Coming to terms with the 1000 horsepower Plone CMS

Sometimes I have to admit I don't put myself in the shoes of the folks that are new to Plone. Today I was helping someone get started and got a full dose of what approaching Plone from the outside looks like. For the traditional LAMP stack developer, moving to the Plone stack is like upgrading from a Honda Civic to a Bugatti Veyron. Once you make that leap you have 10 radiators under the hood versus just one in the Civic. Not only that, you are getting nearly 1000 horsepower to deal with too. Try keeping that on the road.

The typical LAMP developer has few moving parts, but just to get started with Plone there is a huge stack to wade through. Once you get past just the software stack alone, you still have the application server, potentially a cluster, load balancers, reverse HTTP accelerators, SSIs and rewrite rules to wade through if you are going to do the deployment on a large scale. Luckily there are some new tools out there to help simplify that like buildout and setuptools. Unfortunately there isn't enough good documentation about all the options available.

So what on the outset may look like a kludgy way to set things up, really is an enterprise solution which has nearly endless complexity. How do we bring new developers into the fold when getting started requires you to learn ZPT, DTML, ZCML, Python, Archetypes, Zope's Component Architecture and then all the technologies to deploy it. The upside is that you have the equivalent of that 1000 horsepower available to you for managing content and delivering it on a large scale. Once you get to that scale, Plone is very comfortable solving problems, then the LAMP stack probably starts to look very daunting as well. We just start addressing these issues earlier in the process. Luckily you don't need to pay the Veyron price tag to do it.

In an effort to help with the mystical deployment art of a Plone server, Six Feet Up is presenting the Plone Deployment Workshop. We will be tackling many of these tough questions during the two days of the workshop on November 20th and 21st here in Indianapolis. We are keeping it inexpensive so we can help reach more folks and the early bird is ending this week so get out there and sign up!

More information about the conference along with the full schedule of presentations, speakers bios, and social events is available online at: http://www.sixfeetup.com/dw08