Plone: How people stop worrying and love Content Management Systems
Document Actions
http://www.postalheritage.org.uk/sitedesign/postalheritage-and-plone
The pleasures of Plone
Learning to use the CMS was initially a very frustrating experience, but no different than learning any new ICT application. For example, when using the WYSIWYG editor, copying in text from Word documents can sometimes lead to muddled formatting, but this is something that is learned, anticipated, and then becomes less of a difficulty. I got a great deal of CMS practice working through the entire site at the time of launch in late March 2005 (having put this off until the final deadline approached).
The system becomes increasingly intuitive with practice, and the user interface is logical, with options to view, edit and publish pages. We have built a publishing workflow into the CMS, enabling authors to create content and publishers to review and publish. Thus far, we have not rolled out the CMS to a wide number of staff, but our site, like our organisation is relatively small.
Why Use Plone for this Project?
There was a time when open source software was viewed with some suspicion. Nowadays it is widely accepted that, with a worldwide development community behind it, open source software is often better that its proprietary equivalent and it is routinely used by health authorities, government departments and other large organizations.
A major factor in deciding to use Plone for this project is the flexibility it brings - putting a website into Plone renders every page editable, which means that it is free to grow in any direction the client chooses, unconstrained by foresight or technology. In addition, and like all good content management systems, the use of Plone forces a separation between content and style - the content is drawn into the Plone page template and displayed according to its associated style sheets.
This latter point was particularly important because the BPMA was preparing to implement its new public brand while the CMS website was being developed. By using Plone we could get on with building the website and add the new branding later. This avoiding interrupting the site's availability to the public, and at no greater cost than if structure and style had been developed simultaneously.
Another factor in the decision was more personal: for some time I had been researching the requirements for a new CMS that I would design, and that the ATL in-house team would build. My new CMS would be a universally accessible and usable vision of beauty, capable of letting anybody edit any website quickly and easily, it would be perfectŠ• I felt this was within ATL's very strong capabilities, until I discovered Plone. I was so impressed by what Plone could offer that I abandoned the idea of a new CMS, and decided to join the open source movement.
_____
tags:
