Welcome to catmando.co.uk

Plone 3 - A User's Guide

Introduction

There are many, many online guides to Plone; there are also at least a dozen very well written books on the subject.

Some of the guides and books are aimed at content managers:

• [complete]

The more technical manuals are somewhat thinner on the ground:

• [complete]

Nevertheless, all of these resources share one major problem. The changes to Plone over the last few months have been immense and the documentation has simply not kept up.

Most annoyingly this even applies to the content on the official plone site.

The current state of affairs means that mailing lists and the IRC channels are constantly filled with people asking the same questions over and over again (and I include myself among those who have taken from the community without putting anything back in).

I believe that this is preventing Plone from taking a larger share of the CMS and website management market; it also makes for a very frustrating experience that does little to encourage large scale user participation. While I believe that internal design should be left up to those with enough experience to make the right decisions, product and customisation development should be made simpler and more accesible.