With professional web tools like WordPress, a more application-development-friendly Drupal, and the distracted-by-shiny-things Joomla, it’s hard to imagine why anyone would even consider using Plone for their website.
Plone == Harder;
Pretentious programmer quotes aside, Plone is more difficult than WordPress to install, maintain, and develop for.
- Fewer commercial web hosts support the requirements for Plone than support the requirements for WordPress.
- Developers experienced in PHP, MySQL, and WordPress specifics are far easier to locate and hire than those knowing Python, Plone, and the layers in between.
But what about all those Plone advantages?
A few issues I discovered almost held water for Plone. Here’s the information you need to knock them down.
Plone is more secure than WordPress
This perception is out of date.
In 2008, the National Vulnerability Database showed Plone had fewer security issues than Joomla, Drupal, or our beloved WordPress.
That was 2008. Four years ago.
I don’t know (yet) about Joomla and Drupal, but WordPress releases significant core updates every 3 to 4 months, and promptly releases security updates in between. By contrast, Plone just recently stated they will release on a 6 month cycle. We’ll see how that works out for them. In the meantime, I hope all the layers Plone resides on top of remain secure.
Plone is faster and more scalable than WordPress
This benchmark was apples to oranges.
With the Plone 4 release in 2010, there was tough talk about Plone being “3 times faster than WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla.” The website speed benchmarks leading to these results, however, were using base installs of all systems with no caching add-ons.
I hate to accuse anyone of cheating but, well–that’s cheating. The ZODB database used by Plone is fundamentally different than the MySQL database WordPress uses. Among other things, ZODB provides performance enhancements that are only available to WordPress by adding a simple plugin to make use of various types of caching. By simply adding and configuring the W3 Total Cache plugin, I’m sure WordPress performance can stand its ground against Plone.
