[reportlab-users] Widget Libraries, anywhere??

[Rasjid Wilcox]

On Thursday 09 October 2003 17:04, Andy Robinson wrote:
> What kind of collaboration tools would work best?
> We could very easily stick up a Wiki.

I have used Wiki's, and currently my own site is a wiki.  And on the whole I 
have to say that I don't like them.  (No offense intended to those that do.)  
They just don't have enough structure, and having someone enforce a structure 
is just extra work for ... someone.

> Or, we
> could make something more structured whereby
> people contributed "documents" - at minimum a page
> of content, but possibly downloads and examples - which
> went through some very basic checks before being loaded up
> (to prevent bad people sticking nasty programs up).

In which case you really want a edit->review->publish process implemented by a 
CMS.  You also want to make sure that no-one puts up defamitory remarks etc, 
that could reflect badly on ReportLab Inc.  (Not that I get the impression 
that the ReportLab community is really into that kind of thing.)

I will make two possible suggestions. Both are free and open-source, and are 
ones I would be willing to help set up.
a) Plone (from http://www.plone.org)
b) MySource (from http://mysource.squiz.net)

The pro's and con's for each follow:

Plone.

Pros: It is written in Python and runs on top of Zope.  I think any structural 
component we might want (eg news, forums) already exists and is free and 
open-source.  It does implement an review process before content can become 
public (although most stuff is visible to other members).

Cons: I suspect that it would take a fair bit of work to make it look like 
something other than Plone.  And it is always going to behave like Plone.  So 
it may not match well with the rest of the reportlab.org site.  Also, my main 
complaint about Plone is that the look of the pages is somewhat constrained 
unless you are going to put in raw html, which brings its own set of 
problems.  It also requires a Zope installation.

I have very little experience with Plone, except that I installed it once, and 
it looked quite cool.


MySource.

Pros:  It is a commercial grade CMS, in use by a huge range of companies, from 
small companies to multi-nationals (Tyco International uses it).  Commercial 
support and addon's are available (from Squiz.net - its creators), but the 
base (and extremely functional) core product is free to install and use 
anywhere.  (ie, Similar business strategy to ReportLab Inc, if I understand 
things correctly.)

It is extremely easy to use, and fully cross platform. (WYSIWYG editor for 
Windows only - but there is NO loss in real functionality on other 
platforms).  Probably the main advantage is the flexability that it allows in 
the content and structure of each page and the menuing system, but without 
loss in ease of use for basic page editing.  It also allows for a review 
process before making content 'live'.

I should note at this point that my workplace has just purchased a moderate 
amount of support, addons and customisation for MySource from Squiz, and I 
have just had 2 days training in the product, and am (still) extremely 
impressed.  The core MySource product (which can be used for free) is better 
than several other Content Management Systems that we looked at that cost 
AUD$50,000 or more.

So that last advantage is that I know quite a bit about how to configure and 
use it (although there is a bit I'd have to learn about the initial install 
and setup, as my workplace has paid Squiz to do that), and since I will be 
the main site admin, I'm only going to learn more.  I also plan to move my 
own website over to it.

Cons: There are not many open-source extras or modules for it.  (No free 
forums, polls etc.  Most of these are commercially available from Squiz if 
required.)  However, I suspect that it would not be all that hard to make 
some, it is just that their customer base is largely happy to pay Squiz to do 
it.  It is written in PHP (which I don't know particularly, but what I've 
read is far more readable than Perl), and lastly and perhaps most 
importantly, it is mainly tested running on Linux, and I don't know how easy 
it is to install on BSD (which based on Netcraft, is what reportlab.org is 
running on).

There are of course millions (well, perhaps only a few hundred) of other 
open-source options.  I currenly run TWiki (yuck) and have played with 
e107.org and tikiwiki.org.  On the other hand, one can rule out quite a lot 
of the other open-source CMS systems if you want ones that have a 
edit->review->publish workflow.

Anyway, those are my thoughts.  I have more to say about MySource, mainly 
because I know more about it.  Others are free to express their theirs.

Cheers,

Rasjid.

-- 
Rasjid Wilcox
Canberra, Australia (UTC +10 hrs)
http://www.openminddev.net