There exist many blogging tools for Plone, but none that have emerged as a full-featured blogging product comparable to WordPress.

At the upcoming snow sprint we hope to investigate Tim Hick’s efforts using Zope 3 adaptors and interfaces so that the syndication and trackback functionality can be reused by other products.

Jon Stahl has some good reasons for why Plone needs a good blogging product, and what sorts of features such a product should have.
He even pleads with the the Plone developer community to not reinvent the wheel (how many different blogging tools does a CMS need?) and instead rally efforts around a single definitive blogging product for Plone.

Tom argues that it’s okay there are so many blogging products because then each person can do things their own way rather than make compromises.
Below is a list of the current crop of blogging tools.
Thankfully efforts are underway to share development efforts across the Quills and EasyBlog products, utilizing Tim Hick’s Five/Zope3-based syndication and plonetrackback tools.

• Quills – BloggerAPI, trackbacks, powering theploneblog.org
• EasyBlog – next version EasyBlog Generation V is expected to be completely restructured to make heavy use of the component model of Zope 3 using Five.
• Plone Blog (qPloneBlog) is based on the SimpleBlog product. It is enhanced with ping abilities, RSS2 support for audio and video enclosures, Technorati tags, TrackBacks.
• SimpleBlog – no fancy blogger-api/backlink stuff etc (yet), but it supports categories.
• COREBlog2 – a former Zope only product, it has now been ported to Plone.
• KNotes – uses PostgreSQL on backend.
• Bitakora (Zope only)

I’m hoping that at the upcoming Snow Sprint in Austria, we can do some work on at least the syndication part, so that it’s easier to create RSS 2.0 feeds from Smart Folders.

There is murmuring of having a Plone as social software sprint in New York which would include development of blogging, tagging, syndication, discussions, etc. features for Plone. Stay tuned!

NOTE: this post is replicated as a Snow Sprint topic page Blogging.

Technorati Tags: blogging, plone

With Apple’s decision to use Intel chips for the next line of Macintosh computers, the lines are blurring between which hardware can be used to run which operating system.

It’s reported that you will be able to run Windows XP on the new Intel Macs, and OS X can be dual-booted on a Thinkpad.

So now it’s just a matter of which kind of hardware you like, and you’ll be able to run both Windows XP and OSX on the same machine.

I prefer Apple hardware because it’s very high quality, and I admit, I’m a sucker for the design aesthetic.

However, I’m running Ubuntu Linux on a Dell PowerEdge SC430 server and using VMWare to run Windows XP. This way, I don’t need to reboot to switch to the other OS, and it’s fast too.

Technorati Tags: apple, linux, vmware