kinds.
> 
> <philosophy> There are a couple different design approaches to making a 
>  development environment.  You can let the developer start with nothing, 
>  and provide the developer with tools to create something (e.g. zope, 
>  most plain text editors), or you can start with a finished result and 
>  let the developer rip out and discard what is not desired (e.g. plone).  
>  I often prefer to start with nothing.  It's a natural starting point.  
>  Note that systems that are based on starting with nothing can provide 
>  the benefits of starting with something by providing templates and such. 
> </philosophy>
> 
>  I would love to see a system that would give me an editable Hello World 
>  page in under 5 minutes.  Hello World would be a page consisting of 
>  nothing but the words "hello world" (no tools, no navigation bar, and 
>  certainly no CMS navigation stuff) in a url such as 
>  www.myhelloworldwebsite.com/hello and a different url to edit the page, 
>  such as www.myhelloworldwebsite.com/hello/edit or 
>  www.mywebsite.com/edit/hello

Django + flatpages maybe?  Coming from the starting from nothing
approach.  There are links to some sites built with it in the docs
below.

  http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/ref/contrib/flatpages/

A bit more of a learning curve but you'll definitely be in charge.

Somebody used to Django could set up a flatpages site in 5 minutes
probably!  It will take you a couple of hours the first time though.

-- 
Nick Craig-Wood <nick at craig-wood.com> -- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick