Choosing the right framework

[Paul Winkler]

"Carsten Gehling" <carsten at gehling.dk> wrote in message news:<mailman.1058367307.3275.python-list at python.org>...
> I may be ignorant of major Plone issues, but here are my main "grudges"
> against it (please bear in mind that I haven't researched Plone for more
> than 3 days, and some of my arguments may look plain stupid ;-) :
> 
> <grudge>
> 1) I don't the idea, that the user authentication (login form) to managin
> g
> the content of the website is visible on the website's pages.

This is trivial to change - you don't even have to write or modify any
code to do so, it's a matter of unchecking a box on a configuration
form.

Granted, *finding* the form in question might take a while for a
novice :-\
In this case, it's at 
/your_plone_site/portal_membership/manage_editActionsForm
 
> 2) I want the content management interface to be similar to the one I
> currently use in my own CMS. (One frame with a tree structure of the page
> hierarki, one frame with the page displayed, and content editing forms as
> popup windows).
> </grudge>

This is also very doable. All forms, templates, and images used by
CMF, and therefore by Plone, are in /your_plone_site/portal_skins.
*Everything* can be changed.

So what I'd do, rather than focusing on how CMF and/or Plone and/or
CPS looks / feels, is look at its feature set and see how closely it
matches what you want & need to do. For Plone at least, there is also
a very active IRC channel - #plone on irc.openprojects.net

In order to do this you need to 
1) learn how to read/write ZPT 

2) The real difficulty would be in learning what/where are all the
existing templates & forms and customizing them to do what you want,
while understanding plone/cmf well enough to not throw the baby out
with the bathwater.  In my experience, you don't want to start from
scratch - there's an awful lot of useful functionality already
implemented and tested, and you should leverage it.
So even if it seems slower than starting over, I suggest customizing
things based on an existing skin.

It might be worth playing around some with CMFDefault (the basic stuff
that plone is based on); it's simpler and less featureful, so you
might be able to grasp more of the core concepts and functionality
before deciding whether you want / need to tackle Plone.

Also, you might want to look at the Plone Book:
http://plone.org/documentation/book
A lot of the ideas apply to plain old CMFDefault too.

check the FAQ section for some quickie how-to tidbits.
Chapter 6 tells you all about customizing look & feel.

Want to see some CMF/plone sites that look different from each other?
Check out these:
http://www.plone.org/about/sites

Of course, these don't show you the content management interface, but
that's just as skinnable as the end-user presentation...

With all that said, I sometimes use plain old CMF as a base instead of
Plone because there's just less of it to deal with :-)

ANother zope/cmf-based content management system is CPS, worth a look:
http://www.nuxeo.org/cps