Back to Plone, again
Just work, plz k thx.
I was quite happy with Plone for quite a while, but decided to give some Java CMSs a run. All the platforms have great potential, even the ones that were major pains to get going. Magnolia was fine, but was a major pain when it came to changing the look of the site. Additionally, no support for multiple sites in the open source edition. I briefly switched to dotCMS, and somewhat liked it. It supported multiple sites in a single instance out of the box. Making a new theme wasn't a major pain. I had even progressed to the point where I was creating custom content types, generating listings for those, and so on. Its major drawback was that I wanted to run multiple sites, and I didn't really feel like reimplementing those customizations over my various domains. Its hook was that you could clone from a base template site only when you splurged for the enterprise license. Another major strike against it is the way custom content objects are stored in the database. It's truly WTF-worthy. Next up was OpenWGA. It has infinite potential, but deploying a site under it is a major undertaking if you want to do any sort of customization. Out of all the Open Source CMSs, I liked the fact that OpenWGA doesn't really have any differences between Open Source and Enterprise, other than support. It's really more of a framework rather than turnkey solution. Next up was Hippo. It was a pain in the ass to get it deployed, but I felt it could have potential. Finally, I gave Enonic a spin. It was a mixed experience, most of them not good. Once again, I experienced some difficulty during installation, but not as severe as Hippo. It is also quite flexible, but by this time I was too frustrated with everything to be reasonable. Screw it, time to switch back to Plone
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Yes, Plone. It gives a 90% solution out of the box. It's stock skin has improved significantly. If you run the 4.1 beta, a new add-on provides a new templating system that is barely more complicated that whipping up a mockup. Sure, it has issues, but there are no showstoppers. Getting it rolling across all my domains is mind-numbingly easy. The only problem I experienced with this deployment of Plone, is that one feature I want, the new templating system, requires the 4.1 branch, which is in beta. Unfortunately there are some incompatibilities with add-ons that were perfectly happy under 4.0, but are thoroughly broken under 4.1.
From my standpoint, Plone's only drawback is that the system is written in Python. There is nothing wrong with Python. It's a perfectly fine language and a large number of developers would consider Plone's use of Python a benefit. It's just a taste thing, sort of like how I absolutely hate water chestnuts. To me, Python's use of relative indentation to indicate block structure is just plain wrong. Yes, it has benefits, but I feel it's the wrong way to solve the problem. There are other irreconcilable philosophical differences I could go on about, but I'd rather not debate it. There's no accounting for taste.
