I'm new to Plone / Zope; but it looks good; I used the Unified Installer to install it, I have it running, but still trying to figure out how to put Apache in front of it so my URL's go to the right site without the 8080 port; I'm still trying to figure out the VirtualHostMonster and if I should run this via mod_wsgi or use mod_python; and how to get the mod_rewrite working.
Lots of questions I know; sorry I'm new at Plone and trying to get it to play nice with VM is going to be another thing; since some sites will not use it.
I'm running CentOS 5.3 x64 with VM Pro.
One thing I'd like to say; I tried the Django script, nice; but I decided Zope was better for my needs; but, it would be nice to have a Zope script; but from what I know so far, the Unified Installer (UI) works great and you can leave it at that. You can run it as root or user; so I don't see a script doing much more then that and helping with the upgrades; it seems like a script that runs the UI may be possible. This is a dependency nightmare, UI installs its own version of Python, Zope and Plone; depending on if you install it as root or user, it will install root into /usr/local/Plone, and user into /home/mydomain/Plone. I'm saying this to get you interested; I'm going to document this whole process, maybe do a screen cast to go with it; so users can use this info to help them install it using VM.
Thanks for any help.
Jeff
Virtualmin Rocks
I used to maintain a large Zope (and then Plone) site at SciPy.org (it moved to trac and MoinMoin and some custom code eventually, as nobody could ever figure out how to do anything on the Plone site, and so none of the developers were maintaining their own docs or links or downloads, and it just wasn't working for the community). It's a beast of a system. ;-)
You've noticed how complicated the install is...which, along with nobody ever really asking for it, is why we don't support it. Upgrades are also a real bear...and I doubt we could automate it safely. Docs would be great, though. It will help others trying to make things work, and if lots of folks do end up using Zope/Plone, we'd be more inclined to add an install script. for it. The biggest problem though, as you've noted, is the huge dependency chain. Many dependencies are binaries, as well, which means we'd have to add them to our own binary yum and/or apt repositories...I'm loathe to add more binary dependencies.
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Thanks; sorry about the double post; don't know how or why that happened.
I have a question; you might have an opinion about; I've tried a lot of CMS programs like Joomla, DNN and now Plone; I've written a few years ago, before these came out; I'm like most people, I want a fast site that is easy to maintain and deploy; must be secure and I need a shopping cart; from my experience PHP CMS like Joomla, are not very secure and every release of it and my site is broken and less secure then it was, Joomla is going down hill and I'm done with it; python seems secure; but I'm hearing that Plone is not any good for sites that get a lot of traffic; is it Plone or python that gives it its bad rap?
What is a good CMS and Shopping cart?
Jeffrey Scott Flesher
Medically Retired Gulf War Vet
I share your opinion of Joomla. Unfortunately, I have sort of similar feelings about Plone/Zope. I operated a Zope, and then Plone, site for about three years. You may note that despite that, I don't run it for Virtualmin.com.
Security-wise, it's solid, but upgrades are horrible, and they've reinvented every wheel (including the database) so the learning curve is <i>huge</i>. I've met several of the developers of Zope and Plone (I did contract work for Zope Corporation for quite a while several years ago), and I have an extremely high opinion of all of them. But, it's a very intimidating system for anyone that can't devote full-time effort to understanding it.
As you note, Plone and Zope are somewhat difficult to make go fast. That was actually the work I was doing for Zope Corp...I helped them with their Squid deployments for customers. In the end, it'll scale pretty well, but again you have to know what you're doing and devote a lot of effort to the task. Zope runs Boston.com, for example, which is a very high load environment.
But scaling was never the most difficult problem for me. I could just never wrap my head around the system...when I tried to develop for it, I got completely lost.
Our new website is built on Drupal 6. I'm finding it pretty solidly designed. Upgrades, so far, have been astonishingly nice; I did an upgrade from 5.x to 6.x, which worked flawlessly and exactly according to the documentation. I can't emphasize enough how important upgrades are. Joomla is a nightmare in this regard. Current Virtualmin.com is a hodgepodge of old and new versions of stuff held together with chewing gum and baling wire, and it barely works at all (and anyone that has used the forum, bug tracker, or shop, has seen at least one of its major warts). And, of course, it will never run Joomla 1.5, since you must "migrate" rather than upgrade...since that's the case, I decided it was worth "migrating" to a system that wouldn't make my life a living hell.
<div class='quote'>is it Plone or python that gives it its bad rap?</div>
Why would Python give it a bad rap? Python's a very fine language, and it's perfectly possible to build sites that scale in Python (reddit.com is almost entirely Python; and Python is one of a handful of sanction languages within Google, alongside Java and JavaScript). Plone is just a very complex system, and they've made some interesting choices (ZODB instead of a traditional database, for starters) that places performance lower on the priority scale than other factors. Some folks consider the benefits worthwhile.
Anyway, I can't really tell you what the best choice for your requirements will be. But, I can say that I've been very pleasantly surprised by how well Drupal works and how well it is designed. The learning curve has been very short, for me, and I've been able to get working code written in a few afternoons worth of experimentation. It also has a powerful and elegant content model which makes building new applications pretty easy, relatively speaking. I wish I'd chosen it over Joomla a couple years ago when I switched us off of OpenACS.
Oh, and we're using UberCart for the shopping cart. I don't have an opinion of it, just yet, as I'm still figuring it out, but it appears to integrate very cleanly into Drupal (unlike the shopping cart options for Joomla, which are mostly poorly bridged in non-Joomla apps, or forked from non-Joomla apps and have never really been fully integrated in), and uses the Drupal content model. It also seems to have a nice hook system for doing custom development, which was something that was really difficult in Joomla with VirtueMart (the license manager here at Virtualmin.com was way more difficult to build than it should have been, and it works very poorly; partly that's my own incompetence with PHP...but it's also really difficult to hook into VirtueMart reliably).
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Thanks; I wished I asked this question a year ago.
I did some research and it seems that the Zope / Plone are starting to really look at performance; Plone 3 is said to be 3 times faster than Plone 2. But as you have said it is very difficult to install, setup and get running; I'm at a lost and I've been a programmer for over 30 years, which may have made me more hard headed then learnable to new systems.
I think I'll switch to Drupal and work on Plone on the side.
Thanks again; you really know how to answer a question.
Jeffrey Scott Flesher
Medically Retired Gulf War Vet
UberCart looks nice; never heard of it before; surprised you didn't have it in your Shopping cart scripts.
Jeffrey Scott Flesher
Medically Retired Gulf War Vet
UberCart is just another Drupal module. We don't actually include any Drupal modules in Install Scripts, and at this point don't really plan to. It's already got pretty good module management built in, so we don't try to address it. It could be made <i>slightly</i> easier, but no one has ever asked for more automation on that front, and it wouldn't be a trivial undertaking (since it'd need to understand Drupal versioning and other complicated stuff).
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What I need to know is how to set it up in VM; what files I need to edit; I'm sure its the /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf, I just don't know I'm doing; I'm hopping someone has a working Plone site using VM and might be able to help with what I said before.
I don't really see a need for a Script for Zope / Plone right now; the UI works fine; that was my point; I know it wasn't that clear; I was getting at if it could be integrated, the UI script that is, a script that calls that script; but not worth the effort right now unless you had a calling for it.
Jeffrey Scott Flesher
Medically Retired Gulf War Vet
Well, Zope has its own appserver, right? So, you'll need to proxy through to it. I seem to recall it's a pretty simple proxy rule, but it's been a <i>long</i> time since I set one up (but it was running on a Virtualmin system; back when Virtualmin was just a baby...it was one of the very first real Virtualmin deployments).
Something like:
ProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
ReverseProxyPass / http://localhost:8080/
But, I'm just guessing. I will note that there's nothing magic about our Apache configuration. Whatever rules the Zope/Plone docs suggest for running behind Apache would probably work unmodified in a Virtualmin system. You'd just want to add it inside the relavent VirtualHost section for the domain where you're running it.
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I am just back from CMSExpo 2010. The word from Mr. Limi himself is that Plone turns more pages per second out of the box than the other CMSes.
If you look at the Mitre CVE, you'll see that Plone has the best security record, perhaps precisely because SQL injection is not a factor...
I also noted one of the Joomla founders now pitching the use of Mongo, an object database, with Joomla.
The Plone guys are the smartest in the room, and the product shows it. There are major improvements in theming available from third parties, including the Deliverance proxy, which makes it easy to theme multiple apps to look like one.
There also see to be some IP issues with the Joomla code and Drupal is still owned by one guy.
I suggest taking another look at Plone.
Best, Ken