Community Sites

O.K. the evil plan is to wrest control of the current developer site from the marketing types who bizarrely control it and bring it in-house to engineering. Afterall we know best eh?

Which lead me to play around with two community/forum portal-thingies Drupal and Plone. Now Drupal is Apache/PHP/MySQL (the AMP in LAMP) while Plone is based on Python/Zope/ZopeCM. Now I did some reading and some playing and the result is: I really, really like Drupal. Sure it's not the most extensive content-management system out there, but it's really, really easy to get a basic community site up and running.

The main drawback of Plone is allegedly one of its main strengths - it's solid foundation on Zope and Python. While this is probably undoubtedly a good thing [tm], my tiny mind and even tinier attention span - just frankly isn't going to go there. PHP/HTML I can stomach.

The other thing about Plone is that it's actually quite infuriating to use. Drupal by comparison is a breeze. It's simple and it makes sense. Plus it has a very vibrant developer community.