I showed my head round the door of the quills developer list yesterday, to ask a question and see how things are going, feeling a bit guilty that really i’m looking to jump in and start using it just as everyone else has finished all the hard work. I’ve also been scouting around to see how ploneboard is doing.
The thing with both these products is that they are often requested plone features but are both still under development, so fall some way short of established alternatives. This is one of the things to consider with plone - it’s a very comprehensive bit of software, not really aimed at someone who just wants to keep a blog or run a messageboard. However, fantastic work is being done so owners of plone sites can add these features to a plone site if they want.
Ok, here come’s a car analogy (some plone people i’m sure will disagree with this):-
Using a plone site just to keep a blog is a bit like running a bmw just so you can use the coffee cup holder. Even then may be surprised to find that you have to fit and modify the coffee cup holder yourself to make it work the way you want only to find it isn’t quite as good as the one in your mates car. Furthermore, if all you really wanted was somewhere to put your coffee, you might be better off getting yourself over to Ikea and getting yourself a coffee table. erm.. following this?
The flipside of this . and I’ll stop using the car analogy now.. is if what starts out to be a blog or messageboard then goes on to be much more than that, you are in good hands with plone. If you want to start adding other products to the site, or creating your own content types with seamless integration of search and membership etc, you are never going to outgrow plone, but you might if you started of with a standalone messageboard or blog which isn’t natively part of a larger system.
