Thursday, October 25, 2007

Revisit: Plone/Zope is certainly doing alright Around 13 months ago, just after I moved back to the U.S., I wrote a blog post saying "Zope ain't doing so bad."  It was written just after a small European consultancy made a surprise shift away from Zope, leaving some core supporters in the dark. I felt then that Zope was doing alright, as shown by Martijn Faassen's storytelling and Plone's demand. A little over a year has passed, and what's the verdict?  Well, Plone 3 is out and is, frankly, kicking ass.  Sure, it's software gumbo, but the software is just an artifact of the community, which is smokin'. Grok has attracted a real, real community and has a positive attitude, especially towards the initial experience. And now there's Repoze, about which Chris McDonough recently wrote: I was not happy about continuing to be a Zope developer. Now I'm better. I'll be writing more about Repoze, what it is (and isn't), and why it matters.  For now, as Chris said, we can talk about Zope without having to deny that we farted. 9:54:15 AM   comment []

Web CMS Trends: So much for my theory CMSWatch just wrapped up the (for-fee) Web CMS Report 2008 and, right off the bat, I can see long-standing assumptions changing: Trend #1: A Return to Coupled Production and Delivery There goes my theory.  For years I've said that Plone has to get out of the content delivery business and make it clear, in its positioning statement, that Plone is for content management. The CMS market had been organized into a split between management and delivery.  Namely, Pager Guy wants some boring stack to get his 5 nines of uptime using a stack he already knows. Well well, the market seems to want the New New Thing.  Meaning, interactive pages and user-contributed content.  Meaning, what Zope/Plone has always been about.  Back to the future, eh? Good to see SOAP getting it come-uppance.  Good also to see a recognition that content-as-XML is starting to matter some (coarse-grained) on the way to mattering more (fine-grained).  Perhaps it is time to think of XML as our issue.  Most of the time it feels like our first response is "XML is vaporstupid", then the next response is, "Sure, we do XML because ZPT can generate XML, knock yourself out on that and good luck." But, I'm a broken record on this.  Seems like the market might be also. Kind of funny the reaction about "JCR Indifference" and the real motivations at play there. And finally, a point about our role in the drama. And as you might expect, most innovation happens at the lower and middle tiers of the marketplace. At the Plone Conference 2007 in Italy a couple of weeks ago, during my talk I mentioned my standard "Plone is in the $50-$250k deal size arena."  Someone challenged me on that, saying: "That is way, way bigger than anything we do."  I had to point out that I meant where we fit in the commercial CMS market, where deals are measured as 1/3 software, 1/3 hardware, 1/3 consulting. I have always thought that Plone was in the very top of the middle tier.  Software-wise, the addition of features such as versioning in Plone 3.0 move it closer to the bottom of the upper tier, although Plone's ecosystem can't yet support all the "whole product" stuff needed to thrive there. But let's talk turkey about what that space means.  From Jeff Potts' notes on Tom Austin's recent Gartner keynote we see: ...Average spend on content management is $475,000 for 250 users. Woooooo doggies.  And that's filed under the heading "Basic Content Services (BCS)" with a first bullet of "Good enough is good enough". 9:38:56 AM   comment []