Plone vs. Drupal

Who owns the copyright and trademark in each case ?, Who are the top contributors ?, Who provide services based on each ?.

Although these aren't technicals stuff, they might be critical in many scenarios.

Kind Regards
r.

--
http://robertoallende.com

Indeed, those are legitimate questions, and this series doesn't mean to be exclusively technical. A "Background" section has been added to the listing.

Theming is the critical customization which must be performed basically for every site.

This is now corrected. Thank you for bringing this up!

How does it currently fit in my Solution stack whether it by LAMP or other and how difficult is it to administrate.

This is an interesting point. It is now part of the "Hosting" section and will be AMPly discussed in its specific sub-post.

In addition to mere customization, how does the framework support development of new or extended functionality? Does the framework expose itself well by design, so there's no need to hack it or add monkey-patches? Is extending the framework understandable to "average programmer", documented and stable? How about extension migration? How do the framework extension story & community support, encourage or even enforce development of extensions that play well with the framework and one another? 

It seems to add to several parts in the listing above: modules, customization and upgrading. I added a couple bullets to the customization part and will try and merge your comment with the sub-posts about those parts.

- Rules for proxy cache ? UI configuration for that ? Good documentation for that ?
- Cluster mode ? Is easy to create an cluster ? Is it easy to add a new node ? Can we have an HA system ?
- Architecture for HA, is there reference document about that ?
- Single point failure of the system ?

That's a lot of new questions! They will be treated in their own section "Load and Availability". Thank you for your help!

I've just installed Drupal 6 and it's interesting to see how different it is to administer it from using Plone's Site Setup or ZMI.  It might be worth looking at how easy it is to create users, assign rights, manage workflows, and do other actions that a typical content owner wouldn't do in each system.

I'd second Mikko's comment on theming: what's available as an add-on, what can be done with templating "proxies" (if that's the right term?) like Deliverance and whether they're necessary.

I spend most of my Drupal investigation playing with those administration differences: creating and customizing content types, users, rules, workflows, views etc. It is a good idea to make a clear distinction between content creation and administration on a deployed website. I renamed the "Adding Content" section to reflect this and added a couple points to it. Thank you!

Even the best CMS in the world is useless without documentation and an active community behind it.  One of the things I struggle with Plone over is the lack of up to date, accurate, helpful documentation.  Many times I have struggled with the documentation on plone.org only to find when I ask on IRC the documentation is wrong. 

An accurate and up to date documentation is very important on many levels. But rather than making a section about it, I plan on taking it into consideration within other sections, such as deployment (coming soon after the weekend), modules, customization, theming etc. Thanks for sharing your experience! Don't hesitate to let me know what documentation is bad or hard to find, so I can mention it in the right section. 

Another part important for me is how CMS deal with authentication and user sources and how to plug this with ecosystem of firms. 
So question could be : how integrate users from external sources ? Is there solutions for standard user repository (ldap , database , file ..., openid ...) ? Is it easy to develop an exotic authentification ? how to deal with sso (ntlm , kerberos and so on) witch architecture for that ? is it easy ? Is there documentation for that ?

I need some more research before I can merge these questions into the listing, but it would probably fit in the "security" part, if I make it "security and authentication".

I wish you would've compared against Drupal 7, which was just released and includes an *extremely long* list of improvements: better admin usability, simplified installer, updated jQuery+jQuery UI, native fields and image scaling/uploading, and much more. It represents over 2 years of work of more than 1,000 contributors.

Hope you can at least give it a try.

I went to the Drupal Indianapolis meetup two days ago, and learned (amongst many other things) that Drupal 7 was released a few weeks ago. It was after I started writing this series however, so I'm not sure I can suddenly switch gears and talk about Drupal 7, but I'll definitely try and take a look at it, and potentially mention improvements over Drupal 6 as I continue the series.
Thanks !

Nice effort in providing a comparison of Plone and Drupal.  Hopefully, others can chime in with input on their experiences too!

As noted above, Drupal 7 is out, but as this CMSWire article notes, there aren't many top-tier add-ons compatible with Drupal 7 just yet.

Speaking of Drupal 7, one thing I didn't notice on your list yet (but perhaps I missed it?) is the upgrade/migration path.

We've upgraded Plone sites from version 1.05 to 3.3.5, from version 2.1 up to 4.0.  In some cases these upgrades across multiple versions were done through a SINGLE CLICK script that ships with Plone!  :)

To my knowledge, Drupal doesn't provide such an easy path (or an automated one at all) to upgrade a site from Drupal 6 or earlier up to Drupal 7.  

If that isn't accurate, please do correct my post.  It seems like this would be one of those 'value-add' 'enterprise-y' services that Acquia would provide, if nobody else beats them to the punch.

I only recently came across this post but I wanted to chime in 20 months later! ;-)

I can tell you Ken, that upgrading from 5to6 or 6to7 falls into pretty much two distinct categories. For the vanilla sites that have not truly harnessed the more complex features of Drupal, it can be expected that the upgrade can be performed in less than a day and perhaps even half.
For sites with lots of complex data types and a handful [or more] of custom code then we're looking at days.
Why is this?
Simple.
When we move from major release to major release, we purposely break things. When hindsight tels us that something that was "awesome" 12 months ago is "not a good idea" any more... We break it in the new release and make it better. This may or may not raise issues when upgrading. 
This is being addressed in Drupal8 as we further divorce the content from the site functionality. We're baking in a MIGRATION process whereby a user can rebuild the site in D8 [using all the coolest and latest tools] then import the data over from their D7 site. 
Some may see "rebuild the site in D8" and think, "Good Frikkn' Grief! WHY!?!?"
I understand that immediate reaction. But trust me. Drupal is on the cutting edge of what Web Application Frameworks are doing. I don't want to upgrade my site to the newest version only to keep on doing things "The Legacy Way" and never truly harnessing whatever is "new" about this new release.
On the same hand... We have Drupal 5 sites out today that show no signs of moving up the release ladder. Popular Science Magazine being one of them at http://www.popsci.com/ When these sites were launched in 2007 they were WAY ahead of their time. Today they still look and function perfectly. There's no need to upgrade. Perhaps the release of Drupal8 in August 2013 will inspire some of these 5+ yr old sites to make the move, especially since the content MIGRATION features are native now.

My point...

Drupal often takes a few black eyes out on the playground because we break our APIs across major releases. I say it is the ONLY way to do it. I understand the objections and I share the pain. However, I favor the speedy advances we are making over the notion that we should be beholden to old methodologies under the guise that delicate sensibilities are at play. At the end of the day I trust my fellow Drupal Community members to keep pushing this ball down the field so we can score and score then score again. And as painful as it might be, If that means selling our QB to Denver... OH HOLD ON.. I think I just changed topics!?!?
You get the point! LOL
Doug Vann [Drupal Trainer, Consultant, Developer, President of Synaptic Blue Inc.]
http://dougvann.com    GO COLTS! ;-)

Sorry - here is the CMSWire Article link:

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-cms/drupal-7-released-but-is-it-production-ready-009722.php

I am not affiliated with CMSWire in any way, by the way.