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Mar 12th, 2008 by Jon Stahl

What’s the most exciting feature of Plone 3, according to students in Joel Burton’s “Plone Bootcamps” class this week?

Content rules, I was surprised to learn.

Discuss.

Tags: Plone

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8 Responses to “Counterintuitive”

on 12 Mar 2008 at 11:24 pm1Lennart Regebro

That and the dashboard “homepage” for all users is my top ones. Content rules gives you easy access to a flexible event framework. CPS has this, although content rules has a better UI, and it was used pretty much all the time. It’s extremely useful.

The dashboard should pretty much be the default page you end up on if you log in from the front page. It finally put’s the Portal in Portal ToolKit. Oh, right, it’s called CMF now.
on 13 Mar 2008 at 12:34 am2Martin Aspeli

Why is it counterintuitive? Okay, so I had something to do with them, but they are very useful, and were in effect a reaction to a popular feature in many of Plone’s competitors.

Martin
on 13 Mar 2008 at 1:17 am3Kamon Ayeva

Yes, content rules are the most exciting feature of Plone 3, IMO.
And like many exciting things in the world they are underestimated or not valued as it should. But I guess that would improve, as the smart folder/collections story improved. Some well thought rules should probably be used under the hood by Plone OOTB, so it appears obvious when and how to use them.
As a side note, I gave a talk about content rules at the Naples Plone conf, and it was the only talk on that subject when you would expect 2 or 3.
My 2 cents.
on 13 Mar 2008 at 2:36 am4yurj

it is surprising cause one would expect something about the framework, and you get something about “do a thing in a fast way and TTW”
on 13 Mar 2008 at 3:20 am5Matt Hamilton

I’m really not surprised by this to be honest. Think about the feelings at the PSPS, lots of people want TTW content type creation… this is similar I feel. This allows someone only slightly higher than a normal web editor to be able to do real-world nice things like content alerts etc.

-Matt
on 14 Mar 2008 at 6:47 am6Jon Stahl

Just to clarify my surprise: Content Rules is a really neat piece of code. It’s just that was the one major feature in Plone 3 for which I didn’t immediately see a clear use for the small/medium clients we serve. I see a LOT of Plone projects (and new Plone users!) here, and never have my clients asked to be able to create something resembling a content rule, nor have they asked for something that made me go “gosh, I wish I had content rules.”

So, what I took from the experience was not to make the mistake of assuming that we necessarily see “average” Plone users or use-cases.

Content rules itself totally rocks, btw.
on 14 Mar 2008 at 5:04 pm7Martin Aspeli

I think there’s a bit of a perception and documentation issue here as well. People may not necessarily know that they’re there or know what to do with them. They may assume that they need programmers to get some things done that they would be able to do themselves with content rules.

I’ve actually found myself telling people “you could solve this with a content rule” (plus sometimes “with a custom condition/action”) when people ask for more advanced “work flow” (in the more basic sense of the word) for content.
on 14 Mar 2008 at 7:16 pm8Jon Stahl

Martin,
Exactly. When I asked Joel, “Why do people in your classes love content rules so much?” he said, “Because it lets them do ‘programmer-y’ things without being programmers.”

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Counterintuitive

8 Responses to “Counterintuitive”

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