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Plone and multi-site management

CMS Wire recently posted a light weight comparsion of open source CMS and their multi-site management capabilities. According to article none of the three popular CMS (Plone, Drupal and Joomla) include multi-site management in their core CMS. Article was more about third party addons and what they have to offer for multi-site management needs.

Six Feet Up companys Lineage -product shines on this comparsion with it's easy to use separation of certain folder inside Plone site as independet site with certain users, workflows, theme and navigation. Although Lineage is already released it still has some dependencies which are not met with Plone 3.2.1 (but should be in Plone 3.3), so installation needs some additional lines to buildout. You can find more information from Plone Software Center.

In the Plone-sites we're developing and maintaining, we've traditionally wanted to keep sites theme pretty much the same within all different departments and faculties. With Lineage change to this restriction policy would be pretty easy I still believe our current way is best option for us. We have students who are studying in several minors in different departments. Now if every department would have their own theme this would just broke the ways people have learned to use our pages. Still we've encountered situations when there are some projects which aren't tied to our university so tightly and would want custom theming. I can see how easily this could be done with Lineage.

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