mardi 24 janvier 2006

Optaros report on open source CMS Optaros was in the news recently for a report on corporate adoption of open source. Seth Gottleib from Optaros recently published a research paper on open source content management systems, including a breakdown into market segments. Out of 15 mentioned, the CMF was listed under "Online Periodical" and Plone was listed under "Collaborative Workspace". I was shocked to see Bob Doyle's count of content management products: 1,785 !! Last I heard, 2 years ago, he had 450. Wow. This is truly a dysfunctional market. I really enjoyed reading Seth's report, especially the lead-in. I parsed quite heavily the text on all the pages, trying to learn about the latest in market positioning and how products are being stacked up against each other. I was pleased to say that Plone's positioning fit into the space that I'd like it to be thought of. Seth brought up a couple of points in the market overview that I think are prescient. His coaching on how to do evaluations is spot-on and I hope prospects take him up on his advice: "Get to know the story behind the software." More specifically, I think there's a lot of punch in this statement: Interestingly, the interconnectedness of the web and technologies such as portals, search, and RSS, can make having several small and medium sites more practical than trying to standardize on a single central platformiii. Large companies do not need to construct a monolithic intranet platform if smaller departmental sites can be integrated into a comprehensive intranet. Enterprise CMS, and most WCM, is organized like a mainframe. Everything is in one system and you bring the users to that system. Federated content management might be a growth opportunity in the market. 3:57:43 PM   comment []

What's new in Plone 2.1.2 Alex wrote up a very nice mini-guide to the Plone 2.1.2 maintenance release. Thanks, Stefan Holek, for managing the 2.1 release cycle. It is nice to see Plone getting bug fixes and small tweaks in a timely fashion, just as Zope 2.x has been doing over the last few years under Andreas Jung's release management. It's even nicer to see Alex put together such a nice guide with good hyperlinking to relevant topics. For example, the tickets that got closed for this release. (Well done, Wiggy and Alex, on such large-scale adoption of Trac for managing issues and releases.) 2:43:26 PM   comment []

Enfold Systems site is really well done Recently I went to the Enfold site to take a look at Enfold Desktop, the Windows integration work for Plone and Enfold Server. Looking around their site, I was struck by what a great job they've done. As noted recently, people take around 50 ms to judge whether they like a site. All the work Alma has done on the visual touches, layout, consistency, artwork, etc. really show through. Equally, the content has really gotten good in the last few months. Some big-name customer case studies (again, nicely portrayed.) Alan has worked hard with Toby and the others on the text for products like Entransit, the open source package for high-speed content delivery for the Plone CMS. News items that are actually new. Flash movies for product walkthroughs, a decent download system for evaluations. They even have a killer demo site. Lots of people might think that writing software is sexier than building a website for that software. But if people form their opinions in 50 ms, it won't be from the apidoc output. Well done, Enfold. 2:34:52 PM   comment []

Tutorial on XML in Plone Thanks to help from Sidnei at Enfold Systems, I figured out enough about Marshall to get it working. So I wrote a plone.org tutorial showing: How to set everything up Getting and saving content using WebDAV and XML (cadaver and oXygen) Relax NG validation on the export format Configuring the content type registry for creating new content I'm stoopid, so I wrote this for others that are too busy to work through puzzles. Lots of screenshots, text that tries to tell you exactly what to do, etc. The kind of tutorial I need, basically. Please note that I'm working with Sidnei on the Marshall software itself. Thus, something in my tutorial might be wrong. If you find something broken in the tutorial, or something that didn't make sense, please let me know. I'd like to keep the tutorial up-to-date, otherwise I'll forget how to setup the software [wink] 2:26:11 PM   comment []