plone "vs." CMF was (Re: [Zope] What New Zope...)

[Ausum Studio]

> (...)
>
> And after customizing Plone for ZopeZen, I have to say its a lot better
base
> to start with on anything CMF related. The skin is now a tenth of the
size.
> --
>   Andy McKay
>   www.agmweb.ca
>

I like Plone's graphic design, but after diving into the guts of CMF's
default skins and compare them to Plone's I still need to know whether Plone
is much more than a set of templates over zpt templates, or not. (I must
confess I haven't read any of the documentation but I did installed many of
its releases including Andy's installer.)

When I look at Plone I see its graphic designer's decisions all over the
site. Ok, I know I can chage many of them by modifying the stylesheet, but
if want other kind of modifications, if I want to have the commands at
different places than its defaults, for instance, I still need to perform
them skin by skin, am I right?.

In my humble opinion there's still room for a new general-purpose CMF skin
that takes over the repetitive tasks during the skin customization process,
without the usual constraints that come as a result of being template-based.
Something like a skin-control layer that allows developers to focus on
features rather on just code, but powerful enough to allow every level of
per-case customization, when needed.

I agree that Plone has suceeded at driving people's attention to CMF/Zope,
but from a developer point of view I should tell, IMHO again,  Plone neither
can be opposed to CMF, neither Plone is CMF.  :)


Ausum