And speaking of alternatives to Plone, today I came across Typo (no, not that typo – come on, let’s be serious here ;-) which looks very interesting from the perspective of a Plone and Quills developer: a lightweight, AJAX-enabled, cleanly written blog system with a thriving themes community and XML-RPC-support (and more).

So naturally, I wanted to check it out and thus proceeded to install it (on my Mac). But that’s when my initial enthusiasm started to fade. See, Typo depends on Ruby on Rails which in turn is distributed and installed via the RubyGems. Well, that’s not too bad. I downloaded and installed RubyGems just fine (sudo ruby setup.rb – voila!) and then used it to install Ruby on Rails (sudo gem install rails --include-dependencies). Now I’m all set, right? Oops, we’ve only just begun, I’m afraid:

• Create a database for typo. You can find matching schemas in the db/ folder.
• Change the config/database.yml to reflect your newly created database configuration
• Run script/server -e production and see if it works
• Point your browser to http://your.domain.com:3000/ and follow the install process

Etc. pp. So, next thing I know I’d be installing a database and setting up db users and permissions and running SQL commands? No, thanks. Don’t get me wrong: I will install and check out Typo (and Ruby on Rails) eventually (can’t really afford not to, quite frankly and it does seem like a lot of fun, once you got it going!) but this encounter did remind me of how much I’m taking for granted in the world of Zope and Plone.

In comparison: to get a working setup of Quills you simply need to run the All-in-One Plone installer (Mac, Linux or Windows), expand the Quills package into the Products folder and restart Zope. You are then literally one click away from a shiny new Quills instance.

To make it perfectly clear: the point of this entry is not to bash Typo or Ruby on Rails but simply to illustrate that both worlds have their very own areas where they truly shine – and that there is still plenty of opportunity to learn from each other! I’m really looking forward to digging through Typos code and to see what I could adapt for Quills, particularily in the XML-RPC and AJAX-department.