I hope we can get this subject into the agenda of the 2007 Naples conference. To me one of the crucial questions underlying a discussion on collaborative systems is the combination of face-to-face (f2f) and face-to-screen (f2s) types of collaboration – mainly because I sense a conflict between these working styles, in the present rather early stage of computer supported collaborative work (CSCW). To take this topic to its extreme it seems as it clashes with the question of what it means to be a human being and how we thrive. To take Plone to the next step of making it a good support for collaboration, we must understand how it interacts with the real world work-flows, and how it actually partly mirrors partly reorganises the behaviour of people. With the Plone community and the vast experience of people here, there is very good reasons to expect cutting edge solutions. I look forward to that – it will change my collaborative life.

Ideally folks would have one login and be part of a site’s e-list/forums in an integrated fashion.

See: http://groupserver.og http://e-democracy.org/groupserver

Thanks for stopping by!

As you point out, this article is already getting pretty outdated. Quills is developing nicely, and in fact I think this article actually played some small role in nudging the development paths of Quills and EasyBlog a bit closer together.

I’ve been checking out COREBlog with some anticipation — the Plone version wasn’t out when I first wrote this article. My initial enthusiasm has been tempered somewhat by the fact that it does not have a public SVN repository, so it’s hard to get a sense of what’s “in progress” or for others to contribute to it. But I agree that there is much potential out there.

And, thanks for the kind words about ONE/Northwest’s Plone sites.  I haven’t written much yet about our customization processes, but you know, I think that’s a great idea.  Look for a short post on that Real Soon.

The product is in the Collective subversion repository, and there are branches belonging to various people. Somebody on #plone recently said to me, ‘there are many quills branches you can chase in search of various hopes and dreams’ or something along those lines. So it is way premature to give up on Quills as a product.

That said, you didn’t mention Coreblog2, which is a new version of Coreblog done as a Plone product. This has only been released in the past month or so, and development seems to be coming along. I have a lot of confidence in the future of this product, simply because the author has done all this before with Coreblog as a Zope product.

This was a very interesting article which is right along the lines of what I am trying to accomplish with Plone. I’ve also seen quite a few of your sites on del.icio.us, you do excellent work modifying the layout of Plone. This is my first time at this blog, did you ever write an entry about the customization process you use?

The simpler and less capable the tool, the easier it usually is to do simple customizations.

That said, we’re working right now on a “Plone Developers Bootcamp” that is tentatively scheduled for the week of March 27th here in Seattle. Sounds like you’re raising your hand for the “pre-registration” list.

All of the functionality you’re talking about Plone either does right now (with some fairly simple customization) or will do Real Soon Now. See, for example, the upcoming Calendar Sprint.

Thanks for the “wish list” redux of community networking features. The organization where I work, Earth Share, is very much the hub of a community, with 66 conservation organzations that make up our federation. We would like to expand our role as an exhaustive resource for news, volunteer opportunities and upcoming events in WA. I’ve been somewhat hesitant to make the switch over to Plone, mostly due in part to the steep learning curve. I feel fairly comfortable updating and customizing the back end of our Movable Type system which is admittedly inadequate for what we use it for. However, I think we would take the leap to Plone if it could do much of what you mentioned, smoothly. Here’s what I would ideally want from a CMS:

News, volunteer opportunities, and events aggregated chronologically, by organization, and by issue area (category). We would need some sort of custom archetype to parse each piece of content differently in different sections of the site. For instance, a news article from one of our organizations, like EarthCorps, would be displayed on our News page (blog) in its entirety, as an excerpt or summary format on the EarthCorps page, and as a sidebar or excerpt on a category page about Habitat Restoration. To take it a step further, this content would ideally be posted from an RSS feed from the EarthCorps site, with the ability to edit, add links, images, etc. And it would link to a discussion forum about habitat restoration.

While I’m sure that Plone could do most of this now, with a good deal of customization, can it do it smoothly? I’m truly asking, I really don’t know. Take your WordPress site here — it’s news done right. You have a link to the RSS feed of the blog and comments, comments nicely displayed at the bottom of each post, a link to the next and previous article, a polished date, time and author tag at the bottom of each post. It’s a well done blogging tool. I’d like to see Plone with a blog as nice as WordPress, but with the flexibility to parse that news (blog) content in many different ways in other sections of the site, with the same level of detail. I’m sure it could be done with some highly customized archetype but I’d be at a loss if I wanted to make even the smallest changes — to the word count of an excerpt, or the way a link or date is displayed, for example. Maybe it’s just my inexperience with Plone, but this ability to easily customize the way content is displayed seems much easier on the basic CMS/blogging tools like WordPress and MovableType.

I would also value the ability to parse and display content differently on different areas of the site as it applies to upcoming events and volunteer opportunities. In the case of Earth Share, it would be ideal to have a calendar with everything listed, from all of our 66 organizations, but also a calendar of upcoming events and volunteer opportunities for each organization or within a specific issue area. Again, I’m sure this could be done already with some customization but it would be ideal to have this content flexibility built-in to a calendar tool. And as you mentioned, to have this content fed by RSS feeds from our federation organizations would be the icing on the cake.

I think one of the greatest advantages of a system like Plone is its ability to cross-reference content. Someone interested in volunteering with EarthCorps, might also be interested in reading news about them or attending their upcoming fundraiser. As a nonprofit employee, I’d like the ability to create these connections, between content objects, without a detailed knowledge of Python and TALES. I’m sure my gripes certainly don’t reflect those of the nonpofit user community, most of whom pay the consultants to create the tools, but I did think it it would be worthwhile to share our community network needs.

How about a Plone programming class Jon, from ONE/Northwest, now that you have so many groups using the system?

Jon Stahl’s Jour…