[Added links to Jon and Alex's blogs]
I am heading back home from Mountain View after spending a day at the Plone Strategic Planning Session where 50 Plonistas are meeting for three days at the Google campus to discuss the future of Plone. Kudos to the Plone Community for proactively thinking about growth and improvement when things are going well for Plone. Too often these discussions happen during crisis when options and opportunities are limited.
Yesterday (day one) focused on “marketing” and today is about technology. Tomorrow attendees will organize the action items that came out of the first two days. Jon Stahl from One/Northwest did a wonderful job of organizing the event and directing the sessions (he even got a Kentuckian to “twinkle” – you had to be there). The Plone community is lucky to have leaders like Jon. That Jon comes from a non-technical background shows how the Plone community has been able to attract, engage, and leverage non-technical people. Plone co-founder Alexander Limi’s assertion that he is not a technologist (although he is a closet geek) has helped the Plone culture be more inviting to non-technologists and give them pathways to leadership. This aspect of the Plone community is somewhat rare in open source software (and most commercial software too). I would say that the closest thing is in the Joomla! and Drupal communities that have active marketplaces for designers to sell and share themes.
The biggest issue that the group struggled with is the one that confounds the whole content management industry: is a CMS a framework or a product? This came up a number of times in pre-conference blog posts and email threads as well as during exercises like composing elevator pitches. The elevator pitch exercise turned up another industry-wide puzzle: what is content management? I, personally, dislike the term content management. “Content” is too vague and “Management” (in my mind) is a negative word (guess who works for himself). “Content Management” implies that content is a liability and needs to be controlled. It sounds too much like “Waste Management” or “Risk Management.” However, it is convenient that the term is widely known and immediately brings about a sense of understanding. Alas, I digress. Back to Plone…
There was a good discussion about competitors and differentiators. Drupal, Microsoft Sharepoint, and Alfresco were identified as the biggest threats. From an emotional perspective, Drupal got the greatest amount of attention because the long-standing rivalry and that Drupal has been so successful in the non-profit sector where may of the Plonistas work. Alfresco and Sharepoint are newer and the Plone community is still learning about where they fit in. Plone has a broad set of uses and both of these products certainly encroach on some of the territory that Plone has marked out. Sharepoint, is very compelling for intranets and collaboration. Aggressive pricing by Microsoft, especially for non-profits, trims Plone’s edge on total cost of ownership. However, Sharepoint is not a good answer for building traditional websites where Plone is effective.
Joomla!, Drupal and low-end commercial tools like Expression Engine, City Desk and Adobe Contribute are the obvious competitors for building basic websites. In order to reach the broad, low-end market, a theming community and a shallower learning curve would help Plone. Open source products that were noticeably absent from the discussion were TYPO3 and eZ Publish. Although less so in North America, TYPO3 has a nice network of agency style consultancies that can efficiently build highly branded websites on the platform. TYPO3’s default install with all of the back-end modules enabled makes the product easy to dismiss as complex and ugly. But most TYPO3 customers see TYPO3 only after it has been tailored to their needs. eZ Publish has the advantage of commercial style support options and productized bundles that are targeted to different market segments and industry verticals. Both of these qualities would help Plone be more accessible to a broader market of buyers.
Alfresco was also on the radar and there are good reasons why the Plone community should be paying attention to it. While Plone’s out of the box user interface is much more refined than Alfresco’s, Alfresco has a number of architectural features that make it a better general content management framework. Alfresco’s repository services are more open and advanced than Plone’s and most large companies developing custom web applications will be better equipped to build and support them in Java than in Python and Zope. I think that Plone’s Zope architecture will frequently qualify Plone out of large corporations that think of the world in terms of “Microsoft” and “Java.” There was an acknowledgement that large, established IT departments tend to be hostile to Plone and chances are better when business owners run the selection process. That is not to say that very large companies have not successfully deployed Plone in important content management scenarios. Just look at Novell and the CIA. There are also some other big companies that are in the process of major Plone deployments.
Many within the Plone community feel that there are better Python frameworks for building general web applications so maybe this is an area that Plone should not try to compete in. The general consensus is that Plone developers should try to integrate with other applications as much as possible rather than build everything on Plone. I am sure that they are talking about technical tactics for enabling integration strategies today during the technical session. I would expect that there will be a discussion about better mechanisms for creating and consuming RESTful APIs and strategies for replicating content out of the ZODB.
I am really happy that I attended the Plone Strategic Planning Session. It was good to see the Plone community in action working together to solve difficult questions. It will be interesting to see how these ideas get distilled into a strategy that is easy to organize behind. More important, however, will be how the Plone community is able to execute this strategy.
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- Drupal and Alfresco Jeff Potts has a nice post about how Alfresco...
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Seth – thank you both for participating in the summit and for the recap. There has been a real air of mystery surrounding this summit for those of us who couldn’t attend. It sounds like there were some great discussions. As you pointed out at the end of your post, talk is cheap. The hard part is defining actionable tasks, and then executing on them. It seems to me this is especially challenging in an open source community where people are volunteering their “free time” in many cases. I suspect that there will be great momentum for this in the short term, but it will be very interesting to see if that momentum can carry through for the longer term.
Seth, thanks for posting this!
I might have some points to add:
CMS – I am not sure if the notion of a CMS is very long valid. This term seems to very much symbolize what Web1.0 has been about, publishing content one-way. These days we see a big shift in moving towards a more interactive, Web2.0 model which means two-way communication. While big CMS seemed more to be focused on producing static content in the end we will need more and more dynamic content. Shifting away from the company in focus to the customer in focus.
And this actually is a field where platforms like Drupal are far better than Plone. See as an example the relaunch of fastcompany.com
As for Typo3 I agree, esp. here in Germany it’s not so much about Drupal but about Typo3. Alfresco OTOH I haven’t heard that much talk about.
As for the Frameworks I recently made experiences with Django, moving away from Plone for one project because of performance. I must say it’s not better suited except for speed simply because you have to build everything yourself. If I’d have the choice I’d always use Plone because to me from a developer’s standpoint it is a great platform/framework for doing anything with it (esp. if we catch up in the Web2.0 field).
Thanks for the recap! I’m looking forward to great things happening in the world of Plone as a result of this summit.
I’ve been hoping to line up someone to give a “What the other guys get right: a look at other CMSs” presentation or panel at Plone Symposium East. Would anyone be interested?
@MrTopf
About the word ‘CMS’ one interesting observation was that we had to produce 60 second ‘elevetor pitches’ as to *what* is Plone to specific audiences ie to an Enterprise, NGO, Govt, etc.
Out of the 6 or so elevator pitches, only *1* of them said ‘Plone is a CMS’. The others all said something like ‘Plone is a system to…’.
So I think the term ‘CMS’ is being used less often, my vibe from the PSPS is that the term just is either too vague (everything is a CMS) or too strict (but Plone does non-CMS things!) depending on your viewpoint.
-Matt
I think one thing that’s largely ignored about Sharepoint and I don’t hear enough people discussing in relation to Plone is the integration with the Microsoft application stack.
This is a major reason that many companies find Sharepoint to be a natural selection. It integrates well with their Exchange servers, the Active Directory, and Microsoft Office.
The OSS community has similar products that we could write for similar integration with. Could make Plone into a Sharepoint killer if it could work with OpenOffice/NeoOffice and similar better.
Just my 2c.