Plone.org needs a canonical listing of Plone-powered sites
Sep 19th, 2005 by Jon Stahl
Currently, the Plone website has a rather anemic listing of Plone-powered sites. Although there’s a note there stating that the PR team is “working on enhancements to let people post their own sites,” and I’m hopeful that major improvements are on the way, I also notice that this topic came up on the Plone Website list in February, and little seems to have changed since then.
I thought I’d try to channel my short-term frustration into something positive: a draft specification for “PloneSiteListing” and content type, and some thoughts on revamping the Plone Sites page.
Motivation
I think the Plone sites webpage needs to accomplish two related-but-not-identical objectives:
1) Provide a short listing of “reference” Plone-powered websites — 20 or 30 sites that showcase the very best of what Plone can do, across a wide variety of organizations and site goals. These listings would ideally include fleshed-out case studies on the Plone site.
2) Provide a canonical listing (and count) 0f all Plone-powered sites. This is important to establish Plone’s market/mind share in a crowded CMS marketplace, and to attract developers to the Plone/Zope platform.
Proposal
I propose the creation of two new content types for Plone.org:
1) PloneCaseStudy 2) PloneSiteListing
PloneCaseStudy
This object is intended to represent the “in-depth” Plone site case studies. Information that is part of this object should include:
- Name of site
- Site URL (null = site not public)
- Name of client
- Sector (e.g. NGO, corporate, government, etc.)
- Location of client (city/state/country? Need to decide how structured)
- Name of lead developer
- URL of lead developer
- Other contributors
- (URLS of other contributors?)
- Date of site launch
- One-paragraph description of site
- Longer case study of site (or link to an off-site case study, perhaps on the developer’s site)
- Thumbnail image
PloneSiteListing
This is nearly identical to PloneCaseStudy above, except that it should only contain:
- Name of site
- Site URL
- Name of client
- Sector (e.g. NGO, corporate, government, etc.)
- Name of lead developer
- URL of lead developer
- Date of site launch
- Thumbnail image
- One-paragraph description of site (?)
All of these listings should be filterable by:
- Name of lead developer
- Sector
- Date
I agree about the proposed new content types for plone.org, but think it would also be a good idea to agree a common tag to use in the open social-bookmarking systems.
The plone.org types would be great for developers and site managers who have the time, awareness and confidence to come to plone.org to describe their sites, but many interesting uses of plone would slip through the cracks I fear.
Having sites tagged as ‘plone-site’ (or whatever is agreed) in del.icio.us for instance has several other advantages: (1) it exposes the plone-ness of these sites to users who browse their del.icio.us listing for other reasons, (2) it exposes the listings to open public tagging on their other attributes, evolving a rough & ready folksonomy of plone-sites, (3) it lets the bookmarking public express its rating of sites’ interest and importance (for instance, 900 people have bookmarked ‘Ubuntu - Linux for Human Beings’ at del.icio.us), and (4) it makes it very very quick & simple for plone advocates to note plone sites as we encounter them.
For instance, the tag I have used to casually note plone sites as I run across them is “plone-site” (I seem to be the only one who has used this one though: http://del.icio.us/tag/plone-site == http://del.icio.us/Mike_Malloch/plone-site). There are 3 uses of the tag “plonesite” by others in del,icio.us. Any reasonably rare string would suit me for this kind of tagging - the more ‘natural’ and guess-able the better of course.
I have a hunch that simplicity and open-ness are in themselves a 5th advantage of complementing ‘real’ case studies and listing entries with more casual postings in the big public services. As we move towards loosely-coupled parts & services for meeting users’ needs, and away from portal/CMS lock-in, these open services will become more and more important I think.
Mike-
Totally great idea.
Directory of Plone sites.
Jon Stahl described in a blog his vision about directory of Plone powered sites. This motivate me write few words about cmspowered.info
The new Plone site listing and related topics is being discussed on
http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/plonenet
Jump in there, or send me details of any sites you’d like to see included.
I just installed Plone at a request of a new faculty member. He thinks it will offer his department a better way to communicate. But to sell the idea I went looking for some shining examples. So far I’m coming up short. Plone is a solution in search of a problem - a great directory of showcase Plone sites might help fight that problem.
Jim-
I’m not sure I agree. My colleagues at ONE/Northwest are solving lots of real problems for grassroots environmental nonprofits with Plone — helping them create polished, professional, easy-to-update public websites, easy-to-use intra- and extranets, and custom web applications.
Often I find that consultants are trying to solve problems that the clients don’t know they have. Maybe the problem is that you and your client have a different understanding of what the problem is.
I’m told by the Plone developer community (including Jean, above) that an all-new Plone.net site is coming soon, and that a big listing of great Plone sites will be a key component of it. That’s great news.
Hey - this is a great conversation. These are exactly the kind of ideas that we are always looking for on the marketing comittee list http://lists.plone.org/mailman/listinfo/marketing-committee
This group is more about vision and message than it is about “marketing”, and we try to operate as a do-acracy, producing actaul documents and delivarables that can help people understnad what plone is and what its good for.
Stop by and ask some of these questions there.
Jim - I also have plenty of ideas for what a faculty member might use Plone for, along with many examples (including http://educommons.sourceforge.net/ which is built on Plone). This post is also a good place to start: http://lists.plone.org/pipermail/marketing-committee/2005-August/00028.html
Thanks for the ideas!
/Jonah
Hey Jonah-
About two days after writing this, I did join the marketing committee list… I’m still mostly in “lurk” mode, but will soon decloak, I’m sure.