This is a personal followup on several discussions I had in personal lately with other Plone integrators and big Plone users in addition to Steve's and Eric's latest blog posts on the future of Plone (5):
Most of us are in weird situation because we have multiple and different roles in the #Plone world: either as integrators, as contributors, as Plone users.
So where is my current problem?
Steve numbers clearly show a growing number of contributors. On the other hand there is the overall feeling that Plone turned into a legacy technology that will be around for many years but the overall impression is that the overall adoption of Plone is stagnating. This impression is of course subjective and based on personal experience and talks with customers. In addition many so-called Plone companies are currently making a shift by no longer focusing on Plone but also providing services in other areas and focusing on solution and services to customers and addressing their needs instead of advertising themselves as "Plone company". The concept of the "Plone company" is going to fail for most Plone shops. Customers are looking for solutions and as integrators we have to have various solution options - Plone will be one out of many others. The decade of the CMS systems is over. CMS turned into commodity software. They were something new and cool in the first decade of the millennium but nowadays web technology moved and the technology and requirements are more diverse than ever. So content management is now only a small fraction of "the web" as it was some years ago. I think the trend of stagnation and more slowly adoption is also true for other content management systems.
Going back of the level of adoption of Plone. The level of adoption of an enterprise-level software is possibly depending on factors like
- marketing
- user experience
- to a certain degree: underlaying technology
- Webdav support of Plone under Windows is fragile and not usable for enterprise-level usage. Many weird workaround exists for getting rid of webdav locking problems.
- Customer received a Plone 4.2 buildout with a policy and theme package. Everything was working...the customer himself installed a few add-ons on its own...suddenly the complaint that TinyMCE would no longer work...even after debugging for some hours I could not find the real problem...perhaps not a core-issue but some weird interaction of Plone with some of the add-ons. Bad user experience, pissed integrator experience.
- OOTB installation of add-ons must work. E.g. a simple functionality like video support in Plone has to work without issues by installing collective.flowplayer (4.0). As an integrator I can handle issues and properly fix them. End users just become frustrated.
- Upgrade story: upgrades in Plone 4.x became an unpredictable pita. With 4.x update we had to update various add-ons basically because of changed imports. So some add-on in some version was only running with one particular Plone 4.x version. Having to support multiple Plone 4.x versions ended up with try..except cascades or different release branches....not nice.
- Migration story: I upgraded a Plone 4.0 site to Plone 4.2 based on my own Produce & Publish framework. Suddenly some image URLs (using plone.app.imaging) could no longer be resolved directly through restrictedTraverse() for whatever reason. In addition: Plone started to store image URLs (as edited through TinyMCE) suddenly with the full host and port which became a major pita in the context of virtual hosting and in particular in the context of having image URLs starting with https:// accessed through the public website served over http:// (IE security restrictions caused the images to appear broken). All these issues caused major user pain and trouble on our site. In the end the migration took full six working days (two days scheduled and paid, four unpaid working days on the integrator side).