Map includes all content management vendors from CMS Report. You can see Plone, Drupal, Vignette, etc. If you like the subway map representation technique, you may also be interested in iA's Web Trend Map.

Sauti wasn't developed by Quintagroup, so it was better for me to realize the situation with usual Plone based sites.

Note: December 2006. The owner of Sauti.co.uk desided to switch from Plone to OsCommerce. In some cases stable shopping cart solution is better for clients then good CMS.

Second Note: December 2007. Customer decided switch back to Plone, but website archive was damaged :-(

Plone is the best CMS for SEO

I can say with confidence that Plone is the best CMS for SEO.

• It has very nice  search engine friendly URLs feature. You can create the pages with any desirable URLs like http://my-plone-site/keyword1-keyword2/keywords3/keyword4.keyword5/keyword6.php.asp.html
  It can be done in very usable way, it is as simple as adding Title.
• Default Plone generates great internal links with navigation portlet, breadcrumbs and sitemap.
• Any site structure may be implemented
  
• HTML includes a lot of whitespace, but it is very clean. Usually Plone skins include tableless layout, so you have not much redundant html code in the source.
  

Tools which can be used for Plone SEO.

• Plone SEO (qSEOptimizer) allows per document editing of Title tag and META tags.
• Plone Google Sitemaps (qPloneGoogleSitemaps) allows Plone websites to get better visibility for Google search engine by providing it with complete listing of URLs to website content.
• The Redirection Tool can be used for storing references to moved content to enable redirects. It is very useful product, but it doesn't work at Zettai hosting (at least in Sauti account) . We generated a patch to enable Redirection Tool plone product at Zettai.
  

People say that "Google likes Plone sites".  However, it is possible to use Plone in such way that only main page will be indexed by Google.  Plone is a great tool for SEO itself, but you should know how to use it.

Plone SEO Issues.

Basically, duplicated content is the main issue. It can be discussed in different situations

1. Links to folders. 
   If you insert internal link with Kupu then it creates relative link to some Page or other object. It's a pity that it is not possible to insert link to Folder. You must create link to default item of folder instead of link to Folder. Links from Navigation portlet lead to Folder and internal links lead to Pages with the same content. Here is duplicated content issue.
2. Relative links in portlets and acquisition.
   If you create links in  static portlets with relative links then links may work because of acquisition, but a lot of duplicated content will be generated. Google robots may lost in huge amount of pages generated with Zope acquisition. By the way, that's why Sauti wasn't indexed by Google.
3. RSS and relative links in Pages, News, etc.
   If you insert internal link with Kupu then it creates relative link to some Page or other object.
   

   <a href="../folder/filename">link text</a>
   In this case rich text RSS2 feeds will include broken links and images.
   I remove "relative links" feature in Kupu by customizing kupuploneeditor.js file. Just remove
   contents = this.makeLinksRelative(contents, base).replace(/<\/?body[^>]*>/g, "");
   

4. Images preview. It is not easy for me to estimate how Google index Images in Plone. Plone preview Image with different parameters without .jpg .png at the end.
   
   •  If you insert image in Page with latest Kupu, it generates the code similar to
     <img src="filename.jpg/image_preview" alt="Title"> or <img src="filename.jpg/image_thumb" alt="title">. It depends on size of thumbnail. It works perfect for image resizing. However, it is better to have
<img src="filename-image_thumb.jpg/" alt="title"> then <img src="filename.jpg/image_thumb" alt="title">
   • Random Image is not a good choice for Google. If you have subfolders with images plone-site/gallery/subgallery1 then random image represent the subgallery on the level of plone-site/gallery/.  It would be nice to see here the first image from /plone-site/gallery/subgallery1/folder_contents instead of random image.
     
   • Suppose, you create usual photo gallery: add Folder "Photos" , add images to "Photos", change folder Display View to Thumbnails View. Folder page includes the photo with thumbnails
     <img src="filename.jpg/image_thumb" alt="title"> and links to photo preview page <a href="filename.jpg/view" title="">. View template includes image <img src="filename.jpg/image_preview" and link to actual photo <a href="filename.jpg/image_view_fullscreen" class="discreet">. I don't know how Google can index it properly, site structure is broken here.
     
   Personally, I like how images can be managed in Plone, but I don't know how Google can index it in Proper way. Image file extansions .jpg .gif should be at  the end of url. Default templates use  <img src="filename.jpg/image_view_fullscreen"> for full size image.  I suppose that Plone images are not well prepared for Google.
5. HTML white spaces. If you look at html source of usual Plone page (View -> Source in IE, Ctrl-U in Firefox), you see a lot of white spaces. HTML white spaces in source of Plone pages appear because of ZPT code. ZPT may be customized to prevent white spaces, but templates will be not usable for developer in this case. We had experience before in such  type of customization. It is possible to save 30% of HTML size. Look at view source of this site  and compare it with usual Plone site source.
   
6. Default plone calendar portlet  has the following links
   

   href="plone-site/current-object?None&month:int=6&year:int=2006&orig_query=None" rel="nofollow"
   

   This issue is solved by corresponding parameter rel="nofollow". However, it would be nice to see links to smartfolders here. This issue is not critical for me.
7. Using  hidden H5 tagslike
   <h5 class="hiddenStructure">Sections</h5>
in html is not good for Google. I suppose, they will be definitely removed, but H5 is still available in Plone 2.5. It can be replaced with DIV.
   
8. I'm not a Accessibility expert, but as for me, using of H1  in Logo template is not good for SEO. H1 is the same on all pages, it is used for logo insert.
   

Resume

Plone is the best, but it is possible to make it even better.

What I'd like to know is: what kinds of tricks do you use? ...
I bet there are lots more 'smart practices' for building simple Plone sites.

So, is Alfresco the perfect open source ECM? Not quite. At least not yet. First of all, Alfresco is not all open source. Features like group based access control and clustering are actually "Shared Source" and require monthly subsription fees to use.

There is a large degree of functional overlap between Plone and Alfresco. They both have the functionality necessary for groups of users to manage and share documents: access control, search, metadata, etc. Plone also supports WebDAV and has a mechanism where files automatically updated on the server when edited with a client application such as Microsoft Word. But it does not support CIFS. Alfresco has the advantage of a content rules framework which Plone is missing because of its lack of an event model. Alfresco has a better content versioning system. The many companies who have standardized on Java will feel more comfortable working with a Java solution

There are several areas where Plone has a significant edge. The most notable of which is handling web content. Plone is an effective and elegant hybrid of a document management system and a web content management system. Plone's workflow model is more robust than Alfresco's. The other significant advantage that Plone has is its maturity

It is important to quickly find out such posts and protect Plone reputation. Sometimes only one comment can help people stay with Plone or choose Plone.

http://del.icio.us/tag/plone-dislike

Over the next few weeks, Alan and I are going to start providing some snappy, informal coverage of Plone -- along with some opinions and advocacy. We hope to expand the reach of the Plone community, catalyze some new conversations about the future of Plone and to inspire others to dive in and continue the work of building Plone into a world-class content, collaboration and community system.

Write for The Plone Blog - we're always looking for folks who love Plone and want to be part of its voice.

n our travels around the Web, we come across countless sites and services. But with only 24 hours in the day, we have to settle on a relative few as places to work, play, and get things done online. These are our picks for the cream of the crop, ranging from the ridiculous (the disturbingly hilarious StuffOnMyCat) to the sublime (the group art blog PostSecret). The list was aided, in no small part, by our readers. Some of the best, such as the tech news site Digg.com and the great group advice site Ask Metafilter, came from sharp-eyed readers and have become some of our new favorites. Others, such as Google and Craigslist, may be obvious but just canÕt be beat. Either way, check them out and maybe you'll find some new favorites.

And what does this say to the open source community at large? If a great project like Mambo can be split like this, it makes it that much more difficult for a business to trust its future to open source, any open source.

My guess is users will choose, in time, based on performance. Kwiecinski makes it sound like a freely competitive situation. "We’ll have two people doing the same thing, with the same code, in the same way, just under another name." But a year from now, or two, people will have to choose, and either way they go, they're going with an outfit that is smaller (when compared to proprietary competitors) than it would be otherwise. Why not just call Oracle?

Here is my comment: It's a normal situation with Open Source software that some developers want to create new project based of existing CMS. Postnuke CMS was based on PHP-Nuke. Plone was build on top of Zope and CMF. OscMax was based on OsCommerce. Not a big deal! If someone can organize a work of new community of developers the new project can appear.

Here is example of Nuke evolution (Postnuke, PHP-Nuke, Xaraya, Xoops):

Its been a while since I started take a play with django web framework. I run their tutorial and take alook how to deal with it. At the moment, I compare django with plone. I like plone and I wish to used it as my production area, but I got stuck with their SQL Storage capability.

Plone allows you to store your data on any other RDBMS like MS-SQL, Oracle, PostgreSQL and etc. But, Plone required to store your object metadata at ZODB, and it must. This is it. This is the one that I dont want, Its mean, as my RDBMS data grows, then my metadata on ZODB will grows either. I dont want it. Thats why I keep delay my application to jump to Plone.

The most precious relics of the church is the Wonder-working Icon of the Virgin Mary (XVII c.). It was brought in Lviv from Terebovlia in 1674 by bishop Joseph (Shumlians'kyi).

With a great effort of metropolitan Atanasy Sheptyts'ky on the ruins of the ancient church a new one was erected a pearl of European art. (1774 - 1761, architect — B. Meretyn, sculptor — I.Pinsel). In its architecture the Western influences and traditions of Ukrainian church building merged.

Last week I made few photos there: St. George Cathedral, Lviv

In the end, she chose Drupal, mainly because it had built-in RSS aggregation features.

It was interesting to note what she said about Plone RSS support in her writeup:

As a CMS based on the Zope platform, Plone offers much greater programming extensibility than other CMS options we considered. The flip side of this virtue is that Plone’s relative advantages are much less compelling for a project that (like telecentre.org) specifically wants to limit its custom programming commitments.

Ultimately our biggest concern was that Plone's RSS aggregation capacity was not part of its standard install; while adding an aggregation module is a trivial technical challenge, the lack of native aggregation support spoke to the platform's orientation towards single-site content management rather than distributed community.

It is really sad that people think that Plone is lack of RSS support. Plone has RSS support by default! It is not enabled by default.

Login to ZMI. Enable syndication on your Plone site. Select portal_syndication -> Properties tab -> Enable syndication

Login to Plone. Go to the folder which contains documents you want to syndicate. Select Syndication tab -> Enable Syndication

You can also create RSS feed by any search result.

Default Plone can be extended with Plone RSS2 Product to generate RSS2 feeds with support of audio/video. It allows the syndication of ATAudio objects, mp3, wmv, ppt, jpg files using RSS 2.0 with enclosures.

You can create feeds for any contentent types in Plone. This Plone blog has RSS2 feed and default RSS feed.

Short part:

Use ZEO. ZEO rocks. Really. In essence it’s just the ZODB with a small communication layer on top. This layer is used in Zope instances instead of using the ZODB directly. That way you can run several process groups on your machine, all connecting to the same database. This helps with the above mentioned process restarting: when one is down, the other does the work. Use mod_backhand in Apache to distribute the load between the process groups or use other load balancing tools. ZEO makes regular database packs easier, too: they run on the server and not in the Zope instances - they actually don’t notice much of the running pack. If you have, use a SMP machine. Or buy one. Really - that helps. You need to run ZEO and multiple Zope instances, though - otherwise the global interpreter lock of Python will hit you over the head and Zope will just use one of the two processors. That’s one reason why you want multiple process groups in the first place - distribution of load on the machine itself, making use of multiple processors.

Ryan Latham:
it will be a combination of the two. And will always continue to be. Yahoo is going to see from Google that they can take a higher percetage. Google will give out more, Yahoo will give out more, Google will take some away, Yahoo will take some away, etc.

Scrivs:
Yahoo is already a profitable company and doesn't need the Publisher's network while Google's business model is about 80% from its ads. Yahoo has the ability to give a significant portion of the money to the publishers and stay profitable without any worries.

Paul Scrivens:
Let's look at some numbers to see how my ten days of Yahoo stack up against some of the months of Adsense.
August: 1112% of Google
July-August: 189% of Google
June-August: 80% of Google
May-August: 56% of Google

Ok Yahoo! - I think its time to let some of us non US bods in on the act!

It publishes a tree of objects stored in the ZODB which is an object oriented database. Think of it as a monstrous pickle implementation.

Zope folders are a lot like user-defined classes in your application. They contain things, which is why they're called "folders". But basically, from a programming perspective, what they contain are their "attributes" in the class/object jargon (in reality it can be more complicated, some containers use Python container types like dictionary or list as their internal structure).

Of course, "publishes" means "publishes to the web".

Z:

So Zope includes an object store, a publisher, and a web server. When the web server receives a request, it asks the publisher to get it, which digs it out of the object store. Then it goes back the other way, back to the requester via the web.

Usually, you run the Zope webserver behind another proxy like Apache, but it is possible to serve a site directly from Zope. I never do that for production, because, Apache, being much more completely tested is a safer bet for not crashing or misbehaving under heavy loads. However, the built-in Zope webserver (I believe it was once called Medusa) is quite convenient for development and testing.

OBJECT:

Because Zope publishes Python objects instead of files, they can have much richer structure (e.g. metadata) than a site based on files stored in a filesystem. However, a set of files stored in a filesystem is very much like an object database, so

1) The ZODB is sometimes called the Zope Object FileSystem, which I find a useful idea --- especially since ZOFS has some extra constraints beyond what ZODB requires.

2) You actually can store contents of the ZODB as a filesystem with associated metadata in auxiliary files. I believe this is how the "filesystem storage" option for ZODB works (by default, ZODB lumps all its data into one big container file "Data.fs" -- this is the "filestorage" option).

PUBLISHING:

Zope has also been called a "web application server", because it's relatively easy to write highly-integrated, highly-dynamic sites with it (and overkill to use it for purely static sites).

Objects are defined in such a way that they can be represented as web pages. The publisher has a lot of default behaviors for built-in types and the objects that come with Zope.

Zope "product" developers have the responsibility (and control) over how their objects will appear when published.

ENVIRONMENT:

If you want to think of it as a "web application server", then basically, Zope is your "operating system", and your site is your "web application software".

Zope also provides some specialized programming language help --- Python scripts that can be edited through the web, and two "Templating Languages" for designing web pages that will have dynamic content. You can think of the templating languages as being similar to PHP or ASP style programming.

But "Zope Zen" says that the serious code should be either in Python scripts or in Python products (on the filesystem, instead of in the ZODB, like scripts). Templates are meant to be simple, simple, simple. But that's a style issue.

This stuff provides the Zope "operating system" with a "shell". And the "Zope Management Interface", which is what you see when you visit the /manage page at a Zope site, is the "window system" or, perhaps more accurately, the "file browser" of that "operating system".

So, in fact, Zope does quite a bit. But it isn't really all that hard to understand. It's just not been well-introduced, because the people explaining it have a tendency to forget that it isn't all obvious, because it seems that way to them, now that they know it.

Restart zope and add a plone site with the id plone1. Note: You must create the folder after adding the moint point.

When using seperate dbs it's very easy to migrate some instances to a second server. You don't need to export a large site but simply copy the files and the sections in the zope.conf

• Why did you create Python in the first place ?

I was working (with a bunch of other folks) on a new distributed operating system named Amoeba (it's quite famous, Google for its paper legacy).

We wanted Amoeba to be as useful as Unix for our daily work, but it was lacking a scripting language. So I set out to design my own. The explicit goal was for it to be somewhere in the middle between Shell programming (too high-level) and C programming (too low-level), and I wanted it to be cross platform. (Maybe I wasn't too optimistic of Amoeba's success. :-)

• What are the strengths of Python ?

I'm not really the right person to ask, you know... I'm so immersed in it that it's hard to give you an objective list of advantages. Just look it up on python.org. My own view is that it makes my job as a programmer much easier than most other languages because of all the stuff that Python takes care of: memory management, platform dependencies, etc.

• My little brother starts to learn programming, how can I convince him to learn with Python ?

Download PyGame, a cool toolkit for creating graphics games, and give him some simplified APIs that let him create simple graphics objects and animate them.

There are several English Python boosk for beginners (see http://www.python.org/moin/IntroductoryBooks) and even a French one (http://www.python.org/moin/FrenchPythonBooks).

• If you could change some things that have been done in the langage, what would it be ?

Drop lambda, filter, map and reduce. Make range() behave like xrange(). Make keys() and many other methods and built-ins return iterators rather than lists.

• What are the new features, or the upcoming ones, that are the most exciting ?

In Python 2.4, decorators and generator expressions are the coolest new things. For more, see http://python.org/doc/2.4/whatsnew/whatsnew24.html.

• You're back from Pycon. What were the most interesting things, events you have seen over there?

Hard to choose between IronPython (the Python port to .NET, now supported by Microsoft) or the keynote about Google's extensive use of Python.

• What do you think about the actual python community activity ?

I think the community is thriving.

• What's the goal of the PSF ?

In my opinion its primary goal is to exist as a safe neutral non-profit organization that "owns" Python, to make sure that it always remains free and never ever gets gobbled up by some big corporation.

In the opinion of other members it is now also important for the PSF to promote Python and Python-related activities, for example education, and sponsoring coding projects.

I think it's very important that the PSF has enough money to be able to continue to run PyCon -- even if PyCon has made a moderate profit each year, it is an enormous financial responsibility that could not be done without the stable financial situation of the PSF.

• Does Python is as popular overseas as in Europe ?

It's very popular everywhere. There are huge user groups being established in Brazil and Argentina. I heard that a few years ago there 700 people showed up on a Python event in South Korea. Etc.

• Does a specification (ISO, ECMA, ..) is planned for Python and when ?

No, never. I don't see the point.

• Is their such a big gap today between a dynamic languages like Python and compiled ones as it used to be ?

Java is closing some of the gap by adding automatic memory management (they call it Garbage Collection) to the repertoire of compiled languages. It is also pioneering techniques such as JIT that will eventually benefit dynamic languages; the PyPy project in Europe is attempting to do this for Python (in some sense).

• Which external libraries that brings new features to Python (PEAK, ...) do you think are the most interesting ?

Since you mention it, I think PEAK is way too advancedfor most Python users.

I think Twisted is one of the most interesting third party libraries, and also wxPython (too bad it's based on C++).

• Which python open source projects are the most do you think are the most interesting at this time ?

Twisted, Zope. I'm probably missing the really important ones because I'm not using much 3rd party Python code myself (I live in my own self-contained "Not Invented Here world").

• What do you think about Zope evolution ?

I think Zope 3 is a big step forward.

• What do you think about Pyrex ? Should'nt it be used to rewrite some parts of Python ?

Perhaps. Rewriting anything as big as Python from scratch is always a big risk, it usually takes longer than expected and has unexpected problems. I'd rather rewrite some parts of Python in Python itself. The PyPy folks think so too. :-)

• Which one of those projects created to speed Python do you think are the most interesting : Pyrex, Psyco, Pypy,...

Definitely PyPy. It is rolling up Psyco.

OTOH, Pyrex is probably a lot more practical today

PyPy has a long way to go (currently they are 1000x slower than CPython :-) .

• Talking about speed, wich way Python will head towards : less CPU consuming or memory managment optimisation ?

I expect to see a trend towards speeding things up at the cost of a little more memory usage. But we've also reduced memory wastage in certain cases while at the same time speeding things up (e.g. list.append() in 2.4).

• How come IronPython is doing better than CPython ?

Probably a choice of benchmark. There are some areas (like exception handling) where it's actually a lot slower.

• How much are you involved in the community nowadays ?

Mostly as a token figure

I don't make most of the decisions any more, although I end up breaking ties when the rest of the community can't agree. I am mostly still interested in evolution of the language (see my blogs) rather than the library or platform support.

• What are your actual professionnal projects ?

Since 2003 I am working for Elemental Security, a start-up company founded by Dan Farmer to create a new type of enterprise security application. The application is structured as a server and agents, and the agent is mostly written in Python. I've also designed a special-purpose language named Fuel which is well suited for writing security checking scripts. It looks a bit like a statically-typed subset of Python.

• What code editor are you using ? your OS, Desktop ?

XEmacs and vi. Red Hat. I don't recall what my desktop software is running (KDE or Gnome); the applications visible are mostly Firefox, Xemacs, and lots of xterm windows.

• Are you still having fun with Python ?

Oh yeah.

• When will you be candidate for US presidentials ?

I can't, since I wasn't born here. But my son can be. :-)

• Thank you Guido !

Mr. David took us to all the places at Google, Each room was named based on important landmarks of India, like the Taj Mahal - the conference room, Gateway of India, etc. He also showed us the very BIG server room, which was installed by him, which also has a real-time query window, which shows the current queries all over the world.

"We wish to discover the truth about all tragedies that have occurred in the past years," he said. He cited, in particular, the September 2000 assassination of Georgiy Gongadze, a 31-year-old journalist killed as he left a friend's house.

"Not only the perpetrators, but those who contracted those crimes will be held responsible," Mr. Yushchenko said. "Everybody who was killing politicians and journalists will stand trial, everybody who led the country to the splitup."

To hearty cheers, prolonged applause and even chants, like those that last year filled Kiev streets, of "Yush-chen-ko, Yush-chen-ko," the Ukrainian leader thanked Americans for what he said had been "clear and unambiguous" support in the weeks between a presidential election marred by widespread allegations of fraud and the holding of a second election, in which he prevailed.

Mr. Yushchenko has become a leading symbol for the promotion of democracy, both among many American lawmakers and with an administration that has made that a central objective.

If you think video games are engrossing now, just wait: PlayStation maker Sony Corp. has been granted a patent for beaming sensory information directly into the brain.

The technique could one day be used to create videogames in which you can smell, taste, and touch, or to help people who are blind or deaf.

The U.S. patent, granted to Sony researcher Thomas Dawson, describes a technique for aiming ultrasonic pulses at specific areas of the brain to induce "sensory experiences" such as smells, sounds and images.

"The pulsed ultrasonic signal alters the neural timing in the cortex," the patent states. "No invasive surgery is needed to assist a person, such as a blind person, to view live and/or recorded images or hear sounds."

According to New Scientist magazine, the first to report on the patent, Sony's technique could be an improvement over an existing non-surgical method known as transcranial magnetic stimulation. This activates nerves using rapidly changing magnetic fields, but cannot be focused on small groups of brain cells.

Niels Birbaumer, a neuroscientist at the University of Tuebingen in Germany, told New Scientist he had looked at the Sony patent and "found it plausible." Birbaumer himself has developed a device that enables disabled people to communicate by reading their brain waves.

A Sony Electronics spokeswoman told the magazine that no experiments had been conducted, and that the patent "was based on an inspiration that this may someday be the direction that technology will take us."

Interesting statistics:

A survey of 140 large North American companies found that 60% were using open source and half of these were for mission-critical applications.

The free enterprise stack:

• Operating Systems - Linux, FreeBSD, FreeDOS, Haiku, Menuet
• Database Systems - PostgreSQL, Ingres, Cloudscape, MySQL, SQLite, -FirebirdSQL
• Web Server - Apache
• Application Server - JBoss, Zope
• Content Management System - Mambo, OpenCMS, Red Hat CCM, PHP-Nuke, Plone
• Groupware - Opengroupware.org
• Password management - Password Safe, PINs
• Email - KMail, Mozilla, Ximian, Mutt
• Desktop Environments - KDE, Gnome, Ximian
• Windows managers - Blackbox, Openbox, Window Maker, FVWM
• Browser - Mozilla, Konqueror, Galeon
• Instant messaging - Jabber, Fire, Exodus, Kopete
• Office Applications - OpenOffice, KOffice, Gnome Office, AbiWord
• Personal information managers - Kaddressbook/KNotes/KOrganizer, Mozilla Calendar
• Security - Open Antivirus, NeoCrypt, Coyote Linux Firewall
• Internet voice - Catzilla, Speak Freely
• Finance - Jcash, Jmoney, GnuCash
• Business reporting - BIRT