Why Plone

published Nov 17, 2008, last modified Dec 03, 2020

What made me choose Plone.

To those of you who wonder why I am using Plone to power this site now:

  1. Transactionality.  Changes are either applied, or fail.  No middle ground here.
  2. Undo.  I can fuck up the entire site and I can get it back to where it was with one click.
  3. Complete freedom in URL layout.  I can lay the contents of the site out however I want.
  4. Scriptability for batch operations.  I can write short scripts that perform all sorts of operations on content selected from dynamic search results.  For example, organizing stuff into English and Spanish folders was one search plus 9 lines of code.
  5. Automatic redirects.  So if I decide to move/rename an article or perhaps an entire section, no problem, I won't lose the linky goodness and search engines.
  6. Multilingual support.  I can translate articles and, according to the user's and browser's preferences, the appropriate article will be served.
  7. Hack-resistant.  It runs in Python, it does not use SQL databases and it does not access files in the server's filesystem, so there is no chance of any sort of hack that will compromise my machine.

I do confess that setting up Plone required me to inform myself deeply on a number of hard topics.  But it was certainly worth the time.