Tom pretty much breaks down my post from yesterday line by line in terms of how Plone might be able to support our needs. I really appreciate his efforts in creating and thinking about education specific CMS stuff, and I think he understands most of the limitations and requirements of such a system for schools. I’m not really familiar with Plone, but I did dig around on their site a bit this morning. What’s immediately scary is the thought of having to learn a whole new system, but with Tom’s responses in mind, it seems there may be some reason to dig deeper. Obvioulsy, it seems Plone has been pretty widely adopted, and that from the user interface standpoint it can be pretty much whatever we want it to be.
I’m thinking that maybe we could get together a BOF at BloggerCon to talk about all of this stuff. I truly believe there is a need, that as much as I like Manila and think it comes pretty close to being an answer, its lack of development makes me wonder as to whether it can be made even more effective for a K-12 installation. (It’s kind of ironic to me that they feature school sites on the Userland site, but the frustrating thing to me is that there has been absolutely no communication from the new management group as to their direction or timetables for anything. Have I mentioned that I think there’s a big potential market out there for this stuff? Ah…what do I know?)
All right, all right — I didn’t break it down line-by-line, but I’ll get to that early next week. If Howard Dean can use it to organize people all over the country, it can probably be useful in schools, too.
I am referring, of course, to Drupal, which also does everything you need. It’s written in PHP, which is a little simpler to pick up than Plone. And has a few other interesting features, like being able to log in to any Drupal site using the same ID. ’til Monday…
I’m not really planning on going to BloggerCon, but we should get together one way or another when you’re up here. It might be a little rude to sit around at Dave’s party talking about replacing Manila with free software.
I’m not sure what I’m going to be doing this summer, or next year, or ever, for that matter, and I am weighing whether or not I should just shut up and spend a couple months writing this stuff. I need to talk to some people who might know about the “big potential market” around here.
Maybe I can stop down on Sunday on my way back home, Tom. Dinner? At any rate, I think there is a future market here, but only if we figure out how to make it easy, easy, easy to use. And cheap.
The new pMachine product, ExpressionEngine, looks powerful and is inexpensive — I’m thinking very seriously about moving to it in the next month. They’re at http://www.pmachine.com .
I’m with Boris. After using PostNuke for a while, trying out Xaraya, getting a tour of a Plone site from the administration side, and reviewing a few others, I ended up with Drupal. Not just because of the features, though, but also because of the community. Drupal is lean, fast, and extremely configurable. And, I would argue, it’s very “social” in it’s development orientation. I’ve also taught with Drupal and would imagine that there is very little that Drupal can’t do in the classroom that Manila can do.
But everyone has to decide for themselves. The best piece of advice I have is to not get hung up on the application itself, look at the community, both the developers and the community of users. What they value, what they are doing and how they interact determines where things head in the long term. I wrote some ideas down about this a while ago which might help out: http://cyberdash.com/node/view/64
Meanwhile, admittedly, pMachine is a good app, as is MT, but open source has some advantages. Were Manila open source, for example, there are enough users that someone would pick it up and keep developing it.
Will, I’d be intersted in your thoughts on Pronett.org as a community of educators creating content using a Plone CMS. (I’m based in Australia, and intersted in case studies relating to identity and shared authorship in online envoronments.)
Will, I’d be intersted in your thoughts on Pronett.org as a community of educators creating content using a Plone CMS. (I’m based in Australia, and intersted in case studies relating to identity and shared authorship in online envoronments.)
Will, I’d be intersted in your thoughts on Pronett.org as a community of educators creating content using a Plone CMS. (I’m based in Australia, and intersted in case studies relating to identity and shared authorship in online envoronments.)