Subject: Blogging in Plone, and collaboration features more generally
Newsgroups: gmane.comp.web.zope.plone.devel
Date: 2005-11-05 06:19:07 GMT (3 years, 4 weeks, 7 hours and 23 minutes ago)
There are least 5 blog products for Plone that appear to have at least some active development work going on: 1) SimpleBlog - http://plone.org/products/simpleblog 2) qSimpleBlog - http://quintagroup.com/services/plone-development/products/plone-blog/ 3) kNotes - http://www.knownet.com/products/downloads/knotes/ 4) EasyBlog - http://plone.org/products/easyblog 5) Quills - http://plone.org/products/quills (I've played with each of these at least a little, but will skip the exhaustive run-down for now.) Choice is good, but I'm a little concerned that we're seeing smart, talented, well-intentioned people reinvent the wheel over and over, without ever building the powerful blogging vehicle (or bicycle!) that many of us need. For example, kNotes and Quills, the two most full-featured contenders, are both are just a bit shy of "1.0" releases, and have been for what seems like a pretty long time. What I'm wondering is: -- Is it time for the Plone Team to "bless" a blogging product, and try to rally development efforts around a single blogging product, to make it *the* definitive, full-featured blogging product for Plone? -- Is there any precdent for doing this? What could/should that process look like? Why bring this up on plone-devel, you might ask? Well, that leads to another larger question I've been wanting to raise for a while, which is: If Plone's aspiration is to be the most kick-ass platform for content, collaboration and community, is it perhaps time to start a conversation about whether Plone ought to start bringing some collaboration & community functions a bit closer to the "core" in order to accelerate and better coordinate their development, and to help Plone more readily build mindshare among folks who want to build collaborative websites? I'm talking about features like * Blogging * Aggregation of RSS feeds, with the aggregated items available as first-class content objects. * Mailing list archiving * Discussion forums * Tagging * Publishing content out to "social software" services such as upcoming.org, flickr.com, del.icio.us, commontimes.org, etc. * Calendaring * Probably something else I'm forgetting here(I wrote at some length about these features a couple of weeks ago at http://tinyurl.com/8wztz.) From where I sit, here in the NGO sector in Seattle, I see Plone getting very strong competition from Drupal, largely because it has reasonable versions of many of these "community" features out of the box, and does a good job of marketing these features to relatively inexperienced website developers. I think that Plone has a far superior architecture, way more headroom for innovative development, a more robust community, and I believe that a relatively modest effort could push it way, way ahead of the pack here. I've spoken and emailed with a few folks about this, and those conversations have encouraged me. I think it's time to take the conversation into the wide open. I'm eager to hear your thoughts and see where the conversation could lead. best, jon ---------- Jon Stahl ONE/Northwest http://www.onenw.org http://blogs.onenw.org/jon ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: Tame your development challenges with Apache's Geronimo App Server. Download it for free - -and be entered to win a 42" plasma tv or your very own Sony(tm)PSP. Click here to play: http://sourceforge.net/geronimo.php