[EuroPython] EPC 2005: where and when?

[Dario Lopez-Kästen]

Magnus Lycka wrote:
>>Laura Creighton wrote:
>>
>>>But I think that everybody who worked on the conference
>>>last year is aware of how thoroughly unhappy and frustrated I was with Plone,
>>>and the Plonish way of doing things, which is why I want to provide an alternative.
> 
> 
> Dario replied: 
> 
>>sure, though I think the problem with that stance is that many others 
>>were not unhappy. 
> 
> 
> I am so far unimpressed by Plone. I think I just realized why, and
> also why there is this big gap in opinons about it. It seems to me
> that Plone is designed to make web site designers and administrators
> happy, and it seems that this happens at the expense of the visitors
> of the web site. Most Plone sites I see look reasonably good (although
> rather similar after a while) but provide poor navigation, often expose 
> flaws (like links or searches leading to pages that doesn't seem to be 
> intended for site visitors) and expose things on the pages that are 
> irrelevant to normal site visitors and thus increase the cognitive load 
> without adding value.
> 
> I think it's important that things that are irrelevant to normal site
> visitors are not shown to normal site visitors. Is that possible with
> Plone? (I.e. hide the log in and join links for normal users, make sure
> that .)

I am not going into a dicussion of whether Plone is aporpiate or not - I 
am totally uninterested in that. Suffice it to say that Plone has been 
successfully used all over the world, and that I myself have coded an 
application to manage Kerberos passwords using Oracle as the Catalog 
backend.

Most of the complaints are about VISUAL LAYOUT of the site, but that is 
*so* much an opinion and

> I also got the feeling that he site designers tried to use features
> of Plone that weren't at all ideal (or even intended) for the use it
> got. The main example was to use the login and editing features that
> are intended for Plone content providers for registration of conference
> attendees and speakers. To me it's really surprising (and poor design) 
> to mix web site data with conference business data, but the foremost 
> problem was that registration was a lot more confusing than it ought to 
> be. Plone developement reminds me of application development in MS Excel,
> and that is not in Plones favour...

Well, like I said - see above... The onoy positive thing related to the 
website issue so far is that we are actually talking about it NOW and 
not 2 weeks before the conference.

It seems quite obvious that most people that have complaints about the 
site do not know plone or zope at all; I have also com tu udnerstand 
that using Zope-based software is, to my utter amazement, a politically 
controversial issue in the non-zope python world.

I wonder how much of the Plone issues people have are b ased on that.

Nevertheless, I applause any effort to improve the website, and I think 
this dicussion is an utterly pointless one. If Strakt has an alternative 
solution, then by all means use that.

I have no comments for the rest of this letter, other than what I 
allready have said above.

/dario - withdrawing.

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Dario Lopez-Kästen, IT Systems & Services Chalmers University of Tech.