Cocoon and Zope, CocoBlog and Zwiki with Blogface, Radio
After reading Ugo Cei's recent comparisons of weblogs, I'm reminded to set down some notes on recent experience.
Cocoon suffers when compared to Zope, in my experience, largely in the
user interface and documentation. Getting Zope and Cocoon up and limping is roughly equivalent.
The next steps... site configuration and change, customization .... are considerably more developed in Zope and Radio. Cocoon will soon have component drop-ins, like Zope or Radio in effect... although done differently, and Cocoblog is an encouraging example of a drop-in. Most Cocoon examples are 'Hello World Handwaves'. Cocoon provides a toolkit for content management at this stage, rather than a CM application.
The Zope instance is designed from scratch to be managed from a web interface. Cocoon has little along this line and shows no sign that this is a priority, as far as I can see, following the user and developer mailing lists. Zope is like the Radio application in this respect. The textbox web interface is certainly a little clunky, but greatly augmented by template forms and configuration buttons.
It will be interesting to see how much of the cocoon community releases their in-house code back to the open source community, and how quickly. HP's announcement is certainly promising but the code is still outside of cocoon proper, afaik. If you look at the live sites cocoon page, most are not showing code for the underlying implementation which uses cocoon. The portal example is a good contribution, but enhancements are announced but unavailable until a conference presentation.
Some user oriented documentation has started to move outside of cocoon to places like cocoon Center. This seems to be following the track of zope and radio.
One index of project development is the degree of compartmentalization for users and applications available to the community of users. Cocoon shows just a user mailing list and a developer mailing list. There is no Special Interest Group structure in the community (although there are certainly working subgroups of developers).
Enough for now. I should get back to work. Just to note, I'm working more on Cocoon, even with the rough edges. These notes should not be taken as a negative response to Cocoon.
8:56:46 AM 
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