Another Plone marketing thread

[pigeonflight]

Continuing the discussion from Report from Plone Open Garden 2017, roadmap discussion:

I actually think that this echos the messages that we've put out there.
Three of the five things emphasized on plone.com were addressed to some extent:

• enterprise integration (they did address integration)
• industrial strength security (they addressed this)
• limitless extensibility (they did mention the fact that it isn't average and can address multiple purposes)

What wasn't captured in the write up was

• flexible workflows
• robust scalability

I think they were pretty accurate, stating 512MB being the baseline for Plone hosting.
I feel like we're almost there with a trivial deployment story, it could be achieved with a tiny layer on top of ansible.

[djay]

But if you look at virtual all the other entries they had a USP, some key feature thats says - if you need this, you might want to look at this solution. These days this list above all applies to drupal and WP.

What is the one thing we can do that they can't do easily?

[pigeonflight]

I think that's an important question. I don't know the answer as yet, but I find that I get closer to an answer when I speak to persons who use other CMSes or just watch them as they work.

Perhaps our USP has to come as a unique combination of features out of the box that you'd have to combine several CMSes to gain a comparable out of the box experience.

Features that I really value are:
Intuitive cut and paste
I really like the ability to cut and paste entire pages and folders and move things around, just like on the desktop. It makes managing the information infrastructure much easier.

File link integrity
Use case: Customer needs to rename a pdf that is available for download because the name is misleading.
Unfortunately you have 3000 pages other pages scattered throughout your site that reference that pdf. Luckily for you, you're using Plone so renaming the file (not just the title but the actual url) is safe.

Sane Group management
We recently benefited from Plone's built in group management capabiliites. It was easy to create three folders (A,B,C) and three groups (A,B,C) then give sharing permissions to the folders based on the groups. This was trivial to implement and train a brand new user. To achieve this on many of the other platforms would introduce additional "non-native" customisation which would require proper planning for migration and security considerations.

Security is not something to be trivialised, I've had to interact with administrators who deal with other CMSes. Getting hacked can be a huge mess.

10+ Free Alternative Open Source CMS Tools to Explore - Designmodo

[Rotonen]

What is the one thing we can do that they can't do easily?

TTW Dexterity types? TTW forms?

[djay]

TTW Dexterity types? TTW forms?

yes I think this some of our most unique features.
WagTail talks about it's streamfields all the time. I saw a demo of it the other day. It's a really simplistic thing, and not as flexible as our ability to rewrite an objects schema. Yet they get a lot of marketing value by saying how great it is.

The ability to write python TTW also very unique (although still buried in later versions on plone).

But TTW as a marketing term has held us back. It hasn't stuck outside of the community.

What I'm hoping is that @datakurre idea of TTW addons (https://community.plone.org/t/let-there-be-ttw-add-ons/) is a way to combine the above ideas together into a single concept thats easy to grasp. The idea you can customise plone online with no coding experience, bundle it and distribute it in a secure manner, and then allow others to use your customisations instantly from some kind of app store. So from an AMI or shared plone hoster, or some one click ansible install you no longer have to worry about deployment.

Question is, what to call this that captures the essence of this, so outside people can see it as unique and useful?

[pigeonflight]

Let there be TTW add-ons

I like build in the browser as a byline. "Plone uniquely lets you build in the browser with its instant-addons feature". An alternative I've been trying out is "cloud coding" or "online development".

One other term that I've started using is "power user friendly". It isn't quite a synonym for "cloud coding" but the point is we're targeting the type of persons who might like to customise stuff but aren't necessarily using git and managing environment variables.

[zopyx]

One other term that I've started using is "power user friendly".

You will not convince a single new user to Plone by such buzz marketing terms - in particular when they do not reflect reality.

-aj

[pigeonflight]

In my context, Plone's ability to easily manage user groups and sharing was "power user friendly". I was able to train a user to manage a Plone site, including appreciating groups and pemissions, in less than 3 hours. They now manage content and user permissions.

That experience was the reason why I coined the term.

I qualify it with "power user" and not just "user" friendly because there is a class of user that I can do that with and it's worth making the distinction.

I'm sure there are other areas where it isn't an accurate or fair term.