Plone

Earlier today, Packt Publishing announced the winners of their 2008 Open Source CMS Most Valued People Award.  The MVP is a new category for Packt's annual Open Source CMS Awards.  In this category, "names were put forward by members of the Content Management System's development team and community and represent the exceptional support, guidance, and sheer amount of time that the MVPs have given up to support the development and growth of the respective CMS". 

Instead of just copying the winners list from Packt's site, I had hoped to do something different here. I started with a goal to look for each of the MVP's personal blog or project site,  I had hoped to find acknowledgments of the award was given by the MVP themselves or by someone else on their behalf.  Evidently I started searching a little too early and I only came across mentions of the awards from three four of the projects: Drupal (Earl Miles), Joomla! (Johan Janssens), and XOOPS (Onakazu). Plus... Plone.

Below are some excerpts from or about these open source MVPs.  If you are aware of more of the award winners recognizing or being recognized for their contributions...I would appreciate a link to the post.  Open source contributors like these MVPs deserve all the recognition we can give them.

Last October, Packt Publishing sent me one of their latest books on the Plone CMS, Professional Plone Development. This is a book I had been saving for review until I had a chance to install and use Plone myself. Plone is one of those CMS that I've really wanted to learn more about by installing it on the server myself. Unfortunately, too many things on my "I want" list have had to compete with my "I need" list and I never got around to installing Plone. With no Plone on the server, I unfortunately never got around to reviewing the Plone book written by Martin Aspeli either.

This book is aimed at "developers who want to build content-centric web applications leveraging Plone’s proven user interface and flexible infrastructure". Given the fact that I haven't installed Plone myself, I can't honestly give a thumbs-up or thumbs-down on the book. However, what I can do is talk a little about the book and let you decide for yourself if this book is worthy of your hard earned money.

Packt Publishing is creating quite an exciting week in the world of open source content management systems.  The publishing company announced the winner of their Best Open Source Other CMS Award and it's mojoPortal!

Packt can exclusively reveal the second category winner of the Open Source Content Management System Award as mojoPortal, winning Best Other Open Source CMS. In another tight category, mojoPortal came out ahead of Plone and Silva who came second and third respectively.

Congratulations to mojoPortal for recieving the award.  mojoPortal holds dear to CMS Report's heart on the simple fact that it's project leader, Joe Audette, really was the very first project leader that sent us an e-mail to call attention to his content management system.  I feel like we've grown up together.

I'm still in need to read this InfoWorld article in its entirety, but thought it was worth mentioning now.  InfoWorld's Mike Heck has written an article, Open source CMSes prove well worth the price, which reviews and compares five content management systems.  The five CMS under review are Alfresco, DotNetNuke, Drupal, Joomla, and Plone.

The good news is that all five CMS ranked Very Good or higher. However, Alfresco was the only CMS that ranked Excellent with a score of 9.2.  Plone 3.0 received the second highest ranking with a score of 8.6.  DotNetNuke and Joomla tied for third and fourth place with a score of 8.4 which put Drupal a fraction lower with a score of 8.3.  While none of these CMS ranked poorly, I'm sure the open source communities are bound to scrutinize over how the individual criteria were scored and ranked.

So, Python isn't really a CMS topic unless you're a Plone user.  However, as my world at work slowly moves from Python to Java as the language of choice...I'll promote this underdog open source language anytime.  From the IBM developerWorks site:

Last week, Plone 3.0 was released.  Plone is the content management system that runs on the Python-based Zope application server. The install of Plone is known to be very easy with Plone, Python, and Zope already packaged together in the installer.

Highlights to the new features/improvements in Plone 3.0 that the Plone team would like to stress via their announcement are listed below.   I provided links to further details on those features I thought needed a better explanation or were just too exciting to leave alone.

• Full version support, history and reverting to older revisions
• Improved performance
• Inline (Ajax) editing

The message below was originally posted as a comment here at CMS Report. Unfortunately, the comment was posted while I was switching the site over to a new server and just before the Memorial weekend holiday here in the United States. I'm afraid very few people saw the comment so I thought it should get more attention by posting the comment onto the "front page".

The author has narrowed his choice of content management systems for his project down to Plone, Apache Lenya, and Nuxeo 5. I'm not a user of any of the CMS listed so hopefully if you're reading this post you can spend a few minutes helping him out.

If you had to choose only one of the three CMS based on his requirements for the project he describes below...which CMS (Plone, Apache Lenya, and Nuxeo 5) would you choose? Please leave your comments belows!

Plone 3 beta 3 was released on Wednesday of this week.  The announcement posted at Plone.org also invited users, administrators, and developers to help test the new software.  Plone 3, built on the Zope application server, is nearing a year of development .  By the time the final version of Plone 3 is released you should see the following new features included in the content management system.

• Full versioning, roll-back capabilities, in-place staging (ie. working copy support) and locking for all content.
• Inline editing of content using Ajax.
• Link integrity checking and automatic handling of moved or renamed content.

I almost missed this one. Plone 2.5.2 was released a few days ago. Plone is a CMS written in Python (something I know a lot about) that is built on the Zope application server (something I know very little about). The Plone 2.5.2 release is a bug fixer for the following:

• LiveSearch
• Unicode handling
• External Editor
• IE7 rendering

The original announcement from Plone.org can be read here.

Developers and users of five content management systems (CMS) have been anxiously waiting for Packt Publishing to announce the winner of their Packt Open Source CMS Award. Packt Publishing is expected to announce on Tuesday, November 14th, the top three CMS along with the winner.

The winning CMS will get US $5,000, the second will get US $3,000 and the third placed finalist will get US $2,000.

As I mentioned a couple months ago, the top five CMS were nominated by the public are all that remain eligible for the award. Those five CMS include: