Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2010

Usability and Plone

I've seen in here and there someone mentioning that usability of Plone is very good. Lot's of people - me included - like the fact that in Plone you don't have separate content management interface compared to some of Plones rivals. That counts for something when we're talking about good usability. Still that is only one quite small part of the whole picture. So what else is there? What do people like in Plone and where are the rough edges for end users? If general consensus is that Plone does have good usability, where is the actual proof of that? On plone.org I found one page in developer documentation mentioning following:  "Plone differentiates itself on usability. The intuitiveness of the user interface is what attracts people to Plone the most." I interpret this sentence meaning about the "one view for all" approach. What bugs me in this is that this whole sentence about good usability is about how the UI works compared to Plones competi

Speed comparsions between Plone and Wordpress

Jon Stahl wrote recently a blogpost about Plone being three times faster than Dropal, Joomla and Wordpress . We had a small discussion about this in my workplace and as my colleague pointed out this wasn't a really that comprehensive test that you could state Plone being 3 times faster than it's competitors. This seemed a bit unfair test considering how fast this has been spread in tweet/blogosphere, so I decided to repeat the test with a bit more critical viewpoint. What's wrong in the original test? No one would consider opinion poll with 10 answers nowhere near trustworthy - it's all the same with requests. I didn't want to put up all the cms so I just set up second best (Wordpress 2.9.1) and compared that to my Plone development site (4.0a3). As a comparsion I did the first test with same ab command Jon used and my iMac gave following results: Wordpress: 7.13 requests / second Plone: 17.10 requests / second So far we have clear winner and Jons data hol

Domain name registration through Google - when things go wrong.

Not too many people know, that you can register new domains through Google. This can be done when you're registering for Google Apps Standard Edition which is free and somewhat stripped version of their Google Apps Premium Edition. Latter one is tailored more to suit business needs. With $10/year prize tag it's not cheapest option, but you'll get "private domain registration to protect against spam at no extra cost, full DNS control and domain management, automatically configured to work with Google services, email, calendar, instant messaging, web pages and more also at no extra charge". As a comparsion GoDaddy offers .org domains at $14.99/year so it's actually not that bad offer. Google actually is just collecting the data and sending it to their partners (godaddy, enome) which does the registration. I decided to give it a try at January 11th. To my big surprise things didn't went that smoothly. It's been now one week since my order - the domain