"Count what is countable. Measure what is measureable. What is not measureable, make measureable." -- Galileo

Saturday, December 12, 2009

A Plone-Centric View of CMS Technology

Some clever person over in the Plone Evangelism Forum (Armin Stross-Radschinski) suggested that the community look at a Plone-centric subway map.  From that germ of an idea comes this modification of the CMS Watch Subway Map



This leaves a nasty jog in the Blue line where Alfresco to Typo3 now connects with the Plone station.  If I had the time and patience, I'd flip the Blue line over to the other side of the Red line and continue it in the same direction as the Alfresco-Plone leg, although that would crowd into the CMS Watch logo in the center. 

I'll leave it to CMS Watch to see if they agree with the repositioning shown above.  It echos the remarks made by Limi in this year's Future of Plone address at World Plone 2009 -- we're not competing with the Drupals and Joomlas of the world. 

To move Plone onto the main line, we'd have to add one or both of Enterprise Content Management or Digital Asset Management.  If you think about it, were Plone classified as a strong Digital Asset Management system, it would probably also meet the criteria for ECM.  It all goes back to the discussion about what constitutes an ECM.  I'm not sure that Wikipedia has the last word on that, at least at the moment.  The article there is listed as having multiple issues. 

Meanwhile, after some reflection, it occurred to me to extract the Red-Blue-Green lines and look at the neighborhood around Plone in a less cluttered view.  That led me to a Venn diagram instead of a subway map: 



This omits all the other CMS Watch categories and leaves a very clear Plone-centric picture.  Plone is running with the big dogs and its the only open source solution in the center.
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In closing, we're fast coming up on the New Year and that can only mean one thing:  Plone Metrics' Person of the Year Award.  No cash, no prizes, but as they say on Iron Chef, they'll have "the peoples' ovation and fame forever."  Now accepting suggestions until Dec. 28.

Happy Plone Holidays!

3 comments:

Lennart Regebro said...

Yeahhhh... why is Drupal and Fatwire in different parts of the map, when they are the only ones who are at both the blue and red line only? Is there a secret dimension to the map we don't know about, or something?

Dylan Jay said...

It would also be interesting to see these same diagrams single product/platform was the data point rather than "company". Then google/microsoft/oracle and others wouldn't so centered place. It would show Plone's extreme flexibility even more.

Schlepp said...

Lennart, at first I thought it was an FOSS/commercial split, but then WordPress and other OS are over by Fatwire. Maybe its just artistic license?

Dylan, I totally agree. The vendor-centric view distorts the placement of individual products. Where would Google or MS be if their individual product lines were separated out?

All, I apologize for enforcing comment moderation recently. Someone started adding vacuous random comments to old postings just to get a few more notches in the pagerank for their product. One bad apple...