[Zope-CMF] CMF Usabiltiy

[P Kirk]

Jim Pharis wrote:

>CMF'ers,
>
>I am curious if CMF has gone through any usability testing. If so, is
>the data available?
>
>Have any of you out there compiled any usability documentation on CMF
>that I can use?
>
>Thanks, Jim
>
>
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>
>See http://collector.zope.org/CMF for bug reports and feature requests
>  
>
I use another CMS at work and am just learning Zope in my spare time. 
 Compared to the one at work, there are things missing from Zope like a 
tree structure manager, proper ways to import files and images 
(especially images which need to be resized - you need a seperate app to 
resize them which the server should do for you) and use of the wysiwyg 
editting component of IE5 and above.  

An odd thing is that in Zope if you move stuff from folder to folder, 
links that refer to it break while in a commercial CMS the links would 
simply carry on working as all the items of content are in a database. 
 But how often is that a real problem?

In fairness, open source products are rarely usable without a lot of 
hard work.  If we were willing to pay $40,000 each for Zope, it would 
still still cost less than a commercial CMS yet it would have usability 
and documentation that matches the best and probably a consultant to 
come out and install it to our needs.  But none of us will pay that 
money even if we could afford it because Zope is usable enough that we 
can get it to work without consuming $40,000 worth of our time.

That's my opinion anyway.