Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

Helping you quickly enter and edit great content!

That’s it. Don’t get me wrong - Plone is HUGELY featured, and it integrates very nicely. But I think it is the printing press of the decade, if you get what I mean. When Martin Luther nailed his treatise on the church door in Wittenberg - it wasn’t the content of his note that was radical -it was that he was able to use the printing press to evangelize (no pun intended) his message:

The printing press is discovered and put into action in 1450. … Luther would have just been one more reformer in a small area if it had not been for the printing press. But thanks to the printing press, Martin Luther became the bestseller throughout the empire. He out-published all of his Catholic opponents. … He discovered the power of the press in ways that no one else had used it up to that point: everything from woodcuts being used in a polemical way, ditties and rhymes. He mastered this new medium; he used it to spread and turn what would have been a local affair into an international movement. ..

Plone can do that for you - but you have to have a communication plan, you have to know how to write for the web, and you have to know your audience. And (most of all) you need to regularly provide content updates to your website.

When you consider moving to a content management system such as Plone - make sure you START with an effective communication plan, that you identify the features of your website (NOT the visual design elements) that are most important, and implement your visual design in such a way that you further your goals, rather then just look pretty!