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OSDir interviews members of the core Plone team. This is a good interview, and Plone 2 is looking really good.

One (very small) beef that I have with the interview is that they make it seem as though Zope (the software) itself is lacking. I have to differ. Sure, the Content Management Framework and Plone add a lot of functionality, but only for certain types of applications. Zope (the software) is a base system for building web applications, but there are many kinds of web applications and content management (in particular, Plone's style of content management) is only one of those kinds. From my experiences, which primarily date from the Plone 1.0 release candidates, if your applications don't fit that model fairly well, you have a lot of work ahead of you to reconfigure and rework the model to fit. Plone has grown a lot since then, and frameworks that extend it even further, such as Archetypes, make customization even easier, but it can still be way too much sometimes. But even Zope (the software) suffers from this issue, albeit less. We have come across times in our little company where the resources and overhead required for Zope were just too much for a couple of forms and their handling.

Curiously enough, Plone reminds me of the problem that Principia (Zope before it was open source) was trying to solve initially - a common product that makes it easy to bring various different application types together in a common system. Principia unified a lot of common Zope Corporation (Digital Creations at the time) products, that were themselves built on the fundamental Bobo (now ZPublisher - the cool core piece of software that turns web requests into object calls), Document Template, and BoboPOS (which became the ZODB) pieces of software. CMF seems to be avoiding some of the issues that came up that have plagued Zope in the meantime - meaning that they have more defined set of audiences in their users and developers, whereas Zope is much more of a blank canvas and tougher to define (thankfully, for me).

But overall, the whole stack (Zope/CMF/Plone) is a very powerful system. The interview provides a good overview behind the philosophies behind Plone, and what differentiates it from Cocoon and PHP-Nuke and the like.