I have used Plone content management system for some time to publish my teaching materials and other educative articles on http://study.risk.ee.
Plone has some nice features including various article formats, multiuser environment and hierarchical content structure. The bad thing is that it runs as a Zope instance and the latter is rather a huge framework to run a single small site. In addition I'm not familiar with Zope nor Python so configuring and changing it's behavior was too difficult and caused unpredictable results. The upgrading was always a cross-my-fingers-and-pray approach. I knew that fixing this broken system might be impossible. The whole data lived in mystical one big ZODB database file that made migration and data restoration questionable.
Last bad news for me was that the Plone package maintainer on FreeBSD has lost interest of updating the repository to reflect Plone bugfix updates and because of that Plone port seems to be removed from the tree entirely.
Taking all that into account I decided to change the underlying platform to Wordpress instead. My goal was to make the switch as transparent as possible for a regular visitor. Therefore I've created the Wordpress template that produces Plone-style design. With various Wordpress plugins it was possible to mimic the simplistic clean Plone interface that actually runs on Wordpress.
Artifacts
- Programming language: PHP
- Source code: https://github.com/vbl-themes/plone
- Precompiled binaries: this is an interpreted language