Re: [school-discuss] Website admin for students

[Randy Edwards <redwards@golgotha.net>]

> Garry - have you tried PHP Nuke?
   I have extensive experience with the various *Nuke CMSs.  My 
recommendation would be to use PostNuke <http://www.postnuke.com> instead of 
PHP-Nuke.  PostNuke (PN) is a rewrite of PHP-Nuke and the code is far 
cleaner and more organized.  This results in some speed improvements and 
additional security and logical layout.  And like PHP-Nuke, PN also has a 
large and active user and developer community.

> I've seen many posting about Zope.  Do you know how the two compare? 
> What has been your experience using Zope?  In other words, would you 
> recommend it for a relative newbie?
   The Nuke CMSs' aren't equivalent to Zope.  Zope is a complete web app 
server system.  An equivalent to *Nuke would be Plone 
<http://www.plone.org>, a Zope CMS "product".

   One slick Zope feature is that it allows nice granular access to various 
portions of the web server.  Sure, you can do this with Apache's .htaccess 
files and authorization, but it's far easier with Zope.  Things like letting 
a secretary have access to just the portions of the web site so she can 
upload school board meeting minutes or allowing the science club teacher to 
have access just to his club's pages is a snap under Zope.

   Plone brings a lot of promise and CMS capabilities to a Zope system, but 
IMHO it isn't as admin-friendly as a *Nuke system.  Things like changing the 
look and feel extensively is more involved with Plone, and Plone, like all 
of Zope, can involve some Python knowledge.

   PostNuke (and the other *Nuke variants) is aimed at more of a typical 
admin or novice.  Plus, the *Nuke CMSs have dozens of modules for everything 
from slick event calendars to alumni modules to even wrap-arounds for the 
Moodle <http://www.moodle.org> online class system.  The biggest downside is 
that the *Nuke systems don't have the easy/fine granularity of access that 
Zope/Plone has, but on the other hand, that might not be a critical problem.

   My advice would be to seriously investigate PostNuke.  While that's my 
advice today, I think the Zope/Plone combination has a huge amount of 
long-term potential.  There are a couple of efforts to build educational 
portals with Plone, and in a year or so my recommendation hopefully would be 
different.

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