Needed: Comparison Reviews of Third Party Plone Products
Nov 26th, 2006 by Jon Stahl
It’s a lazy post-Thanksgiving weekend, and so it seems like a good time for me to make a list of tasks I’d like to put out to the Lazy Plone Web. (Before you go all “scratch your own itch” on me, though, remember that my blog is a much a set of notes to myself as to all of you, so this post is as much a “to do” list for me as it is for all of you.)
Specifically, I’m thinking about head-to-head product comparisons. As we all know, Plone has a got a lot of add-on Products. And there are quite a few common scenarios for which there are multiple add-on Products. This richness is definitely a strength, but it’s also a weakness — especially when there are very few good direct comparisons amongst similar products.
Here are a few clusters of products I’d like to see reviewed together:
- Forums: Ploneboard, Gossip, ZForum, SimpleForum, NunBB
- Blogs: CoreBlog2, Quills, EasyBlog, SimpleBlog
- Workgroup Collaboration: mxmWorkgroups, TeamSpace, GrufSpaces
- Filesystem Storage: ExternalStorage, FilesystemStorage, BlobFile
- Email: PloneGazette, LindeMerkur, EasyNewsletter, ELetters, Listen, PloneContactFolder
- Composite Page Layouts: CMFContentPanels, CompositePack
- Photo Galleries: Plone out-of-the-box, LightboxJS, ATPhoto, FriendlyAlbum
(I’m probably forgetting a few products, and maybe even a few clusters — what’s missing?) The basic elements that I think would comprise a good multi-product review include:
- Compare the technical architectures of each product, especially identifying any significant strengths/weaknesses that might not be obvious to less experienced users.
- Compare the features of each product, preferably in a simple matrix format. (I’ve got the rudiments of a blog feature comparison in wiki format here. Feedback/contributions most welcome!)
- Assess the strength of developer & community support for each product. For example: does the product have a single author, or multiple contributors? Is there a track record of releases? Is the product widely deployed? What kind of future can we expect for the product?
- Given that many of these products cover somewhat different kinds of use cases, what are the situations where this product is a good choice? What are situations where another alternative might be best?
Are there elements that you think are missing?
Now, where to publish such a review? Martin Aspeli and the third-party products team are hard at work updating Plone Software Center to have much of this functionality for individual products (see here for details), but there’s as yet no plan to include multi-product reviews in PSC. (Hey, maybe that’s a good idea!) In the absence of that, I’d recommend writing up multi-product reviews as a tutorial in the documentation section of Plone.org. Tutorials are designed for complex, multi-page documents, so this seems like a good fit. I’d call a multi-product review something like “Review of Products.”
A final note: reviews are by definition subjective, opinionated documents. A good review is fair, balanced, and gets the facts correct, but is also not afraid to have an opinion. That’s what comments are for.
One thing that I am dealing with constantly is cross compaitibility and Plone version compatibility. It would be helpful to me if the matrix had a column for compatibilty / incompatibility.
A really great idea.
A few thoughts:
I think the problem for me, is I never end up using multiple products in one space, but do the research first before going with one.
BZ
I agree - great idea. On your last point, it would be good to encourage the reviewer to be specific about their own particular use-case. Everyone comes at a CMS with their own slightly different requirements and are going to make judgements dependent on that.
This kind of multi-product review could be a bit like a case-study. I’d find it really helpful to have these in the documentation section on plone.org. Not only would they help me make decisions between products but they’d also be a good way of seeing how others had met particular scenarios using Plone.
They could go out of date really fast though!
We’re about to look at CompositePage and others, so perhaps we could contribute something….
Looks like something I can fold into my Plone metrics work. I’ll try to chip away at your list and post interim bits on my blog (cross-posted here if you like). When something coherent comes out the other end, we’ll see about packaging it up for plone.org. In the meantime, I’d be delighted to get feedback from others with direct comments about various products.
Right this moment I’m evaluating GIS products (PrimaGIS, PloneWorldKit, and GeoLocation) for an up-coming project. That’ll be my first target, since I’m getting paid to do it.