[ZWeb] Zope 2 web site

[Martin Aspeli]

Chris Withers <chris <at> simplistix.co.uk> writes:


> Yup, you've hit the nail on the head. But, Plone has proved itself to 
> require more maintenance than its predecessor.

You mean Plone has, or the way that Plone was put in place has?
 
> I've changed my opinion on this over the last year to be inline with 
> Jens and Andrew: dump the lot, start again...

Or at least section it off to e.g. old.zope.org and lock that down.

> > * The site should be built largely with off-the-shelf components. 
> 
> Not even. It should be absolute positively minimal, fully documented and 
> _everything_ should be svn'ed. Zope.org suffers from having zero people 
> with time and inclination to maintain it. That's the real problem here. 
> Last time Plone was touted as the silver bullet for that, and we can see 
> how well that turned out...

So the problem was either Plone itself, or it was the way in which Plone was
implemented and customised.

> > later would make all of us look better.  PloneHelpCenter and
> > PloneSoftwareCenter work well now. 
> 
> Honestly, flat html files in Apache would probably work better and be 
> easier to maintain...

Depends on whether you want a single person to maintain it (and deal with skin
consistency etc.) or if you want to re-invigorate some community involvement.
plone.org/products and plone.org/documentation works very well because it
provides a well-defined, restricted set of content types that people can
contribute with, in a restricted location. If you want to contribute
documentation, it's easy to see where you do that, there's a review cycle, there
are tools to manage that content. Same with add-on products and modules - it
gives you a place to store, promote and manage the code you want to contribute.
By making it easy to contribute products and documentation, we've ultimately
made Plone a better and more useful system for our users. I don't see why this
shouldn't be the same on zope.org.

> > * The site should be built with software that is actively maintained
> > independently of a zope2.org site. 
> 
> I think it should be built off either a default distro of Zope 2 or of 
> Zope 3. That said, I think Zope 2.9+ covers both those bases...

So it's better to build a custom CMS from scratch just for zope.org?

The thing that confuses me is that community-oriented sites like zope.org and
plone.org, which I hope you'll agree serve very similar purposes, is probably
the one use case that Plone handles better than all others, out of the box.
plone.org on plone 2.1, on a proper server and with a proper sysadmin now that
we have wiggy has been extremely stable, easy to manage and has
community-oriented components (the documentation and products sectios in
particular) that have re-invigorated community involvement and made Plone more
accessible to people more peripheral to the system. I can't see how zope.org
needs anything more than plone.org + a custom skin, the type of thing that Plone
developers build for their customers every day (and maintain for their customers
down the road). And there is a site there at the moment, that works, that proves
that the technology works. So why re-invent it?

Martin