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How does Drupal compare to Plone?
General discussion
Steve Dondley - December 1, 2004 - 06:34
This question is prompted by some comments made over athttp://drupal.org/comment/reply/13129/21713.
I‘m not familiar with Plone at all. In fact, I couldn‘t even tell you what Python code looked like if I saw it. Zope sounds like a dark force ready to suck me into another universe. But its technological intimidation factor aside, it is the mother of all CMS software, at least from what little I‘ve read and heard. Given that it even has some of code written in C for performance purposes, I can only assume that Plone is an industrial, heavy-duty CMS system.
I‘m just wondering what Drupal‘s niche in the CMS software ecology is compared to Plone. What advantages does Drupal have? Disadvantages? Does Drupal aspire to evolve into a better, stronger version of Plone or is there something inherent about Drupal‘s architecture that would prevent that from ever happening? And what really distinguishes the two programs? Are there some things one is good at that the other is not?
‹ I want to search for "GD" on this site but I can‘tSupport for Multiple Blogs / User ›
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While I don‘t think I‘m
nazadus - December 1, 2004 - 07:45
While I don‘t think I‘m fully qualified to answer your question I can explain why I chose Drupal over the others.
PHP/MySQL/{Apache,IIS} -- meaning it isn‘t it‘s own web-server. From what I can tell Zope and Plone require it‘s own little engine run. I do some webmail stuff. While I‘m sure Zope et. al. can probbly do this, I don‘t feel like investing the time to figuring it out. Using MySQL also allows you to nicely hand-hack tables ‘n stuff incase things break. Installation -- Installation is fairly simple and a very small learning curve to get going. Learning modules is a small learning curve but not signifigant, with the documentation getting worthwhile now-a-days you can easily make your own module with moderate programming experiances. Interpreted, not compiled -- meaning the module I write here will work on (virtually) any other machine that can run the other modules. Free/GPL
Now while Drupal has a very small learning curve relative to Zope and Plone, Drupal is not as easily able to handle the big stuff. I say this, what I mean is Drupal still has some core things to fix (such as taxonomoy_access and getting it working with some better features) that could make it very painful for a medium or large scale company to deal with.
I think, in the future, Drupal can compete with these however Drupal is far (?) from being capable of doing that in my opinoin.
-----------------
"Our greatest glory is not in never failing but in rising every time we fall." -- Confusious
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Sadly, Drupal is not in a Python ;)
Axel - December 8, 2004 - 22:10
> From what I can tell Zope and Plone require it‘s own little engine run
As I know Zope may use Apache and don‘t require use own webserver.
>Free/GPL
Plone also free and GPL.
>Interpreted, not compiled -- meaning the module I write here will work on (virtually)
Python is also interpreter with beauty crossplatform availability.
I thing, Plone & Zope - more oriented to large corporate and intranet sites, but Drupal - mostly supports communities and hobbyst projects. Imho. Certainly, Zope has more powerfull permissions system, than Drupal and more attractive for realization of complex workflow. There are a lot of products on top of Zope, not only CMS/CMF, but for example ERP systems. Drupal attract by his simple and clear internal structure, which requre minimum time for learning to use and administer it. Drupal may be easy installed on any ‘virtual hosting‘ - PHP/MySQL/Apache, and I sad that in Python has not such lightweight CMSes like Drupal. But when I wrote Drupal modules I sad what Drupal‘s language is PHP, but not Python. PHP is horrible, certainly.
--
Axel,
Russian Drupal Community
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Interesting question
olav - December 1, 2004 - 10:50
... because I frequently make a concious choice between the two. Both are open source, free systems and could happily serve community sites.
Plone is based in theContent Management Framework CMF which in turn is based on theZope Web Application Server. Zope is a scalable, powerful system written in the Python language, has flexible rights management, powerful templating (the TAL language which alsomy PHPTAL Drupal theme engine is based on originates here) and a very easy-to-use package system to create extensions. The CMF on top of this defines object types and processes for content management. Plone builds on this to deliver a complete Content Management System.
The fact that it is written in Python (a clean, easy to learn, object oriented language) alone would bias me towards this system, but ...
At least in Germany, you don‘t find that many Python developers. Many CMS that I work with are PHP-based. These two reasons plus the fact that -yes- ZOPE/CMF/Plone is a big system let me look for alternatives.
Enters Drupal. Drupal is small by comparision. What it does (community plumbing) it does very well and -important when you want to adapt it to other systems- it has clean code and well-documented programming interfaces - something I rarely see in the PHP world.
Add its flexible templating and caching and it is very well capable of driving even large community sites or just the interactive parts of more traditional websites. An example that my company has done ishttp://www.diabetes-world.net (look under Forum) which is based on SixCMS with Drupal forums.
To summarize, both systems have their merits. Plone would be a strategic core system for complex requirements like an intranet for insurance companies or financial institutions. One the other hand, for me Drupal is the best foundation for even large public community websites.
Regards,
Olav
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I think I am qualified to answer this.
achilles - December 1, 2004 - 14:10
I‘m one of the core developers on Plone, and also a user of Drupal. I don‘t find my loyalties divided, as I find both systems suitable for very different purposes.
I‘m going to assume most people reading this site are familiar with Drupal already, so I won‘t cover the feature set or intended audience, except to say that Drupal works pretty well for smallish community sites that require minimal expenditure of effort in setup, and a defined set of core features.
Plone, on the other hand, whilst being reasonably suited to that task, is a bit of a different beast. Its development has arisen out of the Zope application server (in itself a gargantuan project), and the Zope Content Management Framework, neither of which actually really gives you a website.
Plone is the user layer on top of Zope and the CMF that offers an incredible amount of functionality out-of-the-box that you just won‘t find anywhere else. Features like: end-to-end i18n; localisation; placeless content; pluggable, configurable workflow; messaging; granular security (in way more depth than Drupal); and so on.
Now, there are 2 main differences that you‘re going to look at when choosing Drupal or Plone. The first is the scale of the undertaking. Zope/Plone is fantastic for large-scale projects, as you can do amazing things with it in a very short period of time. I regularly take on very large scale projects and use Plone for them. Drupal doesn‘t meet my needs in that space, yet. Zope and Plone as a combination provide an almost unparalleled development platform, and, even traditionally as a PHP programmer myself, I will happily assert that Python is the more appropriate choice of programming language to meet these goals.
The second thing that you‘re going to need to look at is usability. Now, I‘m a hardcore developer. I tend to think through problems in terms of code issues. However, when it comes to actually *using* Plone on a daily basis for my own personal website, it drives me nuts. I find Drupal‘s configuration, layout, content editing, and style to be far more comfortable than Plone‘s. I‘m really not a fan of Plone‘s default skin, but that‘s as a matter of personal preference. Technically, and from an accessibility viewpoint, Plone and Drupal are on a pretty even footing.
Just as a quick guideline, I reimplemented my personal website last night in Drupal as part of a familiarisation exercise for another project that I‘m getting involved in. Now, bearing in mind I‘ve been building websites commercially for about 9 years, this took me about 2 hours, from no prior knowledge of Drupal, but Ihaven‘t done any there reworking yet. The last time I did it in Plone took me about 8 hours, including a full skin rework, but I‘m confident I could build a full Plone site for my personal needs in about 3 - 4 hours now.
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plone vs. drupal
oc - December 1, 2004 - 14:39
We compared the two CMS‘s and chose Drupal. However Plone seemed a lot more usable in certain ways, in that it had fewer releases and the releases were somewhat more polished. Drupal tends to move quickly and the development is less centralized.
Plone‘s exterior seems usable, but to do very basic things you have to get into the Zope CMF which is not intuitive at all. Plone is better documented but the CMF is quite confusing.
Drupal is easier once you understand it, but the documentation is of a lower quality than Plone.
Drupal is more oriented toward community sites and blogs, where Plone is more oriented toward sites with lots of static content.
The templates which exist for Plone are more attractive than the themes that currently exist for Drupal.
I am waiting for someone to implement the "Drone" template for Drupal, making Drupal look like Plone :)
-rc
Organizers‘ Collaborative -- Free Software for Activist Groups
http://organizenow.net andhttp://organizersdb.org
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Plone for Community Sites?
martinb9999 - December 2, 2004 - 13:15
Drupal is more oriented toward community sites and blogs, where Plone is more oriented toward sites with lots of static content.
I can‘t comment about Drupal, but Plone/CMF is built around multi-users with roles-based permissions (which can apply at several levels of granularity, from cross-site server level down to individual object level) and workflows. Now that may not be an appropriate model for all community sites - particularly where you want a model of all content is available as soon as it‘s written - but for many communities, it‘s just the ticket.
The selling story of Plone for commercial clients is strong on collaborative sites such as multi-author intranets.
There are also many Plone products (aka Modules) designed to support community needs.
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End users are different?
Steve Dondley - December 1, 2004 - 16:21
Thanks, achilles. That‘s interesting.
If I‘m understading you correctly, it sounds like you need a trained professional web manager to handle the day-to-day changes of a Plone site while Drupal is much more geared toward the same kind of audience that drove MovableType to popularity; individuals and small groups of people who are more interested in communicating with the outside world quickly and easily. That‘s one of the things I like about Drupal: users can do a great deal with minimal training.
What about modularity? Is Plone similarly modular in design? I see Drupal‘s modularity as one of its big strengths. It intially comes configured as a small, easily manageable package. If all you want to do is maintain one blog, Drupal can do that without blinking. But as your needs grow and you require mor functionality, Drupal can easily grow with you. Is Plone set up like this or does it just land on your desk like a box of lead bricks?
I‘m also wondering, as time passes and Drupal‘s modules get more refined and polished, if it‘s conceivable that Drupal eventually might compete on even footing with Plone? Or does the powerful Python/Zope combination give Plone too big of a scalability advantage over Drupal‘s LAMP-based architecture?
At any rate, it sounds like you believe the two projects can learn from each other even though the serve different types of end user. Is that an accurate summary of your post?
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needing a professional web manager
oc - December 1, 2004 - 16:33
about needing a trained professional web manager... I don‘t think that you really do need one with Plone. My impression, from the group ONEnw.org which uses Plone for small nonprofit clients, is that the initial setup of the web site can be a real bear (for that you need a web consultant), but once you do that changing the content is quite easy.
Drupal is a bit easier for the initial setup of the site. After that, changing the content in Drupal might actually be a bit more challenging than with Plone because it takes more work with Drupal to give your endusers just the permissions they need to change content. With Plone the endusers are restricted by default because they can‘t figure out how to get into the CMF, and because you have this object oriented inheritance based scheme for giving people access to editing various objects. Drupal is more permissive, a bit harder to lock down.
Again, these are impressions, we are still learning about both systems.
-rich
Organizers‘ Collaborative -- Free Software for Activist Groups
http://organizenow.net andhttp://organizersdb.org
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Permissions still rough around the edges
Steve Dondley - December 1, 2004 - 16:53
Yeah, the permissions system for Drupal is still very rough around the edges. It has only been around since 4.5.0 (two months). In fact, I just submitted a huge patch to improve the taxonomy_access module but the module is still not ready for prime time. I‘d give Drupal a couple of more version number ticks before its permission system can be fairly assessed.
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inheritance is the key
jasonwhat - December 3, 2004 - 11:56
the fact that roles are in no way connected is a problem in Drupal. CMS‘s without as much bredth as Plone such as Xaraya enable much better multi-author editing by making roles hierarchical and inherited. This way, the role of "Editor" would have all the permissions of the "authenticated user" role automatically.
4.5‘s ability to assign multiple roles helps, but it would be nice to have "parents" for roles, and automatic, yet configurable, permissions created fore each new role.
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permission schemes
Dries - December 3, 2004 - 12:32
An inheritance based permission scheme might be easier to use, but it is equally powerful than Drupal‘s permission scheme that lets you assign multiple roles per user.
How would you make someone an ‘editor‘ _and_ a ‘translator‘ in Plone when you can‘t extend editor from translator, and can‘t extend translator from editor either (yet both can extend ‘authenticated user‘)?
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correct
jasonwhat - December 3, 2004 - 13:48
that is why I said they should still "configurable" in a Drupal like way, meaning you can both set permissions manually or allow the inheritance to do this auto, and you can set multiple roles. Xaraya does both, and allows admin to set permissions right down to the user level.
Hierarchy means that others can set permissions as well, but only on the people under them if so allowed. It is all part of the groups/roles/node_privacy projects that need to be discussed and combined in Drupal.
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Inheritance of permissions
Kobus - June 6, 2005 - 07:51
I know this is old news and that things have changed a lot (in other words, these comments are not all valid anymore), but I felt I wanted to say this anyways:
I prefer that permissions are not inherited. Later versions of Drupal can assign more than one role per user by selecting a simple checkbox. This is ideal in my situation for many of my sites. The reason this works so well, is that one of the sites I have implemented has several admins, each performing a different task, and not allowed to directly work on another department‘s tasks. This site is for a fairly large media company, with branches country-wide.
-- Kobus
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Let me chime in
jasko - December 1, 2004 - 16:55
I think I may be the one who made the crucial comments in the first place, when I said Drupal needed to look at Zope / Plone with an eye towards appropriating good ideas, and I think I said why I use Drupal forhttp://fortprogress.org.
Let me say a few words about Zope now:
First of all, you‘ll be hard pressed to find a better or easier language than Python. I learned Python after both Perl and PHP sent me screaming from the room in abject terror. I was Delphi programmer forced into a Java / C++ world and I needed a scripting / webby language. Python is fast enough on the execution side and blisteringly fast on the development side. It is object oriented from the ground up instead of having had objects tacked on late in the game and remarkably intuitive. You‘ll find the percentage of correct first guesses is higher in Python than anything else you try.
It was through Python that I found Zope, and at first, it was hard to understand. But once I grokked what Zope really was, it became a lot easier. Zope stands for "Z Object Publishing Environment" and that sounds like a lot of buzzwords like many acronyms, but it turns out that‘s exactly what it does. You write Python objects. Then, Zope makes them available on the web. Available to humans. Or software. Or whatever. Zope itself is a web server (though it is frequently run behind Apache), an object database (which holds most everything in a Zope installation and is something I miss about every non-Zope system), and an application server that executes the objects you‘ve written. When I first started using Zope, I was really innocent of the whole idea of a CMS. I only knew that I needed to have some friends be able to update a site without HTML. I built a site on raw Zope with no Python at all, just some now-outdated in-page scripting called DTML (the predecessor to TAL, mentioned above). That site allowed through-the-web updates by certain people, turned a simple markup into HTML and automatically ordered content recent-to-old, moving the most recent post into the prominent center spot. That was without any of the CMF / Plone stuff we‘ve got now. And I built that site, including learning web programming concepts and the whole Zope philosophy and enough HTML to get along, in a couple of weeks of spare time.
The Zope folks could tell that Content Mangement was their killer app. Despite the fact that Zope is a complete Application Server (frankly I think it‘s already better than this LAMP Grid Application Server that‘s getting press lately, but that‘s another topic), many people thought of it as a CMS, because of sites like the one I created. So the CMF was created to capitalize on that. And Plone is a complete CMS built on the CMF.
The real issue is the size of the developer community. Drupal has functionality I need, and it has it now. Could a community moderated submission queue be implemented in Plone? Sure. And it would probably be great. But it wasn‘t there when I last looked and I sure don‘t have time to write it. Plone has excellent, best-of-breed technologies, a dedication to quality coding that is, as far as I can tell, unsurpassed in the FOSS CMS world, and the full and awesome power of Zope beneath it.
You probably wouldn‘t need a webmaster to handle Plone day-to-day, you‘d need a skilled programmer or team to create custom products, just like you would with Drupal. Plone already does blogs, forums, stories, images, wiki, and more.
I wouldn‘t dismiss Plone out of hand, and for Enterprise class projects, I think it has some strong advantages. But Drupal offers incredible functionality that I can access on very low cost hosts, and that‘s what won this time for me.
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That‘s it precisely.
achilles - December 1, 2004 - 16:56
One of the main reaons that I‘m getting involved in Drupal is that I think there‘s a lot that the two projects can bring to each other. Using a Plone site is a nightmare for some users simply because of the way that so much is presented all at once. Drupal‘s approach to a lot of the process of adding content is more streamlined, and that works well for users. I‘d like to bring some of the power and flexibility of Plone‘s content management functions to Drupal, and I‘d like to bring some of Drupal‘s simplicity to Plone.
Both systems share the modular approach to introducing function to a system. Plone can similarly be stripped-down considerably, however, due to the approach of presenting everything by default, there‘s actually more work involved in making a simple site. Plone does have "customisation policies" that allow you to choose from a number of default setups for a site, however, this extraordinarily powerful feature has never been properly utilised.
Plone‘s modularity strikes me as more powerful and flexible than Drupal‘s. The system of Tools, Types, and Skins works really well, although it does scatter the configuration of the system somewhat. This has recently been mitigated by the introduction of a site-wide control panel, however, too few developers continue development past the point of implementing functions, and configuration is often an afterthought.
I like the fact that Plone runs on a fully-featured application server. This is too much for personal sites for most people (finding cheap and reliable Zope hosting is very difficult), but for Enterprise-class applications it‘s ideal. Clustered, distributed, replicated services are very, very important to most of my clients. Plone is really, really scalable, PHP/MySQL doesn‘t even compete at this level.
(Brief aside in personal opinion: as long as MySQL remains the DB of choice for PHP applications, PHP will never really make it big at enterprise level. I‘ve seen people laughed out of the room for suggesting MySQL as a viable alternative to Oracle or SAP. Big companies want big databases, whether they need them or not. Drupal could conceivably work its way into this space with official support for Postgres, Ingres, DB2, MSSql, and Oracle.)
So, in summary, both systems have many things in common, and their own particular strengths that will appeal to varied audiences. Druapl is extremely well suited to smaller, personal sites, whilst Plone is designed ground-up for enterprise applications. Plone‘s content management is more powerful and flexible, but Drupal‘s is simpler and quicker to use. I enjoy using both systems, and will be happy to help each learn from the other.
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Scability of PHP and MySQL
Dries - December 2, 2004 - 09:10
Brief aside in personal opinion: as long as MySQL remains the DB of choice for PHP applications, PHP will never really make it big at enterprise level. I‘ve seen people laughed out of the room for suggesting MySQL as a viable alternative to Oracle or SAP. Big companies want big databases, whether they need them or not.
Both PHP‘s and MySQL‘s scalability are often debated, yet we can‘t neglect some important use cases:
A fair number of thebiggest and most popular web boards use PHP and MySQL. For example, readthis interview with Derek Liu, founder of Gaia Online. Gaia Online is a phpBB message board on top of a MySQL database that stores 170 million posts. They get up to 200.000 new posts a day, and some posts get more than 50.000 replies. These sites are bigger and more dynamic than the average big company‘s web site. Read: it is not just big companies that run big websites. Yahoo! embraced PHP and MySQL. Check thisYahoo! presentation. They have 201 million unique users, 93 million active registered users, and 1.5 billion page views/day.
Of course, that doesn‘t imply Drupal is scalable, nor does it tell us anything about how Drupal‘s performance scales compared to Plone‘s. It is a well-known fact that Plone powerssome impressive sites/projects and that it is more mature in terms of scalability. However, I do think people are laughed out of the room too quickly and that we need to hand out big foam cluebats to beat the crap out of some decision-makers.
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Cluebats on CafePress?
robertDouglass - December 3, 2004 - 12:49
Dries, if you start selling those big foam cluebats on CafePress, we won‘t need our fundraiser!
- Robert Douglass
-----
visit me atwww.robshouse.net
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Not trying to burst your
erikh - December 11, 2004 - 19:43
Not trying to burst your bubble, but Yahoo is a Oracle shop, or was for a long time - the presentation you cited (which I attended personally) has no mention of MySQL in it at all, which is why I hold my position that they still are.
As I previously had a co-worker who worked for the company, like a lot of large sites, pure reliance in a SQL-related database is not how things work if you want to scale. Many file-related databases (through techniques such as directory hashing) are used to improve performance for one-off relations (for things like user ids and basic account information).
MySQL might perform and is very useful when you need read performance in a SQL-oriented server, but when you start getting into enforcing relationships at the SQL Server level, MySQL really starts to crumble (see: foreign keys, user-controllable sequences, just about anything beyond insert/select/update). At past jobs we‘ve fed MySQL data from a more reliable database, to get the read performance, but not lose the powerful constraint mechanisms that pretty much every RDBMS has that MySQL doesn‘t.
So, while I don‘t think it‘s fair to slam MySQL unlaterally - it‘s good at what it does, don‘t make it into something it‘s not, either.
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exactly what does that mean?
larry - December 17, 2004 - 09:33
Hello erikh,
Your post is very interesting. While I would not put MySQL and Oracle in the same league, it must be noted that MANY businesses are either closet users of MySQL, that is not telling their shareholders a good chunk of their information is stored in a freely available, open-source database or they use a combination of both. Over 80%, and I mean 80%, of Oracle‘s net revenue‘s come from servicing their own databases, not database license sales per se. In any case, you said that you attended the presentation personally but there was no mention of MySQL at all. What does this mean exactly? The link that Dries gives is bogus? Honestly, I‘m not trying to be rude, but if there was no mention of MySQL at all, where does this link and the presentation found on that link come from? If you are correct, that means it‘s bogus. What am I missing?
Ciao,
Larry
--There are no Kangaroos in Austria--
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SAP sells mySQL
mcduarte2000 - December 17, 2004 - 09:56
CheckSAP DB. So, I guess, if MySQL is enough for SAP systems it should be enough for most other things...
Miguel Duarte
Webmaster of:Lisbon Guide &Love Poems
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powerful constraint mechanisms
vwX - May 21, 2005 - 22:34
Yes they are powerful. However, why let your database define the business logic of your application. It just makes for harder data fixes, harder upgrades, and harder changes to your business logic. Peoplesoft seems to do well without using the powerful constraint mechanisms that the databases it runs on provides.
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Plone is big
geokker - December 1, 2004 - 19:47
I‘ve had a lot of contact with Plone and Zope over the years. Out of the box it offers a fairly steep learning learning curve, a comparatively high resource demand and appears to be pretty slow generally. People have often barked about improperly configured builds, the benefits of the ZEO tool and use of the built-in zopeDB - ‘use postgres for God‘s sake‘ they whine.
Python is arguably more powerful than PHP, Zope can easily be configured to talk through Apache and the permissions logic is extremely granular but the core problem I have with the zope/plone/cmf pile is its open source-ness. Zope is quite a mature company with quite a few proprietary ‘industrial strength‘ products. The Zope framework is still free, but I wonder ‘how long‘ and ‘will there be a development fork?‘.
Drupal offers genuine simplicity out of the box. Lots of companies out there just want a CMS that will allow them to negate the need to pay a design company bucks to update static pages.
So of course, it depends on requirements. The Plone world is much, much larger. There are many more modules or ‘products‘ out there. Drupal is still in the early stages as far as I can see, yet is ‘cleaner‘ and I have found (on a modestly specced server) quicker.
Time will tell. I want to see an intelligent approach to the search function - the most important aspect of any CMS in my opinion. I want to see powerful, yet simplified visual permissions management. I‘m a believer in LAMP and I think with a sharp brief, Drupal can be just as ‘enterprise‘ as the competition.
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Plone resource intensive and/or slow
tag - December 1, 2004 - 20:55
From a bit of firsthand experience and much reading, Plone is very RAM-hungry, a common gripe about Java appservers.
Another thing I can‘t believe I almost never see mentioned is how slow Plone is. Maybe all the sites I see are running on cheap boxes under desks, or the small server I set it up on wasn‘t ideal, but dang. Maybe if it‘s completely decked out with layers of caching, distributed ZEO servers, etc. it speeds up, but this takes some work and know-how. Perhaps for specific needs this work is worthwhile.
I‘ve been kind of disappointed by it, because I‘d so love to be able to use Python rather than PHP, without writing from the ground up. Oh well, is Moore‘s Law still in effect?
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Apples and Oranges
achilles - December 1, 2004 - 21:21
First off, from a *lot* of firsthand experience (I wrote a guide to Plone performance tweaking and caching, which will be back on my website as soon as I finish working out Drupal), Plone is a bit slow.
It‘s not resource hungry for the kind of application it is. Drupal is not by any stretch of the imagination an application server. It‘s a collection of PHP scripts connected to a database. Plone is a Content Management Framework running atop an application server. One of the uses of the application server is producing websites. I also use it as an asset management system, a customer relationship management system, an integrated communications server, and a server for mutiplayer games. So, yes, it‘s resource hungry in comparison to a collection of scripts and a MySQL database running as an Apache module, but then so is a passenger jet in comparison to a bicycle. I‘ve had a Plone application with fifty thousand articles published by thirty thousand users use up maybe 400MiB of RAM, on a dedicated server, but that‘s a miniscule amount in comparison to some applications I‘ve used (such as BroadVision) which can eat through 4GiB of RAM on 2 separate servers in order to do far less.
The other thing to bear in mind with Plone is that, being an application server, it‘s not really for your weekend hobbyist to setup. There‘s an awful lot of expertise needed to get the best out of the system. You need to know things like caching policies, caching proxy servers, resource management, and so on. For what it‘s worth, I‘ve benchmarked both Drupal and Plone on the same little P3-500 with 128MB of RAM serving up 2000 requests per second. Neither PHP nor Zope is capable of this, it‘s all about having squid in front of the server and having sensible caching in place.
Yes, this takes some know-how, but it‘s kind of the point that you need to know how to use a system like Plone before you start deploying it, in the same way that any reasonably complex machinery requires a little knowledge to operate. Drupal has a slightly shallower learning curve, but also offers considerably less in terms of function. It‘s up to the individual to choose the platform most appropriate for their needs.
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Agreed
tag - December 1, 2004 - 23:51
Agreed they‘re different tools for different scenarios. I didn‘t mean to compare resource usage of Plone to PHP, rather to more similar setups like Java appservers, or even just containers like Tomcat or Resin.
It just seems unfortunate that there doesn‘t appear to be much of a middle ground for Plone usage - a naive setup is really sluggish, but a performant one excessive work for many use cases. I‘ll have to work with it a bit more I guess.
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Plone speed guide
achilles - December 2, 2004 - 09:35
Tag, here‘s a starter guide to getting more performance out of Plone,http://poked.org/entries/needforspeed
The main point is, unless you‘re running a really dynamic application, you‘re going to be using caching from your http server, so performance isn‘t an issue for smaller sites as long as you set up your server correctly. Your choice of application server is essentially irrelevent in performance terms when you‘ve got apache or squid serving out cached pages at 2000 requests every second.
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Yes but
geokker - December 2, 2004 - 08:42
This sort of argument reminds me of the Windows OS. Yes, it‘s mind blowingly sophisticated, the result of a million genius-grade brains no doubt. Yes Drupal is a collection of scripts poking into MySQL or the like. Yes it is apples and oranges.
But. People do use Windows just to surf the net. People do use Windows to play games (only because they now have to). Would Encrypting File System extensions be overkill for them? I think so.
I can imagine the main requirement of Drupal is to provide an easy and intuitive way to allow some users to update web pages. ‘Here‘s your login bob, please add a document here, I‘ll review it, then publish it.‘
I‘ve seen a lot of plone sites do just this - without having a laser-link bouncing off the moon into a supercluster of Oracle datacenters.
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Speed comparison
Bèr Kessels - December 4, 2004 - 14:21
Read here:http://drupal.org/node/9533 andhttp://forum.mamboserver.com/showthread.php?t=11782 here, for some details on speed, scalabilty etc. for various CMSes. Drupal comes out very well. Much better than plone.
[Ber | Drupal Serviceswebschuur.com]
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Where is Plone?
Richer - December 18, 2004 - 02:57
I don‘t see Plone in that comparison.
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might be slightly off
water - December 1, 2004 - 22:33
might be slightly off topic... but in the php & pyton swing of things, can plone handle php code in pages & blocks.
one of the things that i find intimidating about plone is that i might not be able to make php scripts & layout blocks quick and easu in php and include them here & there as documents etc.
can anyone shed some light on this?
:water
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PHP within Zope/Plone
fcasarra@puntba... - December 22, 2004 - 15:33
There exists modules to include PHP in Zope/Plone (PHParser, PHP Document) but are no maintained any more.
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PHPParser/PHPGateway 1.1.3 released on 2004-12-26
dlkita - January 11, 2005 - 11:27
http://zope.org/Members/hewei/PHParser
PHParser/PHPGateway aims to combine Zope and PHP together. It provides you a possibility to run PHP scripts under Zope and Plone.
PHParser is a DTML-Document-like object. Its content when being published is first rendered by the DTML engine and then passed to PHP CGI. The result from PHP CGI will be finally displayed.
PHPGateway is a Folder-like object. When its docroot property is pointed to a real directory in the file system, the entire directory can be published by Zope, even as a virtual host. Especially, the .php files under that directory will be directly passed to PHP CGI without DTML rendering. For example, you can now make phpMyAdmin installed in the file system run on Zope only by adding just one PHPGateway object.
 
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permissions and workflow
samo - December 2, 2004 - 20:14
Very exciting to see patches from nysus to taxonomy_access. This seems like a big step in tackling some of the permissions issues that Plone brings up.
The other big category that Plone brings up is "pluggable, configurable workflow". I‘m willing to take a stab at workflow with a little direction. Are there any lapsed modules out there that attempted this that I should look at? Any other direction?
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permissions and workflow
jvandyk - May 20, 2005 - 17:26
Drupal has aworkflow module.
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Re: C code
Pxtl - December 19, 2004 - 08:13
I‘ve worked in Python, and let me tell you - the system for extending it with C code is goregeous. Swapping in a C optimization in the place of Python code is easy and sexy as hell. So, its no surprise that Plone has C-replacements.
Really, for those who‘re wondering what the hubbub is with Python: imagine a language that looks like C, feels like Lisp, and reads like pseudocode. Unfortunately, in order to implement this featureset, it is an endless series of hacks and inconsistencies, but what‘re you gonna do?
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Extentions
Edward C. Zimme... - May 21, 2005 - 21:34
"I‘ve worked in Python, and let me tell you - the system for extending it with C code is goregeous. "
Its easy but its even easier in TCL (and TCL was designed for) but we‘ve routinely been embeding our search engine into not just Python and Tcl but also Ruby, Perl, Java, Lisp and even PHP--- we‘ve integrated, however, our engine into Drupal not into PHP but with some PHP socket code in a Drupal module that connects to a server... written in (as things might have it) Python.,. In ACS we instead use Tcl and extended AOLSever.. but that‘s just an issue of taste.. The magic in doing all of this is SWIG (http://www.swig.org ) and it helps make things simple--- before SWIG we used to do things by hand (that‘s how we did the very first wxPython, for instance) and it was !@#!.
"Really, for those who‘re wondering what the hubbub is with Python:"
We use a lot of Python but it is indeed over-hyped.
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Plone weak on categories
Tommy Sundstrom - January 23, 2005 - 11:26
One difference between Plone and Drupal that is important to me is that Drupal seams to have a more modern system for organizing the site. While Plone basically is built around the old catalog/document metaphor, Drupal offers the possibility to use categories to structure the site and its navigation.
At least this is my impression after browsing around on the Plone site. The most similar thing I found was ”Topics”, that can build navigation based on keywords attached to nodes. But there does not seam to be any predefined categories or any hierarchy of categories. Topics also seams to be quite buggy in its present state.
I have no doubt that a similar function can be built for Plone. Put at the present, it does not seam to exist.
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Searching
geokker - January 23, 2005 - 11:54
With any kind of CMS, the key usability aspect is the search facility. Plone has an excellent ‘out of the box‘ search function. Users should be able to keenly filter search results e.g. date ranges, keywords, discrete type, status etc. Drupal could trump the competition here with a little work on the search and trip_search modules.
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