Plonistas love to complain about the problems with Plone. I have been working on the system for the last almost 5 years…and I have done my share of complaining, I admit. But what has amazed me more than anything else this year is how bad other CMSs are. This year I have tried to help out a few others regardless of the technology…to my utter amazement. This week, I was asked by my neighborhood associatation president to help with a site someone set up for the ‘hood. It was in DotNetNuke, which is open source, but OMG such a painful interface. I have been working on the web for the last 13 years and can’t figure out how to add an image to the site! Moreover, it doesn’t appear to work on Firefox – simply clicking on what would potentially lead to what I am trying to do doesn’t actually do anything.
When I complain about Plone, it is usually about the intricacies that have resulted from a fairly deep knowledge of how the thing works and where I come up against limitations – either from the perspective of a user or that of a business owner seeking to deploy Plone quickly and robustly. One thing I have to remind myself of is that most of the Plone developers I know don’t actually use Plone (”umm…I dunno what those buttons in kupu do”). So even with the skeletons hidden in all the layers of complexity, from the end user perspective, Plone is by far and away the easiest system I have used for content management on the Web. And I am occasionally given a reminder of that by the universe…
So, as I sign off for the Thanksgiving holiday, I want to give a big thank you to the Plone community. Despite the problems we find with Plone (we are a bit of perfectionists with uber-high expectations, after all 
, we have created a great product. Congratualtions to you all and thanks for your help in this journey. We couldn’t have done it without you! I am truly grateful for all that you have given to this community, product, and process.
+1. I’ve been using (learning, really) Plone since only August, and I’m amazed by all that’s in it. Any criticism’s I’ve ever uttered have been in the sprit of want to contribute constructively to the community — I’m still too much of a noob to contribute any interesting code.
Eh… make that, “…SPIRIT of WANTING to contribute…”
Rock! Thanks so much for posting this. Maybe you already read it, but it’s very much in line with my recent thinking:
http://rpatterson.net/blog/community-introspection
In my own experience Plone is very easy to use, except when it comes to customization, even theme work is quite hard, or installing products to extend Plone. There is fairly steep learning curve and there is quite few things to learn. But then you get the hang of it is very nice, not perfect, bet still extremly good.
I tried hundreds of CMSes before I found Plone. In CMS world it seems that every web developer must in his lifetime write a CMS, and most of them aren’t very good UI experts, good software engineers, and lack the basic knowledge and experience for the job, because at first it seems that CMS is the easiest software to write
So Plone is way ahead currently and I think this will be true for some time – long time. Plone has so much experience accumulated in the field, that for others it is quite hard to catch up. And Plone began it’s life on top of established and solid framework, not like many other CMS’es.
@John – thanks for commenting. Remember that contributing to Plone doesn’t just me code! I have never written a line of code, but still consider myself a contributor to Plone. We can all find ways to support Plone (the community, software and movement for world domination
, no matter how much zope3 kung fu you know!
Oh yeah…I should probably mention I finally posted something on our site about things we love about Plone: http://www.ifpeople.net/technology/plone