[clug] To the bloggers/wikiers

[George Bray]

Hi Andrew,

I've put up a few technical community sites with Plone (http://plone.org),
and found it to be very good.  Not only being reliable, but also accessible
to get people contributing. Like many CMS's, Plone has plugins for
wiki-style editing, comments, forums, galleries, bug-trackers, repositories,
etc.

e.g. http://podcastproducer.org

The most important things for me for a technical documentation/collaboration
site were having a decent way to manage and organise the content (so things
don't break when you reorganise it), and giving the users a choice of simple
or advanced in-browser document editor.

It might be overkill for your situation, but it's certainly meets my needs
as a technical editor, and in my experience it's easy to build a
clean-looking site that also functions well for the users.

But Plone is not really an "out there, hands-off" package like blogger, etc.
While you could probably find cheap/free Plone hosting, the python/zope
stack requires the server to have a bit of grunt, and at least 512MB ram.
That probably means dedicating a small server box or VPS to the job.

A Plone site's data store is the built-in zope object DB (not *SQL).
There's tools for full/incremental backups and recoveries.

Layout customisation and "skinning" options in Plone aren't as good or
widespread as Drupal/Joomla. The price you pay for widespread systems is
they're usually done in PHP/MySQL, which usually turns out to be a headache
when PHP needs it's monthly hack patch.

This site http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ is good for comparing different systems.


cheers,
George


What do you use?
>
> --
> Andrew Janke
> (a.janke at gmail.com || http://a.janke.googlepages.com/)
> Canberra->Australia    +61 (402) 700 883
> --
>



-- 
George Bray, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia.