Back in August, the AI team consolidated a lot of our servers, to simplify management and to reduce cost.
One of the sites moved during that sprint was Plone.com, which is our marketing site. It is a small site that gives an overview of why someone should use Plone.
The idea behind Plone.com was to keep it separate from Plone.org, which is an old and sprawling site with lots of content that dives deep into the innards of Plone and the community but isn't geared toward an outsider who might be considering using Plone.
Plone.com was launched in 2015 after many attempts, and so was running version 4.3. To avoid blocking the server consolidation, the site was exported as static HTML, JS, and CSS, and served via nginx on a new server that also serves many other static exports of old Plone sites.
This week I finally started to update Plone.com content with new providers. The process required creating a new repo, https://github.com/plone/plone.com-static, and getting edit access on the server to deploy changes (this is a bit finicky for the time being).
Editing static HTML renewed my appreciation for having a real CMS! To insert a new provider, I had to edit many pages. The next/previous buttons that are part of Plone's folder functionality have to be edited. The keyword searches that take no effort in Plone create pages that have to be edited manually. Folder listing pages. Adding new keywords and "search pages" for them.
The plan for now is to upgrade to Plone 5.2 on Python 3, and to reuse the current theme; eventually we could go to Volto or Gatsby. Please let me know if you're interested in helping!