[Evangelism] New presentation. Plone: the CMS that hits above it's weight

[Dylan Jay]

Hi,

I gave this presentation to the Australian Computer Sociaty last week
that seemed to get a good response.

http://www.slideshare.net/djay/plone-the-cms-that-hits-above-its-weight
If you download the presentation you can see my notes which might be
needed for it to make more sense.

It's meant as an introduction to Plone. Feel free to use it or expand
on it.
I took a new way at explaining Plone. I told a story of how Plone is
used by some of the largest organisations but many might not have
heard of it. I used stats to show it's less popular with smaller sites
and explained this with the lack of easy hosting options. I hightailed
security and the increase in innovations and also Ploud. I thought it
worked quiet well.

My 2c, I think Plone has the opportunity to position itself as the
fast, flexible, "cleaner to develop", innovative alternative CMS. An
underdog. I'm not sure how we could break from peoples perceptions of
Plone from the past however. Maybe the marketing experts have some
ideas?

---
Dylan Jay
Technical Solutions Manager
PretaWeb: reducing duplication in the government web.
P: [phone] | M: [phone] | twitter.com/djay75 | linkedin.com/
in/djay75

[Dylan Jay]

Dylan,

Hi Mark,

This is an important discussion so I hope you don't mind me taking it
back to the list.

... <stuff cut> ...

"Hits above its weight." Sports metaphors are fine when addressing a
male, middle aged, corporate IT shill audience. Boxing metaphors have
bad connotations among females, folks and many parts of the middle
east and India. Also, what is the message here? Plone is wimpy? A
lightweight? Fights hard to be considered on par with its heavyweight

Looks like the title didn't give the impression I hoped for. I take
your point about negative connotations.
My point with the title was that here is a CMS that you might never
have heard of that a lot of people have picked to run some important
sites. The point is really encapsulated in slide #8 with the plone
positioning stats by w3techs.com.
I was also trying to get across the point that Plone is now light,
quick, open source yet has enterprise features.

alternatives? Its fine to position yourself as a new kid on the block
... if you are in fact a new kid on the block. Plone is a very old CMS
and has been around as long as most of the other CMSs people already
know about. Maybe trying to leverage the idea of a comeback would
make sense?

Plone is new to the vast majority of people. When I first promoted
Plone. I used to say it was 4th largest after WP, Joomla and Drupal.
That's no longer true. Drupal, Joomla and WP and now way out ahead in
raw numbers of sites and there are plenty of others ahead of Plone
(see http://trends.builtwith.com/cms).
The people I was trying to reach are people thinking of creating their
own site. Hobbiests, or developers looking at web technology. Most of
these people know a little PHP and are very unlikely to have heard of
plone in my experience.
Plone has pretty much been rebuilt, and is now starting to have many
innovative features ahead of some of the others. We could present that
as a comeback but I'm not sure comebacks are very convincing in the
tech world. New kids seem to get more attention.
If the vast majority of people haven't heard of plone can't we somehow
present it as something cool that the bigger players are using to get
security and features?
In fact the combination of Ploud and Diazo now takes Plone to the same
league as wordpress, really easy to have hosted and theme. That is
new. So within the last few months we've got an enterprise CMS that
the "professionals" have been using for years, that you can now have
your own free site in seconds and learn to theme in hours instead of
days. Even convert existing sites quickly. Anyone have any idea how to
title that pitch?

Mark

Post by Dylan Jay
Hi,
I gave this presentation to the Australian Computer Sociaty last
week that
seemed to get a good response.
http://www.slideshare.net/djay/plone-the-cms-that-hits-above-its-weight
If you download the presentation you can see my notes which might
be needed
for it to make more sense.
It's meant as an introduction to Plone. Feel free to use it or
expand on it.
I took a new way at explaining Plone. I told a story of how Plone
is used by
some of the largest organisations but many might not have heard of
it. I
used stats to show it's less popular with smaller sites and
explained this
with the lack of easy hosting options. I hightailed security and the
increase in innovations and also Ploud. I thought it worked quiet
well.
My 2c, I think Plone has the opportunity to position itself as the
fast,
flexible, "cleaner to develop", innovative alternative CMS. An
underdog. I'm
not sure how we could break from peoples perceptions of Plone from
the past
however. Maybe the marketing experts have some ideas?
---
Dylan Jay
Technical Solutions Manager
PretaWeb: reducing duplication in the government web.
P: [phone] | M: [phone] | twitter.com/djay75 |
linkedin.com/in/djay75
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--
Mark Corum
Plone Foundation Board of Directors
Communications Team
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