Plone or TurboGears for Intranet

[m.wanstall]

Hi all,

Just wondering which technology would best suit the development of
custom intranets in general, things that may be industry specific would
need to be included (say for an industrial design company the addition
of internal memos and even extrememly business specific apps such as
simple inventory control reporting). The other big issue is ease of
templating as the only Plone examples I've seen have seemed to
basically use the original template or a slightly customised version of
it so I'm wondering whether it would be quicker to build it from the
ground up with TurboGears.

Any thoughts on the matter are greatly appreciated and any examples of
EITHER used extensively in case studies or the like would be fantastic!

Thanks in advance!

[m.wanstall]

Forgot to mention the ease of deployment using Apache (well basically
LAMP) would be a big bonus, just because I trust and am familiar with
Apache. Thanks!

[Ravi Teja]

They are very different tools, apples and oranges. Plone is built for
content management needs and TurboGears is built for general
application development purposes.

Both can work behind Apache but are not based on Apache. They use their
own servers.

Plone gives you a lot out of the box, but building Plone products, for
your custom needs, has a steep learning curve to it. TurboGears is
fairly simple to use and a good dev will probably take a day or so to
get the hang of it. On the other hand, it will take as much time to
learn to use Plone as an admin, let alone develop with it.

There are several case studies for Plone on the web. Just Google for
them. TurboGears won't have any since it is not officially production
software yet. Personally, I don't take software case studies seriously.
They are often too contextual, context that does not get adequately
communicated in the document all too often.

I would choose Plone to manage documents in the Intranet but stick to
TurboGears (or some other framework - there are several good ones) for
app development.

[Yu-Xi Lim]

m.********@gmail.com wrote:

Hi all,

Just wondering which technology would best suit the development of
custom intranets in general, things that may be industry specific would
need to be included (say for an industrial design company the addition
of internal memos and even extrememly business specific apps such as
simple inventory control reporting). The other big issue is ease of
templating as the only Plone examples I've seen have seemed to
basically use the original template or a slightly customised version of
it so I'm wondering whether it would be quicker to build it from the
ground up with TurboGears.

Any thoughts on the matter are greatly appreciated and any examples of
EITHER used extensively in case studies or the like would be fantastic!

Thanks in advance!

For custom applications, you'd be better off looking at Plone's
underlying Zope app server. As an alternative to TG, you may want to
consider Django.

Memos and non-database apps would probably be okay with just Plone. In
fact, for memos, design notes, developer documentation, you'd be best
off considering a collaborative editing solution such as Wiki (of which
there are numerous variants in any programming language you want).

Though some may suggest a single system to fit all needs, unless you
require tight integration (e.g. memos reflect real-time inventory
information), you'd probably do well deploying them as separate "best of
breed" applications. You can customize the UI to make the differences
less apparent.