Quills and Monit and General Plone Grumbling

Server Monitoring Utility: Monit.

Quills is a portal-based weblogging product for Plone. I will be probably be using it for imaginaryplanet.org (indeed, I might be migrating this weblog to it if I can!).

The lead developer’s weblog contains updates, along with the promise of a release upcoming next week. Speaking of which, it seems to be in the backend of the incredible publicknowledge plone site. (Here’s the section full of quill posts ).

I’ve been grumbling lately about plone. First, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve come across error messages within plone sites. A cms shouldn’t be prone to error. Second, I really haven’t seen many good examples of small plone sites (with good usability). I’ve seen well-done corporate sites, but they have the time and resources to make it good. I haven’t seen many usable out-of-the-box plone sites. Third, commenting system is primitive. For example, it is still a nested view and hyperlinks are disabled for comments (smart for countering spam, stupid for facilitating discussion). Fourth, the conceptual model for plone just seems to get harder and harder. Getting templates and macros and products to work together just seems complicated (to say nothing of security or workflows). Part of the problem is that the software’s management interface, while powerful, just doesn’t make it easy to find the most important configuration elements. It took me a good while to figure out where the templates were.