Advice for a replacement for plone.

[Ken Seehart]

I want a new python based CMS. ... One that won't keep me up all night ....

I've been fooling around with zope and plone, and I like plone for some
things, such as a repository for online project documentation. However
for general-purpose web development it is too monolithic. Is there
anything out there with the following properties?

0. Web page being developed is a typical small business home page (i.e.
not a newspaper or a blog).
1. Page owner can edit pages on line with no expertise (plone does great
here).
2. Main page does not look plone-like. For an example of a main page
that does not look plone-like, see http://www.arbitrary.com/ Note the
lack of CMS style navigation widgets.
3. Item 2 should be reachable with nearly no effort (plone fails utterly
here).
4. Target viewer (not the owner), should /not/ see something that looks
at all like a CMS system, but rather see exactly what the page owner
wants the page to look like.
5. Page owner should be able to view and navigate the tree of contents,
and select pages to edit with a wysiwyg editor (plone does great here)...
6. ... But the target viewer should not see this tree. See items 2 and 4.
7. Potential to add python scripted pages of various kinds.

<philosophyTher e are a couple different design approaches to making a
development environment. You can let the developer start with nothing,
and provide the developer with tools to create something (e.g. zope,
most plain text editors), or you can start with a finished result and
let the developer rip out and discard what is not desired (e.g. plone).
I often prefer to start with nothing. It's a natural starting point.
Note that systems that are based on starting with nothing can provide
the benefits of starting with something by providing templates and such.
</philosophy>

I would love to see a system that would give me an editable Hello World
page in under 5 minutes. Hello World would be a page consisting of
nothing but the words "hello world" (no tools, no navigation bar, and
certainly no CMS navigation stuff) in a url such as
www.myhelloworldwebsite.com/hello and a different url to edit the page,
such as www.myhelloworldwebsite.com/hello/edit or
www.mywebsite.com/edit/hello

If you are a plone fanatic and still think I should use plone, fine, but
please let me know where I can find a "Hello World" kind of example that
demonstrates items 2, 4, and 6.

In addition, I would like the ability to design the layout of the page
independent of the content. Plone has some nice features that would be
very helpful, but again, getting to hello world seems difficult.

Just plain Zope does a pretty good job at some of this, but I haven't
found a good online wysiwyg editor for the page owner to modify content.

Thanks for any ideas.

Ken

[Nick Craig-Wood]

Ken Seehart <ke*@seehart.co mwrote:

I want a new python based CMS. ... One that won't keep me up all night ....

I've been fooling around with zope and plone, and I like plone for some
things, such as a repository for online project documentation. However
for general-purpose web development it is too monolithic. Is there
anything out there with the following properties?

0. Web page being developed is a typical small business home page (i.e.
not a newspaper or a blog).
1. Page owner can edit pages on line with no expertise (plone does great
here).
2. Main page does not look plone-like. For an example of a main page
that does not look plone-like, see http://www.arbitrary.com/ Note the
lack of CMS style navigation widgets.
3. Item 2 should be reachable with nearly no effort (plone fails utterly
here).
4. Target viewer (not the owner), should /not/ see something that looks
at all like a CMS system, but rather see exactly what the page owner
wants the page to look like.
5. Page owner should be able to view and navigate the tree of contents,
and select pages to edit with a wysiwyg editor (plone does great here)...
6. ... But the target viewer should not see this tree. See items 2 and 4.
7. Potential to add python scripted pages of various kinds.

<philosophyTher e are a couple different design approaches to making a
development environment. You can let the developer start with nothing,
and provide the developer with tools to create something (e.g. zope,
most plain text editors), or you can start with a finished result and
let the developer rip out and discard what is not desired (e.g. plone).
I often prefer to start with nothing. It's a natural starting point.
Note that systems that are based on starting with nothing can provide
the benefits of starting with something by providing templates and such.
</philosophy>

I would love to see a system that would give me an editable Hello World
page in under 5 minutes. Hello World would be a page consisting of
nothing but the words "hello world" (no tools, no navigation bar, and
certainly no CMS navigation stuff) in a url such as
www.myhelloworldwebsite.com/hello and a different url to edit the page,
such as www.myhelloworldwebsite.com/hello/edit or
www.mywebsite.com/edit/hello

Django + flatpages maybe? Coming from the starting from nothing
approach. There are links to some sites built with it in the docs
below.

http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev...rib/flatpages/

A bit more of a learning curve but you'll definitely be in charge.

Somebody used to Django could set up a flatpages site in 5 minutes
probably! It will take you a couple of hours the first time though.

--
Nick Craig-Wood <ni**@craig-wood.com-- http://www.craig-wood.com/nick