Yeah, Mike and I are chugging away on setting up a new dedicated server for our nefarious uses. Plone was actually mike’s discovery.

I have gone on to setup movabletype for my site flipsidejones.net, as it’s a blog, and thats what movabletype does best.

Plone will remain around for use on dcindustrial.net, so you can watch it evolve there (it’s the next big step)

Positives:

This app actually runs cbs news and a few other huge sites… it’s that good.

It relies on Zope, so a lot of the core stuff is already handled and works site wide (i.e. add ZWiki and the plone users can login to the wiki with the same password… single sign on rules)

Negatives:

It relies on Zope – which gives it a rather large footprint, and some mega crazy setup. It’s doable, but its no movabletype install… it’s more like installing linux.

It’s huge. The preconfigured stuff is amazing, but changing the templates and styles requires /deep/ knowledge of the system, and probably a bit of python work too. I am not sure exactly how difficult this will be because I have yet to modify the dcindustrial.net homepage to the old style (which I will be doing soon) – But it doesn’t look easy from just poking around.

Anyway, sorry for the huge comment here. Just wanted to give you feedback. I will try to blog about my progress once in a while, as I start to know more about it. I would suggest that if Ironworks is going to be a large/busy site, plone may be your answer – zope is a great backend, and plone is great for community CMF.

Stay away from PHP-Nuke, PostNuke and derivatives. They are bug riddled, and generally 75% done throughout – lots of workarounds and opportunities to be exploited. I do know the fellow who helped for PostNuke off and get it pushed into new, better forms. I could have him email you and give you his pitch if you like.

Content Management is a big hotspot of activity in the open source world at the moment. Plone has the most buzz, and is one of the most scalable and mature options. The latest iteration of the PHP Nuke line (some weird name I cant remember) is looking good and may have had its security cleaned up… there are others, but if you choose one of those two, you really wont go wrong.

The options in plone and zope are mind boggling, but, easy to learn. Its just that there is a /lot/ to learn. There is a lot of trial and error involved at first … And i hope you know DHTML, CSS, and are willing to dabble in python if you want to get really fancy. I’ve been playing with zope for almost a year now, and am still jsut getting my feet wet. its a massive, massive system. But it works very well with apache (you can have zope, zope/plone, zope/static, static combinations with virtual domains and such. As ryan mentioned, our new box is running it and we are running all kinds of stuff, not just zope … there are several systems involved …)

and download the zope book if you get into it. Its a Free download from their website.

http://www.zope.org
http://www.zopelabs.org (there are a log of tutorials on this page)
http://www.plone.org

Catch me on IM if you have a question about it

Mike.

Since my last comment, I have already gotten dcindustrial.net very close to where i want it. So that gives you the idea of the level of difficulty.