One week ago I migrated my personal site/blog from Plone to WordPress. As such I’ve decided to write a small comparison of the 2 systems.
Let’s pun things in my context. A few years ago I’ve worked on a custom CMS implementation. The goal was to develop a product targeted for accesibility and simplicity of use. And, as it was the golden age it was decided to implement it from scratch using java. If you are wondering, the project is still used today but it was not possible to evolve as fast as the opensource projects and it lacks most of the sparkling features of today CMS systems.
Plone
2 years ago I once again looked on the CMS products and was astonished of their evolution. It was by no mean justified to develop one from scratch since most features where widely available and there where a lot of choices. In this context I ended up with 3 candidates: drupal, mambo and plone. At that point plone seemed the most powerful since I also had a bit of bad experience with mambo (joomla) and did drupal interface seemed a bit too geeky I choose Plone.
Compared to my previous CMS experience the Plone experience was very nice. The system is indeed very very powerful and the implementation effort was small (compared to the from scratch approach). So I found it also very natural to use it for my site also.
I should say that the system never crashed or had any kind of technical problem. It required an initial effort but little effort later. However even if it was a powerful system it did not had all the gadgets out of the box so this started to bother me. For the other sites I have used Plone on it was not such a big deal but for my personal site I started to observe an increasing demand of a certain amount of features. People where expecting things they where used to in another sites of this type.
At first I ignored them but then I started to search various solutions which came in the form of plugins and various Plone customizations. As such my install deviated from the main stream.
When things got blocked
Things started to get blocked with the new Plone 3.* version. Neither the theme nor the plugins used (especially the ContentPanels plugin) where not compatible with the new version and as such a migration was not possible. This might be a security risk for widely deployed systems such as WordPress but Plone benefits of such a small niche which is not worth exploiting. Let’s call it security by lack of knowledge. So it was clear that I could not upgrade without a very big effort.
Another issue appeared with the new Firefox 3. This is another discussion but it suffices to say that various javascript parts stopped working. I am talking especially about the Kupu editor used by Plone.
WordPress
So it was a very simple calculation. How much effort would require to upgrade completely my Plone installation and how much effort to migrate? And what would I obtain in both cases. I decided to choose the smaller effort for the short term and migrate to WordPress. And once more I admired Plone flexibility and power in doing so.
Comparing Plone to WordPress is like comparing a big laptop (such as my Dell D620) with a gadget phone. It comes with a lot of features built in for a special purpose and you can get it running lightning fast even if you will probably need to customize it later. You get a lot more choices of themes and plugins but you will surely have to pay the price of using one of the most common and thus targeted by malware platform. Yet I am content for now.
Final words
I think it’s a question of economics. How much time are you willing to spend? How much are you willing to learn? Maybe it’s worth much to have something running fast without much learning and see it how it works out. From my point of view both the ages of custom complete developments or even dedicated people to know and understand a system like Plone are not economically viable.