[Zope-CMF] CMF or Plone Applications?

[David Pratt]

With recent discussion on Plone concerning the GPL, it has me 
considering where I ought to be putting my future effort since anything 
connected to Plone would need to be GPL from what I am hearing.  At 
this point, it hasn't been an issue for any application delivering 
services through Plone (which is fine) but the notion of distributing 
software is another question all together.

I have had ideas for something other than using Plone in the future to 
this end and the ZPL seems more friendly since I can distribute a 
complete application this way without licensing issues.

I have been digging in to Plone and the CMF for just over a year and 
continue to learn more all the time.  Many, if not most of the ready 
made products that I want to use, are CMF products with ZPL licensing.  
In addition, with Plone, I have found that I want to go beyond minor 
customizations of the templates to changes that will simplify much of 
the base I wish to build from.  I have been creating skin products to 
give me what I want in the way of templates and CSS.  I have also had 
some concerns about the responsiveness of Plone even with an Apache 
front end and feel that something lighter would work better for 
applications I may want to develop in the future. Smaller headers, 
simplified CSS, and lighter templates together with caching is perhaps 
the direction I feel I ought to be going.  I guess at this stage I am 
wondering whether I should continue bending Plone to what I want to do 
in an application or simply acknowledge that Plone is better for a 
generic portals and go a different route on application development 
with CMF and Zope alone.

Maybe good ZPL-tableless Skin with simple portlet mechanism is all that 
I need to keep everything within the bounds of the ZPL and CMF both.  
Are there any efforts in this direction or would I be on my own with 
this.

The question is really one of making the leap. I guess this would mean 
a mechanism to display portlets, new portlet templates, and a bunch of 
templating to remove alot of the tables from the ZPT default templates 
and using GRUF.  What else would be missing?  Is this a bit insane?  
Perhaps anyone that has contemplated this or work in CMF as opposed to 
Plone could provide their feedback.  Many thanks.

David