Jon Stahl wrote:
> Thought y'all might be interested to see the results of GPs' recent
> evaluation of Plone vs. Drupal (vs Planet2, an in-house OpenACS solution).
>
>
http://importantprojects.com/archives/000084.php>
> Plone lost narrowly to Drupal. I offered some extensive comments to Rob
> Purdie, who ran the process (and is a friend). I think they misjudged
> Plone on a few key points, my comments on those are below.
So do I :)
> Nonetheless, their requirements are a VERY interesting read to get a
> sense of what a typical large NGO might be looking for in a CMS.
>
> Also it's interesting to note how hard the Drupal community worked this
> process:
>
http://groups.drupal.org/node/411>
http://groups.drupal.org/node/458Love those URLs :)
What's interesting is that we didn't know about this. I'd have loved to
have a discussion with them on plone-users or IRC, but I guess they
never went there. That's a pity, given some of their (probably
understandable) misconceptions.
> Very interesting food for thought.
>
> Here's the feedback I offered to Rob Purdie:
>
> ===============
>
> System scability: Plone A- , Drupal A.
> -- Not sure what that means to you, but Plone (well, Zope actually) has
> built-in multi-server clustering support and can scale almost infinitely
> in terms of traffic. Drupal, AFAIK, does not. Plus, it has the
> smartest caching technology out there (CacheFu) which dramatically
> speeds up performance.
The fact that there are huge systems running Plone should speak to
scalability. If you're talking scalability : hardware ratio, that may be
a different story.
> RSS Feeds: Plone A, Drupal A+
> -- Again, not sure why Plone would rate lower. Everything in Plone
> produces RSS, and you can construct RSS feeds for anything you can
> search for, which AFAIK is actually MORE flexible than Drupal.
No idea what their criteria may be...
> Be able to include HTML in any field of the CMS: Plone B-, Drupal A+
> -- I don't know what this means, but I think this is a pretty weak
> requirement. The whole point of a CMS is to separate formatting from
> content. Plone allows you to insert arbitrary HTML into page bodies.
> You can override styles locally if you want to configure Plone to allow
> that. Perhaps the evaluators didn't realize this -- Plone doesn't
> really advertise it. You certainly don't want to insert arbitrary HTML
> into metadata fields.
not to mention the fact that with ArchGenXML you could slap together
whatever fields you ever needed.
> Global Login: Plone B, Drupal B+
> -- Not sure what this means at GP, but Plone unlike Drupal, has a
> pluggable authentication system that can authenticate users against
> prety much anything. A single outlier rating made the difference.
Again, no idea what this means. What more could you want to integrate
with than LDAP, NLM and SQL user stores?
> reuse/leverage content: Plone F-, Drupal F-
> -- I know this was constructed for Planet2, but perhaps you weren't
> aware that Plone, using the PloneRSS product, can import content via an
> RSS feed and transform it into first-class content objects. That
> probably rates better than an F-, doncha think?
Which content? Migrating content from old systems is never easy, but
WebDAV/FTP loading at least makes it a bit easier for plain HTML.
> Product database: Plone B, Drupal A
> -- If you're talking about full-on e-commerce support in the CMS, Plone
> is definitely weaker there. But if you're talking about custom content
> types, I can't see how you one could rate Plone significantly lower than
> Drupal. Plone's Archtypes system for creating custom content types
> is second to none. Fields can be maintained through the web.
> Validation, UI and more are all specified in a single schema.
>
> Cross-browser support: Plone A, Drupal A+
> -- What is this based on? Plone is the most validatable,
> standards-compliant package out there. There was only one outlying
> rating on this, otherwise both would hvae gotten A+ across the board.
That's just silly.
> E-newsletter distribution: Plone C, Drupal A+
> -- You're giving Drupal an A+ because of CiviMail? Beta
> quality "developer only" code? Relying on any CMS for email newsletter
> distribution is pretty dodgy, IMHO. A serious organization like GP
> should be using a powerful hosted email newsetter distrbution tool such
> as WhatCounts, Vertical Response, etc. that offers serious
> deliverability, bounce management, etc. Plone plays nicely with these
> tools. A single outlier rating accounts for nearly all of the difference.
But true also, that there are few decent e-newsletter products. My
experience with this is that people just don't know what they want. I've
seen use cases along the lines of "I'd like to be able to post news,
collect them, and push them as a newsletter", but when it comes down to
it, the manual process they need to clean it up and send what they
really want reduces to copy-and-paste anyway. Managing a database of a
few hundred thousand email addresses, spamming them and tracking
responses is not the role of a CMS anyway, and you'd probably want
commercial hosted solutions for this if you do it at a large scale.
> extensibility: Plone A, Drupal A+.
> -- Not sure what this is based on. But to argue that Plone is any
> less extensible than Drupal is simply not true.
Also just silly - unless they're taking the ubiquity of the skillset
into account. It may be easier to find drupal experts than Plone ones
(at least cheaply).
> I'm surprised that GP didn't consider support for multi-lingual content
> as a requirement. Plone is of course very, very strong here.
>
> I'm also surprised GP didn't really consider versioning support. Plone
> is also very strong here.
Both good points.
It seems to me that they could be doing themselves a disservice by not
talking to the Plone community. What if they'd come on this list, or on
plone-users? I bet there would've been dozens if not hundreds of
responses from people eager to share experiences and dispel myths.
Oh well.
Martin
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