Doing my yearly ritual of looking at Plone & Zope and making sure I still don’t grok them. Check.

In this year’s installment, I set up a little Plone site and actually got as far as creating a custom content type. I started down the road of thinking I would create the content type manually with code in Archetypes. Then I looked at tutorials and saw that it looked like it involved a lot of repetitive code and configuration voodoo. I ended up using ZopeSkel to create a really, really simple Archetypes content type, which actually didn’t take too long to figure out (to my pleasant surprise).

It still feels like too much work and it’s difficult to find good documentation on what’s the current recommended way to do things, because the recommended way of doing things seems to change every couple of years and there is a lot of old, outdated documentation out there. A search on Archetypes for instance yielded all kinds of pages referring to practices that seem to be outdated now, like manually creating the directory structure for an Archetypes product (i.e.: no ZopeSkel) and copying the product into the Zope 2 “Products” directory (which seems to be deprecated in favor of buildout)

In comparison, creating a model in Django is very simple, Pythonic, and well-documented.