[Zope-dev] Re: The bleak Future of Zope?

[Max M]

Joachim Werner wrote:

> The problem of Zope 2 is - don't kill me for saying that - Plone. Plone 
> and its foundations in CMF have created a large momentum around a 
> terribly horrible code base. Believe me or not, almost everything gets 
> more complicated with CMF/Plone than with plain Zope. Building a 
> framework on top of a broken framework on top of an ageing framework 
> that is hardly documented isn't a very good idea after all.


You are somewhat right. It's an absolute bitch to write Products for 
Plone. But it does shows what is actually needed for Zope to work as 
intended.

In plain Z2 You could write a lot of products, and they would all work 
fine on your site. But others could not easily download and use/try out 
the products.

What Plone really is a good example of, is the necessity of a practical 
reference implementation that all content types and tools can be tested 
up against.

It the light house that everything is steering towards. I believe that's 
the reason for it's succes.

It's hard to put a finger on exactly why it has become one. But 
obviously it has reached critical mass of being "good enough" for a lot 
of things. It is also flexible enough to be changed beyond recognition.

So both novice users and developers can use it with a lot of succes.

A short list of things that I think makes it an end user succes (even 
advanced developers are end users of others products):


The skin
--------

Notably main_template.pt & plone.css. It is absolute paramount to have a 
flexible template/styleguide to write up against. It has to be pretty 
enough to be used in production site out of the box, and easy to change.

The CMS' skin apparently wasn't good enough.

A site can be layed ot in umpteen ways, but the Plone guys has said 
"this is how we think it should look and function", and put a working 
example out there. Apparently that has been a very succesfull strategy.

There is also several layers at which it can be changed. From 
stylesheets to programming. So it can look completely different. But 
ther reference is allways there as a guide.


Installation
------------

It is easy to install and try out new products, and they all work 
together, and all use the same skin. So if you install a new product it 
automatically has the look and feel of your site. Even though the site 
is heavily skinned.


Development process
-------------------

Quick and non-bureaucratic. The Plone developers are pretty open for 
suggestions, and hang out on irc and maillists.

There is a shared repository (the collective) for 3'rd party products. 
Which gives a good sense of comunity



There is a lot of stuff that could be different in Plone, but on a basic 
level they got the right solution for making it possible to do 
distributed development of products that can still work together.



regards Max M