[Grok-dev] Re: maintaining the Grok website

[Kevin Teague]

+1 for using Plone 3.

If Grok continues improving at it's current rapid pace, it's hopeful  
- and i think possible :) - that within a few years we could have a  
content base that compares with the size of current plone.org site  
(7400+ content items). With that much content and the level of  
traffic to that content, any other solution than using a polished,  
popular CMS is going to have it's very painful moments.

We also have the opportunity to out do some our competition, who are  
dealing with the same problem of wanting to first build a CMS using  
their framework, then use that CMS to manage their web site. I find  
Pylons attitude of, "We like the Confluence wiki, and we're okay with  
using that for our site even if it's not written in Pylons, or even  
Python" much more appealing than the prevailing trend in say the Ruby  
on Rails community where there is a very strong push to use only Ruby  
on Rails solutions for application needs. Using non-Grok solutions is  
good in that it has the positive message of saying, "We are not so  
insular and infatuated with our framework that we don't think our  
other open source web developers aren't building interesting and cool  
things too."

I do think that there is a place for building a CMSes in Grok though  
- especially as a lighter weight CMS alternative to Plone but still  
making use of all the lovely Zope 3 technologies available. But for  
me when I play with Grok, I am really much more interested in  
building non-CMS apps.

Using Plone and Grok apps are also not mutually exclusive. We can  
also use Plone to manage much of the content (About, Docs, etc.) on  
the site, but still host portions of the site using showcase Grok apps.