Re: Pier v. Plone

Lukas Renggli schrieb: Lukas, I only can speak for Plone not Zope. And I hope my statement wasn’t understood as an offensive. I would love to see that I’m wrong. I also have to correct my sentence. I had not in mind the pure functionality but the big picture with technical and non technical aspects (Plone vs. Pier). Sorry for not being precise enough. So when I compare a CMS with Plone I also look at: - Support/Community - there are 167 companies from 44 countries listed at plone.net who offer commercial support. I know there are a lot more. A lot of them help to improve Plone and/or write add ons. - Maturity - see the number of websites and how prominent some of them are that run with Plone (<http://plone.net/sites>). - Documentation - several books are available, you will find about 250 documents alone at <http://plone.org/documentation> (useful and comprehensive, most of them up2date (what’s not the default for a community driven Open Source project). You can join an annual conference (325 attendees registered 2006). Parts that are more related to functionality where I see a gap: - Internationalization - Plone supports over 35 languages including right-to-left languages out of the box when it’s installed. It has a good i18n framework and with LinguaPlone you can add the same conent in whatever language you need. - User Management - use Authentication Service (PAS) in Plone and manage your users in a database, LDAP, etc. (haven’t seen something similar for Pier). - Availability of more than 100 add on products that can be used from an end user (you don’t need to be a developer). Examples are full featured web shops, message board systems, registration systems, newsletter integration (details at <http://plone.org/products>). - Scalability - you get it out of the box with ZEO (run 1 to n Plone instances on one content database. Guess this is doable with Magma or Gemstone, but not today out of the box). - Full-text Searching - all the content is searchable even Word or OpenOffice documents and PDF files (with add ons under Linux also for Excel and PowerPoint and other file types). It would be nice if someone of the Pier core developer or a more experienced user than me (I must admit I only played around with Pier in the web-dev-images. So perhaps I missed some important points of Pier) could make an entry at <http://www.cmsmatrix.org/>. Then it’s easy to compare Pier to all the other CMS. IMHO Pier today is a powerful CMS framework for a Smalltalk/Squeak programmer. Plone at the other side is also made to be as easy as possible for an end user. Here I see a difference today. It would be interesting how other people position Pier against other popular Open Source CMS today (like Plone, Drupal, Joomla, etc.) and in what direction they wish Pier will develop in the future. Regards, Franz Josef