Wordpress Versus Plone 5

You may have seen my various postings about the decline of Plone sine 5.x. A recent solicitation email prompted a revival of our disappointment and real issues and challenges we're dealing with as we try to find a platform to migrate to from Plone 5.x.

Responses below in context...

On Thu, 5 Dec 2019 12:26:45 +0530
"Alina" <alina@cmstowp.net> wrote:

> Hi ,
>
>
>
> I noticed that your website rpgtherapy.com uses Plone as CMS.
>

We have over 200 domains/websites using Plone.

>
>
> I am not sure if you are currently facing any issue with Plone,

Yes, but only since version 5.

Prior versions were great, with an incredible security history, great features & performance, and a
wonderful community. We've been using Plone since it's predecessor as
Zope in the late 90's and Plone since 2004.

The one big improvement with 5 is customizing themes is much better in 5, but still nowhere as easy as WP and others. But every other area seems to be less-than or even broken compared to 4.x, including security quality alas.

We also use Tomcat, Jakarta, OFBiz, and many others.

We used WP in the past heavily (many years ago), but it always ends up being a disaster for anyone that does more than just a non-interactive static non-user-logins site. And even that is high risk if you don't update almost daily!

> but
> most of our existing clients have highlighted their concerns with
> Plone and are moving towards Wordpress.
>
>
>
> Some of the issues which are mentioned by our clients are:
>
>
>
> 1.   Higher system requirements which makes hosting more
> expensive in Plone

Never been a problem, this is a common misunderstanding by people who
do not understand how more enterprise-class caching systems work and
techniques for performance tuning. This is a misconception by
inexperienced/incompetent administrators and their users, not an actual
problem with Plone.

> 2.   Building custom features requires Python developers

This didn't used to be a problem because the open source community so
actively engaged and large prior to Plone 5.x. Since they have gone in
a different more minimalist direction with 5.x, this has been more
challenging. We have had to pay them to create the modules we want,
which we then insist they release as open source to the public so
others benefit. But they have become much more mercenary than they used
to be.

> 3.   Slow performance when user is logged-in

See answer to #1. This isn't a problem for those who understand
enterprise-class systems and performance tuning. This is not a Plone
"problem", it is just the systems administrators who don't know what
they are doing.

> 4.   Issues with caching

See #1.

> 5.   Plone has a small community of useful and accessible
> developers and documents

Until Plone 4 it was a very large and well supported developer and
user community. But since 5.x, this has become a serious problem, yes.
And their documentation used to be much better too, but with 5.x they
are hoarding the information and have become too mercenary, they are
effectively killing off their own product with their narrow changed
vision.

>
>
>
> Are you facing these issues with your Plone website? If yes, we can
> help you in migrating from Plone to Wordpress.

We are very familiar with WP, and many other PHP-based platforms.

While we have a few front-page landing sites using WP temporarily while
we look for an alternative to Plone, we know from decades of experience
that ALL PHP-based platforms become an administrative nightmare to
maintain because of how poorly designed the underlying PHP language is,
and then the poor coding standards of PHP coders that create the
products using the language like WP.

While WP is popular and easy to setup, we have had to rescue hundreds
(thousands?) of clients over the years from their hacked sites because
they couldn't keep up with the constant (nearly daily) updates and
0-day exploits that PHP itself, and WP as well, is constantly rife with.

While easy to setup, WP is NOT enterprise class, and over time eats
administrators alive in trying to maintain.

We are evaluating other platforms like Django as alternatives.

>
>
>
> Let me know and we can schedule a meeting to discuss the same.
>

Not interested, thank you.

You should really put your energy into
helping people find a safer platform rather than a platform that is so
incredibly insecure.

Good luck.
-Hawke
http://www.hawkenterprising.com

>
>
> Regards,
>
> Alina
>
> Consultant Wordpress
>
> www.cmstowp.com <http://www.cmstowp.com/>
>
>