We have been working with Plone (as our main content management system) for close to four years now.  In that time, we have come to love  Plone and the overall open source movement. 

The only problem we had with Plone is the fact that not enough people knew how great it was.  Despite some of the biggest companies, associations and government agencies using Plone, its popularity has always been overshadowed by other platforms that were not as good technically, but had very good marketing and branding efforts.

But I am pleased to share that our partners at Contextual Corp, along with Netsight Internet Solutions (UK) have writen and produced an excellent overview of Plone.  If you ever had doubts about Plone's heritage and its standing in the CMS market, this is a good reminder of how strong this platform is.

PLONE CMS OVERVIEW

This weekend, I was reminded of my love for and hate of Flash.

Our business partner, Higher Logic, produced a great looking Flash animation that shows the benefits of using an online community.  It is really well designed (see it at: http://hug.higherlogic.com/HUG/HUG/Home/Default.aspx), and more importantly, the progressive thinkers at Higher Logic made the animation, including the source file, available to all partners.  I love this idea of building and then sharing assets for everyone's benefit.

Now, here's my problem.  As we design and deploy new association sites, we are specifically staying away from using Flash.  My rationale is simple (if not, perhaps a little flawed); I don't want to use Flash in a dominant area of any site since Flash does not play on iPhones.  And with the number of iPhone users growing at such a frantic clip, I don't want to have a growing number of users unable to view a key part of one of our sites. 

So when will Apple fix this obvious (and only real) shortcoming of the iPhone? Only Steve Jobs knows that answer... and we all know how hard getting secrets out of him is.

So for now, I will continue to stay away from using Flash but always appreciate a well executed animation (by viewing it on my PC).

Brett

We are in the process of launching a new collaboration center for a confederation of non-profit organizations. The key ingredient to this new collaboration center is that it must be easy to navigate (yet have tons of features and functionality).

So, knowing that site navigation and the site's information architecture are keys to success, we have spent a fair amount of time building wireframes of the site, making sure that we get the site well organized and easy to navigate BEFORE moving to the "pretty pictures" and "rounded corners" design phase.  In the past, we would have used PowerPoint to construct these wireframes.  But while I love PowerPoint for most things, this is a task it is not specifically designed for.  So a month ago, I did a quick search for "wireframe tools" and to my delight, found that there is a whole set of providers of this type of functionality.

Long story short, I began using iPlotz (http://iplotz.com/) and I am here to tell you... it is absolutely worth the $15 a month service fee.  I won't bore you with all the product details (since their demo does a good job of that), but I will tell you that this solution has saved me a ton of aggravation using tools not built for this activity, and I would highly recommend it to anyone who has to design a site and collaborate with others online about the design.

Brett