Did anybody else received that kind of emails (see below)?
Beside people usually do not take very seriously an email starting with "Hi First Name", it is still pretty bad.
Do you think the Plone Foundation could take an action on that? (or is it just perfectly legal and there is nothing special we can do here?)
Subject: Quick Question For Your Website
Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2019 13:49:14 +0530
From: Alina alina@cmstowp.net
To: *******
Hi «First Name»,
I noticed that your website uses Plone as CMS.
I am not sure if you are currently facing any issue with Plone, but most
of our existing clients have highlighted their concerns with Plone and
are moving towards Wordpress.
Some of the issues which are mentioned by our clients are:
Higher system requirements which makes hosting more expensive in Plone
Building custom features requires Python developers
Slow performance when user is logged-in
Issues with caching
Plone has a small community of useful and accessible developers and documents
/Are you facing these issues with your Plone website?/**/If yes, we can
help you in migrating from Plone to Wordpress./
Let me know and we can schedule a meeting to discuss the same.
Nice email there... What action would you suggest? This is advertising for services, and there is no falsehood in the stated points. It’s also clear that anyone using Wordpress is suffering from similar problems: PHP, hacks, zero day vulnerabilities in core but usually the add-ons, lack of good PHP devs, customizing WP or its add-ons requires PHP devs, blabla.
The robotics team that my son is on had a crappy proprietary CMS that did not let an admin grant different permission levels to users, so the team was unable to delegate content creation. About one minute into my showing them Plone, when I mentioned permission levels and folder sharing controls, they were sold on Plone. That is another problem with WP.
well, yes if that's just legit advertising, there is not much to do (beside communicating about Plone strengths of course), my question was more if this kind of things are legal or not (I am not expert here but you seem to imply it is totally legal)
I’m pretty sure that in Canada and the US there is nothing illegal about that message. It is a one-sided message that points out issues in a competing product (ie advertising). But is it legal in Europe? I don’t know.
But you raise a good point, which is that we can do more positive messaging about Plone to non-Plone users, and the email you quoted is a good way to reach Wordpress users who have struggled. Fair is fair. There has been a sentiment expressed that we should not “attack” WP and Drupal or other CMSs, but I don’t think highlighting Plone’s strengths in the light of known WP/Drupal issues is an attack. It’s just positive messaging about Plone.
Who wants to help with this effort? Let’s develop a plan.
In Europe it's not legal, it's spam but what can you do here, if they are from Asia or elsewhere ;).
And yes it's aggressive and not a nice way of doing business.
But what we can do, is giving our users and anyone who is interested out there, real information with real value. This will help to clear it up and correct this crap.
having talking points keyed the exact keywords being used like "plone community size", "plone performance", "plone development costs" and "plone documentation review" just in case someone googles it... can't be a bad thing.
But no it won't stop the rumours
I can write one of those if others write the rest?
To be honest its a bit hard to pick a question I can answer well since I don't know wordpress well.
This is only False for sites on a shared Zope instance I suspect.
If you have a large plone site you might have a less RAM/CPU needed for your DB but more RAM needed for each of your application servers. I really don't know in the real world what comes out on top. It would be interesting to have two examples of similar standalone large sites.
For a small standalone site its also hard to tell if the DB is dedicated to the wordpress site.
But when sharing a DB with many small wordpress sites then it might require less resources per site.
However all of this is perhaps beside the point as lack of competition in plone hosting means costs are higher if you include support.
I think this point is hard to argue against. Data science has made python expensive and the migration of some python web developers to become full stack JS developers has made the average price per python developer high and hard to hire for IMO. Your experience per geographic market might vary.
I'm not really sure where this one comes from. There was some benchmarks from years back about Plone being much faster than Drupal without caching (which is generally what it means when not logged in). I suspect this may be due to very inefficient themes being built? I'm not sure if its as easy to write slow theme code in wordpress vs plone? Diazo does make this too easy IMO and there aren't enough warnings about this in Plone itself.
I don't know how Wordpress handles caching. I can imagine with wordpress there is a well oiled cooperation between popular hosting providers and caching settings which help avoid pitfalls?
Varnish recipe works well. But if you do end up with a caching issue it does require a lot of knowledge to debug. So maybe caching issues do come up a lot with plone that we don't know about? I don't deal with people who host their own plone so I don't know.
I'd better not touch this one at all. I've previously said too much on growth of plone and where the focus isn't and what the likely result would be/is now.
The documentation I think is pretty good. If you are burying deep in the bowels of plone the answers are often there, But it's getting harder to keep up with things changing under the hood and for anyone just wanting to customise a small site it's not really useful IMO.
I have had a similar mail. And now a followup mail has come in. Just sharing it for completeness.
Did you get a chance to read my previous mail regarding issues handling with the Plone website zestsoftware.nl.
There’s a reason why Wordpress is the most widely used CMS. Let me share some facts that might interest you.
There are just a handful of Plone websites as opposed to Wordpress that boasts of over 140 million users worldwide.
Wordpress being widely used CMS has a large community to help you.
Installation and modification are very complex in Plone while it is very easy for Wordpress based websites.
SEO friendly. Google loves it
Easy right management in Wordpress for members website
Re-design in Plone website takes a toll on the finances when compared with Wordpress
If you are still skeptical about it or are confused about the time and effort this would take , I can do a FREE audit and see if Wordpress is the right choice for you?
In this case zestsoftware.nl is the site of my employer Zest, which is a Plone shop, so of course our site uses Plone and we are not going to change it to Wordpress. Anyway, I won't reply to that mail, a waste of time.
There is one point that I think is completely wrong.
Wordpress is NOT so SEO friendly, unless you spend a lot of time on it.
I am pretty sure that if you 'just make a Plone site' and then 'just make a Wordpress site', the Plone site will score better on Wordpress.
I have seen quite a few sites that has been changed from Plone to Wordpress that has dropped a lot (on goggle). These were typically schools/universities sites where 'someone' decided that all sites they had should use Wordpress. And they are sites where no-one spend time doing 'SEO work'.
Just noting that they are not only targeting Plone. I'm surprised they got to Plone via email. If you look at the list of "{} to WordPress" under the Migrations menu on their site, Plone is not even listed.
Yes legal but nonetheless slimy business practices.
I tend to agree that the best response is to tell our story. However, I also believe that the response needs to be as aggressive as the attack. That means developing a response and sharing it with plone site admins so that they have something to go to when their users come to them with the spam mails. (One of my users got one this morning.)
We've got the beginnings of such a response in this thread.
Another possible avenue is to go to the Wordpress community and ask them if this is the way they want do business. It could be private or it could be on Twitter. Get some pressure going from the other side. The point here is not to argue the baseless assertions in the message - that won't get us anywhere. We should argue that spamming your competitors' users is not an acceptable business practice for a responsible CMS provider. The WP developers I know wouldn't be comfortable with this or with being seen doing it.
So, our entire office got spammed by them today. As it's my day off, hadn't seen it before one colleague in our (non-technically focused) NGO replied to them:
Hi Alina,
Thans for reaching out. However, we simply love Plone. It has a good security system and seems almost immune against casual attacks. I don't see why we would change this gem of sheer genius against a cookiecutter CMS.
I got the first mail a week ago and the follow-up yesterday and Timo pointed me here, because I was wondering the same thing. Unfortunately, it's a company from the U.S., but nevertheless my reply was probably more European-style, i.e. not quite as friendly as that of your Padawan…
Anyway, I won't reply to that mail, a waste of time.