One proverb I like to quote a lot is When all you got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail because it reminds me of the dangers of becoming set and complacent with the way I handle things. This is particularily important in the context of my Plone developing – since Plone really is quite powerful you actually can create any web application with it – but that doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily the best solution for a given application. I.e. too heavy-weight, too complex, too complicated, too rich etc.

One particularily practical (and painful) lesson in this context is that currently we’re seriously thinking of replacing the Plone-based editing system that I created and updated over the past two years for the Datenschleuder with a MediaWiki instance. To be fair, this decision isn’t entirely a platform decision and has much to do with the fact that I developed the system to cater to my own personal needs (and anally-retentive meticulous penchant for structure and order) back in the days when Erdgeist and I were the only ones producing the Datenschleuder rather than to what the average (and at the time quite hypothetical!) editor would like to do – things that I’m only now beginning to find out, as more and more editors are joining the team.

In practice we're finding ourselves constantly struggling against Plone’s workflow while at the same time badly missing the massively richer revision- and history functions of mediawiki. Lastly, I never really got the PloneArticle -> XML -> InDesign workflow properly working anyway and if you have to resort to Copy & Paste it really doesn’t matter where the XHTML comes from ;)

Also, in retrospect I can now clearly see that using a system such as Zope/Plone with its tight rights and restriction model (“everything, that’s not explicitely allowed is forbidden”) which makes very much sense in “hostile” environments such as public websites or intranets where the system needs to be protected from malicious attackers and the technical incompetence of the average user isn’t really such a good idea in the context of the CCC where the open and flexible approach of a wiki more closely models and suits its ethics as well as its members skills and competence ;-)

I hope I don’t sound bitter here – because I’m not! The feedback from the editors in this matter has been invaluable for my work as Plone developer and I’m already finding myself applying some of the lessons to the current (super-sekkrit!) project I’m working on. I’m especially grateful to Erdgeist for his brutally honest but concise feedback. Sometimes it just takes a good friend to point out, that the emperor has no clothes on ;-)