[leejoramo]

I worked with Zope/Plone for about 10 years in the 2000s. Without reading the story, I loaded the larger version of the graph and looked for a cluster for Plone.

On my third click, I found it.

Then I read the article which actually stated that Plone is one of distinct clusters. Pretty amazing for a 20+ year old technology

[BiteCode_dev]

My first job was with plone. I hated it. Then I learned the twisted ecosystem and had a moment of crisis.

Those are the devil pits of the python world.

Thank god for django and asyncio.

[leejoramo]

Python programming Plone was painful.

However, I learned so much from the entire system.

* The CSS of the Plone theme was a Masterpiece. There is a very good reason why Wikipedia used a near direct copy Plone’s CSS for most of the 2000s. Using just a layer of CSS and minor changes to the templates, I could radically re-theme an entire site in a short amount of time.

* Plone enforced semantic HTML and used XHTML. Regardless of what you think of the value of semantics and XHTML, it thought me how to create well structured HTML at a time when the web was full of very broken HTML4

* While programming was painful, Plone’s UX for content managers was first rate. I was invoked in testing Plone, Joomla, Drupal and WordPress. Plone got top marks by a large margin

* Again too marks for Accessibility. In 2005, I built a Plone site for a nonprofit that worked with the blind. I remember users saying they could not believe how easy Plone was to use using the Jaws screen reader

* Multi-lingual sites with workflows for translators. Last year I ran into a translator who used a Plone site I build 20 years ago. They lamented that none of the sites the work on today are as good as that old Plone site.

* etc

[BiteCode_dev]

Yes it was a good tech from the user perspective.

If you could make it render fast enough, that is.

And twisted did make use cases possible in python that would have been near impossible otherwise.

If you could debug it, that is.