Have a colleague who’s interested in using a CMS for a fairly major Uni project, he’s wondering whether Plone, Drupal, Mambo or any other solutions might work best.
Personally I had a look at Mambo a few weeks back and it didn’t rock my (admittably community driven) world, you can probably guess that I’m pretty enamoured by Drupal :o) and I’ve seen some great Plone instillations but never had the chance to play with it (PHP & MySQL only through incsub, sadly).
Any thoughts??? I’m guessing that essentially he’d be looking at an area for hosting different projects, some community elements and ‘unifying’ the whole environment in a user-friendly way.
The University of Prince Edward Island just deployed a large-ish scale service using Drupal.
http://weblogs.upei.ca
We recently set up a Plone portal for our on-line M.Ed. program. Thus far we’re quite pleased with it. You can see it here.
Not really enough info to offer any advice. It would be interesting if “tool advocates” for each system would respond with recommendations…
Hi James, I’ve worked with Plone for approx. 1 1/2 years. I’ve used it to manage departmental learning resources, create a knowledge community, eportfolio framework, and as a collaborative learning space. My opinions are strongly biased in favor of Plone.
Here are some quick reactions:
– Plone works well for managing content. It’s use of permissions and workflow ensure that content is only viewed by intended audience. It has a fairly effective system for metadata entry as well.
– Plone is a resource hog. It’s a great program with great functionality…but it comes at a cost. The last few versions have minimized this negative aspect…
– Plone is modularized. It’s very simple to add on a wiki, photoalbum, chat, disucssion forum, blog, polls, etc. It’s “click-a-button” easy.
– As a portal, plone has a quite a bit of potential. Depending on how it’s implemented, each user has a home folder where they can store personal resources or create their own webpage. This feature is useful for adding personal voices to the online community.
– Internationalization is a big benefit to plone. It’s already available in many languages and the list continues to grow
– Various additional projects (like eduplone) continue to extend the functionality of plone.
– I do a fair bit of web developing (primarily ecommerce and community sites). By early next year, I expect that all of the development I do will come with plone as the base. Continued development of tools, strong developer community (I know drupal has this as well) and the framework for future add ons is quite appealing.
– Finally, over the last few months, several books have been produced on Plone. This is an important development in getting the new people to try plone…many newcomers don’t like to acquire their skills through a random network of “how-to’s” and online documentation.
Like I said, some quick biased thoughts in favour of plone…
James, if you would like, send me an email, and I can set up a Plone space for you to play with…
George
btw, you may have seen this already, but drupal site had a recent discussion on the +/- of drupal and plone: http://drupal.org/node/13733#comment
I became unenamored of Drupal when repeatedly unable to upgrade. For CMS I prefer TikiWiki although I would have to admit that Plone is more powerful, especially if you are into sysadmin customization and empire building, e.g., your choose TWiki for your wiki implementation.