[Zope-CMF] CMF Usabiltiy

[alan runyan]

> 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.

which CMS do you work with? The more feature comparisons we can get with
the big boys and we can 'cherry pick' from these commercial trees the
better ZOPE/CMF will be.

* a 'tree structure manager'?  this is fairly simplistic I believe.

* resizing images upon entry should take no more than 10 minutes of work
by using PIL.  There is also CMFImage that can help out.

* using the IE5 WYSIWYG editor is very subjective.  I personally dont like
it.  and highly recommend using JAVA WYSIWYG editors - they have a hope ofworking w/ Mac's.

> 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?

* this is actually something that should be addressed.  There are a few
ways of doing this.  but it probably will require really ugly regex's ;(
webchecker -- may be able to help.  but I dont see this as a huge problem
if you can check the links in your website.

what commercial CMS does do this?  Interwoven couldnt the last time I
looked at it.
> 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.

I completely agree.  I just quoted a 300M+ company to redo their
website and it was a less than 40k.  I even explained them that I could use
a commercial CMS and what the costs were involved.  they still picked
ZOPE/CMF/Plone.

~runyaga