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Thread: Opinions on Plone

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From: John Foliot
Date: Mon, Aug 21 2006 5:40PM
Subject: Opinions on Plone
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Apologies in advance to those hit twice due to cross-posting.

Taking a serious look at Plone as a CMS, but am curious to hear feedback,
kudos and brickbats alike. Key concerns are:

* Ease of setup
* Scalability
* and of course accessibility, both in final output but also in the
"behind the scenes" (i.e. authoring) perspective

It looks very interesting from where I am sitting, but wanted to know if
anyone out there has already messed with this and had anything to say.

Thanks!

JF
---
John Foliot
Academic Technology Specialist - Online Accessibility
Stanford University
560 Escondido Mall
Meyer Library 181
Stanford, CA 94305-3093






From: L
Date: Tue, Aug 22 2006 2:20AM
Subject: RE: Opinions on Plone
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John Foliot wrote:

"Taking a serious look at Plone as a CMS, but am curious to hear feedback, kudos and brickbats alike."

I used Plone for a while last year and found the interface to be extremely cluttered for use with a screen reader. Poor link/button text, poor overal page structure and simply too much information made it less than straightforward to use.

With tweaking, it was possible to create accessible output, but this didn't happen out of the box. I wasn't involved in the setup, so don't have any detail beyond that I'm afraid.

As an open source CMS however, it's probably among the closest to accessible with a screen reader, although only the HTML editor worked with any grace for me. I believe it also has a wiki style editor, but I'm not a fan of using these in favour of markup, as I already know html, so there's little sense in learning another set of codes.


Regards,
L

From: Alastair Campbell
Date: Tue, Aug 22 2006 3:40AM
Subject: RE: Opinions on Plone
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> Taking a serious look at Plone as a CMS, but am curious to
> hear feedback, kudos and brickbats alike. Key concerns are:
>
> * Ease of setup
> * Scalability
> * and of course accessibility, both in final output but also in the
> "behind the scenes" (i.e. authoring) perspective

I know people have used it well, but I didn't have such a good time. I
tried a few open-source CMSs about 2 years ago (for ukwindsurfing.com),
so they may have improved since then.

Coming from the point of view of trying to configure the front-end code,
it was a nightmare to find out where to edit each bit of code. It didn't
have what I would consider a friendly templating system. Drupal was a
bit better for this, but none were good.

In the end I gave up and went with using several different applications
(Wordpress, PunBB and a custom events calendar) rather than one holistic
one like Plone.
That approach was quicker for someone with particular front-end
requirements and not a (python) programmer.

The advice I came across quite a few times was that to do anything that
varies from the base install significantly, you need to know python, but
I don't. Perhaps it's changed, I was using version 2.1 at the time.

Kind regards,

-Alastair

--
Alastair Campbell | Director of User Experience
t. +44 (0)117 929 7333 | m. 07970 879 653

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From: Joshue O Connor
Date: Tue, Aug 22 2006 8:50AM
Subject: Re: Opinions on Plone
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CFIT are currently road testing several CMS systems for overall
usability/accessibility. Plone is one of them.
Our initial tests, with a power screen reader user, found in no
particular order, the plus points:

Good heading structure.
No Frames.
Form elements are well marked up (though this is limited to a search
field but in this version of Plone, on the main admin page most
form elements seem to be marked up well).

The negative points are:

In general the naming conventions for items used in the interface is a
little unintuitive. Use of terms like
"Smart Folder" wasn't great, with no idea what a "Smart Folder" does.
However reading the manual would no doubt shed
some light on this, which we have deliberately not done to test Plone's
level of "instant usability", as such.

When we tried to add a page we found 2 frames, not correctly or not
clearly labeled. There are "Skip to content/Skip navigation links",
which is good. There is however, an overall a lack of consistency
between what elements are or are not visible when in forms mode/virtual
PC mode.

There were also some peculiar (and inconsistent) behaviours when using
JAWS 5. Pressing the F key (or tab key) should allow
the user pick out elements such as buttons, edit boxes, list boxes etc
and this worked fine, however when using the arrow keys
to navigate through these elements, no associated labels or identifying
information, was read out. Now we have to again test this with JAWS 7
and also other screen readers such as Window Eyes etc to see if this
observed behaviour is consistent or something
peculiar to JAWS 5.

Having said all of this we have still not come to a conclusion about
Plone, and we have not tested its output at all, but my first impression
is that I have to agree with Leonie when she says:

> simply too much information made it less than straightforward to use.

But when customized it could be a much different story. As an aside, I
found that the approach Drupal take with it's slim interface which
you can add to as needed, more intuitive and accessible.

I should say that this feedback is hot off the press, so please forgive
me if it is less that cogent, but I thought some
of you might find it useful.

Joshue O Connor

Senior Accessibility Consultant
Centre For Inclusive Technology
www.cfit.ie


L

From: John Foliot
Date: Thu, Aug 24 2006 4:10PM
Subject: RE: Opinions on Plone
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John Foliot wrote:
> Apologies in advance to those hit twice due to cross-posting.
>
> Taking a serious look at Plone as a CMS, but am curious to hear
> feedback, kudos and brickbats alike.

Just a quick note of thanks to all of those who responded. Upon review,
while most feedback was generally positive, it seems that the installation
process and resources required make this beyond what I was looking for...

Thanks again!

JF
---
John Foliot
Academic Technology Specialist - Online Accessibility
Stanford University
560 Escondido Mall
Meyer Library 181
Stanford, CA 94305-3093