Pier v. Plone

[Lukas Renggli]

> - Support/Community - there are 167 companies from 44 countries listed
> at plone.net who offer commercial support. I know there are a lot  
> more.
> A lot of them help to improve Plone and/or write add ons.
> - Maturity - see the number of websites and how prominent some of them
> are that run with Plone (<http://plone.net/sites>).
> - Documentation - several books are available, you will find about 250
> documents alone at <http://plone.org/documentation> (useful and
> comprehensive, most of them up2date (what’s not the default for a
> community driven Open Source project). You can join an annual  
> conference
> (325 attendees registered 2006).

I can hardly do anything about these points, other than using Pier  
for all sites I am building myself (which I already do, of course).  
This is also why Pier exists in the first place and where most  
features come from.

> Parts that are more related to functionality where I see a gap:
> - Internationalization - Plone supports over 35 languages including
> right-to-left languages out of the box when it’s installed. It has a
> good i18n framework and with LinguaPlone you can add the same  
> conent in
> whatever language you need.

If people provide translations that would be certainly a nice addition.

> - Availability of more than 100 add on products that can be used  
> from an
> end user (you don’t need to be a developer). Examples are full  
> featured
> web shops, message board systems, registration systems, newsletter
> integration (details at <http://plone.org/products>).

There is already a big number of extensions. Have a look at my  
proposal [1] for the ESUG Innovation Awards 2007 [2]. And don't  
forget to vote for Pier, this will certainly help to further improve  
it ...

[1] http://www.iam.unibe.ch/~scg/Archive/Reports/Reng07c.pdf
[2] http://www.esug.org/conferences/ 
15thinternationalsmalltalkjointconference2007/ 
innovationtechnologyawards/submissions/

> - Full-text Searching - all the content is searchable even Word or
> OpenOffice documents and PDF files (with add ons under Linux also for
> Excel and PowerPoint and other file types).

There is already a full-text search. It does not included uploaded  
files though. If somebody would implement readers for those strange  
binary formats, that would certainly be an easy thing to add to the  
search results.

Cheers,
Lukas

-- 
Lukas Renggli
http://www.lukas-renggli.ch