[Zope-CMF] cmf dogbowl re-visited (or: looking for the 1.4 roadmap)

Mark McEahern marklists@mceahern.com
Thu, 17 Oct 2002 11:32:39 -0500


[Chris Withers]
> Well, I hope there'll be consensus on how to do this. Like I said, I
> have concerns because I don't use Plone for some good reasons[...]

I know very little about CMF and Plone, trying to get up to speed on
both of them.  Would you mind outlining the features/benefits of CMF,
the features/benefits of Plone, as well as what you referred to as
your reasons for not using Plone?  Here's my lame attempt at the same,
based on, again, my very limited experience and understanding of both,
offered in the hopes that someone will improve upon it...

What is content management?

  A content management system should allow disparate content types to
  be managed in similar ways:

    - workflow for publishing content
    - roles for authors, reviewers, members, anonymous, etc.
    - the holy grail of separating content from presentation
    - metadata

  In addition, the CMS should make this stuff easy:

    - searching, filtering
    - navigation management
    - layout management
    - skinning

What is CMF?

  CMF provides a framework for building content management systems.
  It leverages a lot of Zope's power as well as adding the following:

    - workflow framework 
	- skin framework (does the whole layer thing work by basically
	  doing an el-switcheroo on traversal?)  
	- portal types

What is Plone?

  Plone is an implementation of CMF.  In particular, what it adds is:

    - nice default UI.
    - I particularly like the layers of tabs (portal tabs,
      personalBar, contentTabs, etc)
    - wrappers around DCWorkflow and Formulator
    - what else?

Cheers,

// mark
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