I checked out your site. Looks good; this is a little easier to use than the wiki, and more feature-rich. I do have some knowledge of the Plone system as a user/admin, but will admit up front that I don't have an intricate working knowledge of the back end or development environment.

It certainly could meet your needs.

But it wouldn't be my first choice for a development path, though, and I'll tell you why. I'll apologize beforehand - arguments about software platforms are only slightly less divisive than those concerning sports teams, political parties and religions, so I certainly admit my comments bear strong bias and are likely to incite. (I can also appreciate that some of this might be meaningless to you, but it's in my nature to be thorough).

When I turned to the open source CMS application market a couple of years ago (after more than a decade working with proprietary systems), I evaluated most of the top contenders: plone, xoops, drupal, mambo/joomla!, wordpress, php-nuke and some of the wikis.

What matters most to me:

1) overall project design goals / roadmap for development
2) stability of the development community / speed of development
3) quality of the development community / code base
4) platform(s) supported / core platform choices
5) performance
6) extensibility - not just whether it was possible, but how difficult
7) add-on modules/themes/languages available
8) security
9) ability to integrate with other applications
10) the overall user interface / ease of use
11) availability of human resources for development and maintenance


Plone is one of the top open source CMS (content management system) engines; it typically ranks in the top 5 on most evaluations. It's known for being an stable engine used by many corporations and large organizations, particularly for corporate intranets. It is relatively easy to setup and use, has good language capabilities and is a fairly mature project that won't disappear any time soon. And I always liked their credo: "Plone should look and feel like the band [it was named after] sounds". Compared to most CMSs, it does have a high level of polish to it.

Plone is based upon another open source project called Zope, which provides a complete web application server system of it's own (in other words, it doesn't use a separate web app server, like Apache + PHP). It's written in Python, a high-level object oriented programming language.

My major concerns with plone:

1) It relies on Zope, and that's a platform that has a history of some upgrading headaches. The docs on the plone site attend to some messy past upgrades, and the next one looks gnarly as well.
2) performance - though you'd think that python would typically perform better than PHP, it seems as though plone is only a mediocre performer.
3) platform - again, zope. It's certainly a respectable project, but there aren't a lot of products that use it. Even if you don't question the longevity of the (plone and) zope project, I don't think they will innovate as fast as the typical LAMP behemoth (Linux, Apache, mySQL, PHP).

but the two key issues are:

4) customization - compared to some other engines, plone does not have a huge base of add-on modules, and the platform presents some issues in integration with other open source products.

5) available personnel - The number of python programmers is surely smaller than the number of php coders (even discounting all the people that call themselves php coders who only write simple scripts). Those who know the Zope engine is an even smaller pool. Both are not impossibly difficult to learn, but then you would need to find someone willing to do that.

These last two may not be such an issue to you, though, if the basic plone config works (with the existing modules) and you've already got resources lined up.



But, what I did ultimately choose as a platform for these types of projects was Drupal. It's a system that's a favorite among non-profit and political groups, and is self described as "community plumbing". This is not surprising since it built out a lot of key features for those markets when it was chosen to run the Howard Dean Campaign in 2004 (civicCRM is the drupal-based product that was born from the ashes of the unfortunate Dean demise in Iowa).

A year and a half into working with it, and checking the state of the competitors, I'm not sorry about my choice. It's not perfect, of course, but I support this project for these key reasons:

1) It's built on the ubiquitous LAMP platform, so it's highly portable and can play well alongside countless other LAMP projects
2) It's well supported by hosting companies
3) The code base is remarkably well written for an open source project - and pretty well documented (not a minor issue; the mambo/joomla! project, which may have the biggest user base, is a horrible mess of code in my opinion).
4) performance is pretty good for this type of product (it's used by some heavy traffic sites, like The Onion, Spread Firefox, Ubuntu) - it also has some mechanisms for page caching and throttling back on bells and whistles under heavy load.
5) security is high, and when flaws are found, patches are immediate
6) it's a very gifted development community, and new versions arrive every six months or so, in a remarkably stable condition.
7) extensibility is a key design goal, and there are many great add-on modules to choose from.
8) it's not too hard to write your own modules, and there's lot's of people with those skills around. it's even easier to write little php code snippets that can be embedded directly in a page (only by authorized users, of course, or that could be dangerous).
9) It was known for being a bit hard to set up and administer (indeed, it took me a day and a half to get it working the first time I used it), but most of those concerns have vanished in the latest version (and many of my sites were upgraded to the new version in a few minutes).



I've been looking at some of the drupal wiki module add-ons for drupal, and some other things for your project. Since it ultimately has to migrate back to mediawiki, I was also looking at extending that engine as well, and bypassing ANY secondary system.

I'll look forward to seeing the sample content, and would be glad to answer any questions this opus has generated.

Regards,

Roger
rleigh@northcountry.com