Re: wgo Iteration I

[Kevin Teague <kevin bud ca>]

Not sure if everyone has seen Alan's "notes from the peanut gallery":

http://theploneblog.org/blog/archive/2006/10/31/gnome-org-plone-notes- 
from-the-peanut-gallery

I'll contribute some more "peanut gallery" comments myself:

What is the wgo plan for integrating the public wgo skin and the  
stock plone content authoring interface?

I took the approach that Alan recommends recently with a Plone site  
and was pretty happy with the results. It can be difficult to  
reconcile the layout of a public skin with the assumptions that go  
along with a complete content authoring interface such as Plone  
provides. This approach can require more configuration and work up  
front, but can lead to better maintainability down the road. On the  
flip side, there are lots of skins out there that look quite  
different from stock plone and still provide the full UI of the Plone  
CMS. Either approach is valid, it's just good to be aware of the pros/ 
cons.

> One another question is GNOME Products, I've seen that is  
> interesting to
> maintain some GNOME products information, there is a simple product on
> plone that allow managing products, ( easy so not difficult to  
> maintain
> ). We can adapt the look&feel to enable store different products, it
> allow information about products, svn/cvs url, documentation,  
> releases,
> author, .... You can see it at http://plone.org/products/

I also used Plone Software Centre (PSC) the site that was staging  
content into a /public_website/ directory. Here it feels somewhat  
awkward and clunky, as PSC doesn't really expect to be staged  
(although it works well enough for my needs). Having said that, PSC  
is great piece of software.

If gnome.org is interested in using it though, you may want to  
consider managing it in a separate Zope/Plone instance. Having used  
Plone for a quite a while, I know for first hand experience that it  
can be easy to build up a whole lot of Plone add-ons to a Plone site  
over time. The more add-ons Plone has, the greater the chance for  
headaches when it comes time to upgrade Plone itself. Also, the more  
add-ons, the harder it can be manage the system, especially for a  
volunteer run system where people can tend to come and go on the  
project. Of course, if a Product is being used on Plone.org such as  
PSC, then there will be a very strong incentive for the authors to  
support the product in future versions of Plone (and I know the PSC  
contributors have a lot of interesting ideas in the pipe that they  
want to add to PSC).

- Kevin Teague