Bearfruit

(Disclaimer: This is not an attempt to turn this thread into a “why didn’t you choose Python-based framework X”, Drupal is a fine system and several of the people I hang out with are CivicSpace/Drupal developers :)

I guess I see the off-hand comment about Plone in the article as sniping without any proper reasoning behind it, so I’ll try to fill in some of the blanks.

Plone was used at Ubuntu/Canonical to initially launch their website(s)
back when they started in 2004, and it was done because it was the only thing that could get them up and running in a matter of days. The Plone site was always meant to be temporary.

The reason I know is because I worked for them at the time, so they did
indeed choose Plone because they had people who knew it back then.

This was also Plone 2.0, a very different Plone than the later versions, and none of the systems (including Drupal) were very sophisticated/scalable/reliable at this point.

The fact that they didn’t reevaluate Plone after 3 years of additional development on the project is disappointing, but not surprising. People tend to treat software like static entities, and if you’ve had bad experiences with an earlier version, you rarely go back and try it again later.

There’s a reason Plone is still Python’s leading CMS. :)