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The future of Plone -- not in web publishing?

4-Feb-2008

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Web Content Management, Marketplace at Large, Selecting Technology, Plone

In a candid blog posting, project co-founder Alexander Limi lists 18 things he "wishes were true" about the open source Portal / CMS platform, Plone. Limi has remained a leading light in the Plone community despite his day job at Google.

His list shows a kind of strategic vision and candor about failings -- things we find lacking in most other open source enterprise portals. If you're an adopter of any technology, you want to see open communication about the strategic direction of a product. Across the spectrum of commercial vendors and open source projects it is also very hard to find vendors candid about the strengths and weaknesses of their product. To be sure, Limi's word isn't law: Plone is managed by a separate foundation, but still the post is revealing.

One of his more provocative statements was that Plone's future does not lie in web publishing. This may become true, but in our research for The Enterprise Portals Report - 2008 we found that Plone today is actually a potential fit for Web Publishing scenarios. Many Plone adopters select the platform precisely because it is a kind of combo Web CMS / Portal, but Limi recommends that the community should "realize that web publishing isn't our main area." Instead he suggests focusing on intranet deployments, collaborative workspaces, and document management -- in short, the increasingly crowded space that SharePoint has so effectively addressed.

Later this week the Plone Foundation is organizing a Strategic Planning Summit with the goal of creating a plan for the future of Plone. Surely Limi's list will be helpful for the discussion. While Plone maintains a publicly available roadmap it is quite thin on details beyond Version 3.1, which is slated for April release. Hopefully a few roadmap decisions will be made shortly, so that the faithful Plone adopters have enough time to digest the impact on their projects.

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