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Liferay vs Plone?

L C, modificado hace 11 años.

Liferay vs Plone?

New Member Mensajes: 22 Fecha de incorporación: 15/03/12 Mensajes recientes
I'm trying to compare solutions.

Anyone have a good comparison of Liferay vs plone?

reasons to go with liferay in comparison to plone.
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Tomáš Polešovský, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

Liferay Master Mensajes: 676 Fecha de incorporación: 13/02/09 Mensajes recientes
L C:
I'm trying to compare solutions.

Anyone have a good comparison of Liferay vs plone?

reasons to go with liferay in comparison to plone.


I have no comparison, just some insights from company using both: https://blogs.proteon.nl/blog
Matt Hamilton, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

New Member Mensajes: 5 Fecha de incorporación: 2/11/12 Mensajes recientes
Tomáš Polešovský:
L C:
I'm trying to compare solutions.

Anyone have a good comparison of Liferay vs plone?

reasons to go with liferay in comparison to plone.


I have no comparison, just some insights from company using both: https://blogs.proteon.nl/blog


Hi, I just thought I'd chime in from the Plone camp ;) I can't say I have much experience of Liferay so can't compare both directly, but I can give you a few details about Plone. Firstly, I want to point out the blog post referenced above is a personal opinion, but doesn't accurately reflect the Plone community. One specific part is actually completely inaccurate in that it quotes a blog post from release manager Eric Steele:

"Yesterday I stumbled across the following article titled 'Plone: the second decade' by Eric, the release manager of Plone 4. In short the article describes the decline of Plone as I have experienced it myself throughout the years.", yet if you actually read the blog post you will see the post actually says the *opposite* and that the Plone community is growing.

If you want a good view of the current state of Plone then take a look at the keynote by myself and Eric Steele at the Plone Conference 2012 in Arnhem, Netherlands a few weeks ago:

http://www.slideshare.net/esteele/the-state-of-plone-plone-conference-2012

As for specifics on why I personally recommend Plone to clients:

1) End user ease of use. Plone is very easy for content authors to use. Unlike most CMSs, with Plone the content is 'placeful'. You navigate to a folder on a site and add content there. This very easily fits the mental model most people have of organising content. You don't have to create content in one place and then add it to a navigation node separately. There is a lot less rope to hang yourself with than with Liferay.

2) Workflow/Security. Plone has a very powerful workflow system. It comes with a number of pre-defined states and transitions, but you can easily configure additional workflows with different states, guards, transitions etc. Like Liferay, the security is role based and you can add permissions to roles, and then add roles to users and/or groups of users. One nice thing with Plone is the authentication mechanism is very pluggable, so you can easily authenticate against an AD server, grab roles from a MySQL database, and grab someone's line manager's name from an Oracle HR system.

3) Configuration and build management. Plone uses a system called 'buildout'. It is analogous to Ant I guess. It is used to do repeatable, testable builds and deployments of Plone sites. You could have multiple configuration files that inhertit from each other e.g. base.cfg, prod.cfg, dev.cfg that include different things. e.g. running buildout with prod.cfg would build and setup a varnish cache, haproxy load balancer, a cluster of 8 zope instances, etc. Whereas dev.cfg could set up a local environment with a single instance, profilers, debugging tools etc. Again, I'm not sure how much Liferay uses Ant to do similar things, but it is definitely above what most PHP-based CMSes use.

4) Ease of theming. With Plone, anyone who can write HTML/CSS can theme Plone. You can grab any HTML theme out there (maybe from a free theme site, or build by a designer) and use it with Plone. You don't need to know anything about Plone itself to theme it. You just upload a .zip file (or point to the filesystem location) of the theme including a simple rules file stating what elements in Plone go where in the theme.

5) Content types. In Plone you can create custom content types. These use a schema to indicate what fields the content type has and what types those fields are. This can be edited through the web or via XML on filesystem, or in Python code. You can then add 'behaviours' to these content types to provide extra functionality. (e.g. saving data to Salesforce). The content types model is totally separate from the presentation template. So you could have multiple templates for the same content type (e.g. a mobile version, or XML version)

Hope that is of help. If you have any more specific questions about Plone, I'm happy to answer them.

-Matt
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Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

Liferay Legend Mensajes: 7942 Fecha de incorporación: 24/03/10 Mensajes recientes
After reading your post, I think the main difference is very clear. Plone is a OOTB solution while Liferay is more of a framework where users can build customized solutions.

As an example, with Liferay, it's possible to use bundled Kaleo workflow, but there's Activiti and jBPM workflows that can also be used.

Liferay is designed to be modifiable - plugins, themes, layout, hooks, ext plugins.
Matt Hamilton, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

New Member Mensajes: 5 Fecha de incorporación: 2/11/12 Mensajes recientes
Yes, I think you are right. Over the years Plone has been going people have debated the question of is Plone a product or a framework. And the answer has swayed back and forth over time and depending on whom you ask. Currently I think the main consensus is that Plone is a product. Albeit a very extensible and customisable one. It is a platform, not a framework. You wouldn't use it, for instance, to build a web app. Best to use actual frameworks like Pyramid to do that (which share a lot of the same technologies as Plone). You would use it to build an intranet that had to integrate with several other systems.

A good video on this is from Elizabeth Leddy, one of the Plone core developers from Plone Conf a few weeks ago:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4oVlzsOr5U (video)
http://www.slideshare.net/eleddy/plone-as-a-development-platform (slides)

In terms of modification and extensibility, Plone has one *really* good trick up it's sleeve. It uses a system called the Zope Component Architecture which uses the Adapter Pattern for most aspects of Plone. This means you can register a new adapter in a central registry to take over pretty much any aspect of Plone. Where this is *really* clever is that you can do this from outside the egg that contains the original code. Eggs in python are a bit like packages or beans in the Java world. If I want to override some aspect of Plone, eg. the display template of a particular portlet, or the way the navigation tree is built up, or how a content type derives its URL from its Title; I can do this from a separate egg/package that I create without having to touch any of the 200-odd eggs/packages that comprise Plone's default install. This makes maintenance and upgrades *so* much easier as you don't ever end up modifying code that comes from another source you don't control.

-Matt
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Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

Liferay Legend Mensajes: 7942 Fecha de incorporación: 24/03/10 Mensajes recientes
Yes, Plone is open source proprietary platform and not a framework. It's very good when starting up a new site but we decided to migrate to liferay after a while.
Matt Hamilton, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

New Member Mensajes: 5 Fecha de incorporación: 2/11/12 Mensajes recientes
No, Plone is not proprietary. It is Open Source and community governed. The code is licensed under GPL. Unlike Liferay, Alfresco, Hippo, etc there is no one central 'vendor' for Plone. The code is owned by the Plone Foundation a not-for-profit US registered foundation. The Plone Foundation has an elected board of directors from the community. Plone has a similar contributor agreement to Liferay for contributions to Plone core, only the assignment is to the Plone Foundation, not some kind of Plone Inc.
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Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

Liferay Legend Mensajes: 7942 Fecha de incorporación: 24/03/10 Mensajes recientes
Sorry, should have used a different word. By "properietary", I meant it's based on it's own technology instead of being able to use third party technology. It's locking the user in.
Matt Hamilton, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

New Member Mensajes: 5 Fecha de incorporación: 2/11/12 Mensajes recientes
It is based on different technologies and language to, e.g., Liferay... but it is not locking the user in at all. Pretty much all of the technologies used in Plone are standalone packages in their own right and can (and are) used in other systems as well.
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Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

Liferay Legend Mensajes: 7942 Fecha de incorporación: 24/03/10 Mensajes recientes
Yes, but Plone isn't using other's packages too much. That's the major handycap because it'll requiring more time to add a functionality.

I've been asking liferay's developers to increase speed because that one of the important factor in open source project. It just takes too much time with Plone because it is trying to do everything within the project. Users don't care if everything is build in-house or not.

With liferay, I can easily cover what liferay.com won't do.

This is just my personal opinion.
Matt Hamilton, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

New Member Mensajes: 5 Fecha de incorporación: 2/11/12 Mensajes recientes
Right, I understand what you are saying now. Yes I think this is the case with Plone, in that much of what Plone uses internally is specifically developed for Plone (or Zope). This is mainly historical, in that when Plone was first released over a decade ago there were no other ways of doing things. Plone (and Zope) were pretty much the trailblazers in the area of object publishing and so had to solve problems no-one else had yet solved.

This is changing over time however. For instance Plone can now use WSGI (analogous to AJP) so you can use different web servers directly (e.g. use Apache with mod_wsgi instead of just proxying from apache to Zope). Eventually Zope will likely drop its own request object in favour of using WebOb or something common with some of the other Python systems out there. For Plone 4 we moved from using Kupu as the visual editor to TinyMCE as that is more widely used.

This really has nothing to do with speed (either speed to serve a page, or speed of developing new features) but mainly to reduce the amount of code that Plone and Zope need to maintain on their own and share the load with other systems out there. You could argue that in some cases this speeds development in fact, as the Plone community can make changes without having to get 3rd parties to make those changes for us.

-Matt
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Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

Liferay Legend Mensajes: 7942 Fecha de incorporación: 24/03/10 Mensajes recientes
You've also touched on the major strength of Liferay. It's how hooks and ext plugins can be hot deployed/undeployed to overwrite classes and files.

As you've mentioned, Plone is still based on some historical specifications.

Plone is a very good product that can be used out of the box while liferay is not, but I can build and maintain much better on liferay.
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Hitoshi Ozawa, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

Liferay Legend Mensajes: 7942 Fecha de incorporación: 24/03/10 Mensajes recientes
There a simple comparison of features.
http://cmsharbor.com/products/compare/Liferay-Portal-vs-Plone

The main difference in my opinion to go with liferay is
(1) License - liferay (LPGL but capable of modifying using hook, ext plugin), plone is GPL
(2)Language - liferay (java), plone (python)
(3) Development tools - liferay (Liferay IDE, Service Builder), plone (?)
(4) Application server - liferay(tomcat, jboss, web logic, websphere,...), plone (zope)
Linda Lim, modificado hace 11 años.

RE: Liferay vs Plone?

New Member Mensaje: 1 Fecha de incorporación: 27/12/12 Mensajes recientes
I have no idea about this.