A few weeks ago, my firm designKiln talked about the need to budget some funds to donate to Plone when we get our first big payday. Out of curiosity looked I on plone.org for the donate page but did not find it. I would expect that from the plone.org home page under the “Get Involved” section clicking “Support the Plone Foundation” would send me to a form to donate money.

When the time comes for us to give some money back, I will not let this be a hindrance, I will ask on a mailing list or #plone what to do.

I have been meaning to post a mailing list, but I have been too busy… (joining the Plone Web Site mailing list right now)

…

It has taking me the better part of a decade of watching Zope/Plone, but a year and a half ago I finally joined the party. Plone is hard work and a steep learning curve, except for all of the things that become so EASY to do. Thanks to everyone who has built the plone marvel!

But look; the roadmap page still lists the 3.0 final release date as March 12. It took a little digging around to find a more more realistic idea of when the release would actually be .

Either way, I still think this is an excellent post. The Vignette comment comes about because it’s a system to which our Plone implementation is occasionally unfavourably compared. Sharepoint is another. The people who make these criticisms fail to appreciate two points though:

1) Plone is a community effort, with the strengths and weaknesses that entails. And which Martin’s pointed out. This means that they don’t always grok the “why” of Plone not having a certain feature.

The good news is we’ve been able to channel some funds into development projects that improve Plone functionality. Everyone involved with Plone knows that this is how it should be done. The not so good news is – I’m not sure how this is perceived by the less advanced end user manager type. “What, it doesn’t do that already? We have to *pay* now?”.

I guess pointing out that the base system cost zero is a good start. But people sometimes seem to want something else for nothing, if they got the first bit for nothing. Hiring developer time is anathema to them.

Also (and this is a valid criticism) Plone dev time is not always cheap. Due to a range of factors like the uniqueness of the platform etc.

2) Their pet Vignette or Sharepoint installations probably had a large team of people someplace keeping them up, or an army of consultants who put them together in the first place. It seems to me that Plone is much more in the “workgroup” space due to its low capital cost, ease of use out of the box etc. That’s not to imply a lack of features – far from it. But my experience has been that Plone teams tend to work more closely with non-technical users, compared to “enterprise” CMS teams. Plone’s a complex, powerful system and sometimes the cracks show if you don’t know what’s going on. Or if you work with someone who doesn’t.

On the flip side, self-critique (“how can we do this better?”) is always a Good Thing. And. havine spent some time recently involved in fairly complex Plone deployment planning and a bit of PHP development on the side, I’m left with a new sense of how good Plone actually is. If people felt like throwing as much money at it as they do at Vignette consultancy. it’d be a world-beater.