[<<] Industrie Toulouse

Industrie Toulouse has moved to a new site and new publishing system. The primary reason for the move? It's too hard for me to be bound to a single machine for publishing, something with Radio Userland imposes. You can set up Radio to be posted to over the internet, but Userland has made a point of making it a desktop web site. This has some plusses, the biggest one being zero-fuss. You can set up Radio to use Userland's hosted service, or any ISP / target that allows FTP. This is good for those who do not have access to a server to configure CGI scripts or Perl or larger systems such as Zope.

But still, as one who's been practically weaned on Zope and all of its predecessors (Principia, Bobo), I'm used to doing it all through the web. Now, that's possible.

So why not a Zope weblog? The primary reason is that there's no weblog software for Zope that's very complete, especially compared to Movable Type. I think this partly is due to the fact that Weblogs are popular things to host and for ISP's to administer, and Zope doesn't have a huge audience in this area. Secondly, there seems to be a lot of tinkerers and consultants in the Zope world. These are people who have no interest in writing a full featured weblogging system, or spend most of their time doing commercial work and have no time to make "free" products that are exhaustive. There are some great Zope products out there, but few that are really feature-rich. Most feature-rich Zope sites are custom jobs. Many Zope developers seem used to doing custom jobs.

There are some excellent building blocks to start from, including a CMF Blog (with Plone support) in the CMF Collective project. But because they're younger products (and because it takes a long time to really customize a CMF site, even a Plone site, to be the way I want it), I finally decided to pass on taking that route.

But the new Industrie Toulouse should continue to offer coverage of Zope, Python, Eucci & Co., politics, design, etc. And hopefully it will offer even more now as I shouldn't experience the thought of "I should post this. Oh wait, Radio's on another machine..."