Liberal Religion and Neo-Astrology, Champagne Breakfasts, Clusters and CMSs

[tcpip]

Gave an address at the Melbourne Unitarian Church on Sunday on Reverend Stephen Fritchman, a radical liberal in the U.S. who caused a great deal of trouble for the political establishment during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. On a vaguely related topic I found myself debating on convert_me last week with astrologers, of all people. Intrigued to discover that some of that ilk now claim (or rather, admit as the statistics and science is beyond reasonable doubt) that it has no predictive value whatsoever, but rather can only be used as a metaphorical and instrospective approach. So, after all those centuries it is finally acknowledged to be fiction.

Last Saturday the deco-apartment of Das Hoehnhauss/Casa di Lafayette held a champagne breakfast with various teas, Timorese coffee, lots of pancakes, almond shortbread, silverware and fine china. In attendence were caseopaya's new workmate and partner along with imajica_lj. We're hoping to turn this into a semi-regular event as it's a delightful way to waste away a Saturday morning and most of an afternoon and catch up with a small group of people as well. We're gradually building a list of people to come along, but if anyone is particularly keen to attend in the next couple, please drop a line below.

Work-related matters have been quite busy of late and we've been somewhat short-staffed. Upgrading the dual-core Opteron systems to quad-cores on Tango is a necessity if we wish to reach at least somewhere close to the c7 Teraflop peak but (as one would expect) it hasn't entirely been smooth sailing. On a completely different tangent, I've been investigating the relative competitive benefits of Drupal vs Plone CMSs for ARCS. Having some experience with both does lead me towards the former for the sake of simplicity, but I'm interested to hear contrary views.

Comments

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

I found Plone has some annoying overheads and scalability issues for large deployments, but has some exceptional capabilities for developing your own stuff. They are the two CMSes I tend to prefer.

If basically what you want is to simply roll out fairly straightforward CMS functionality I'd go drupal, if you need to develop your own data types etc I'd go Plone.

[lardarsegreg.livejournal.com]

Are either of them installable on shared hosting though (which means no root access)?

[odubtaig.livejournal.com]

Most shared hosting doesn't support Plone because it relies on the Zope Application Server which is a hocking great overhead and tends to require its own physical server per deployment.

Drupal and Joomla only require PHP and MySQL (or, more recently, PostgreSQL) and are not only commonly available as a provider installable (through somthing like Fantastico) but can also often be dropped in as the raw scripts so long as you can give them a database username and password on the installation run. You should also be able to lock the site down to password protected access only until you've got everything installed.

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

What odubtaig said. Shard hosting sites almost invariably have Drupal available, but not Plone because of the dependency on Zope, rather than the standard LAMP stack....

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

That's a very succinct summary which concurs exactly with my research and experience on the matter.

One other issue with Plone (I don't know whether it's been fixed in more recent versions) I've read is conflicts between modules and the advantages with Drupals taxonomy system.

cf., http://www.hofmockel.org/content/drupal-vs-plone

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

That is a very nice and succinct summary of a several good things about drupal that I wasn't really aware of (having only looked briefly at development a long time ago).

It still seems Plone probably still has some things in its favour for quite heavyweight development, but it seems as if Drupal might have significant advantages for modest customisation.

Though I admit I've never been that big a PHP fan, so that still weighs against it somewhat.