Roger Johansson writes about his experiences with Plone, reaching conclusions not dissimilar from my own. Basically, Plone is a great tool for a lot of reasons, with drawbacks that include a steep learning curve and lack of thorough documentation.

I have to congratulate Mr. Johansson on the site he built: it succeeds most admirably at looking nothing like a typical Plone site. Many sites built with Plone look the same, probably because of the difficulty of figuring out how to do anything else. But once you do, just look what can be done.

I am asked about content management systems quite a bit, unsurprisingly most often by people in higher education, and I keep coming back to Plone and Lenya as my primary recommendations. Plone has the advantage of being a cinch to get running: it ships with an installer that gets you going in minutes, even if it then takes a massive “eureka!” moment to grok well enough to use effectively. Lenya has no such advantage: first you need to get a servlet container like Tomcat running, then Cocoon, then at last Lenya. Not too bad if you’re a Java developer or familiar with Unix, but otherwise not exactly point-and-click. Still, as I am a Cocoon fan (and AxKit as well, which is kind of like Cocoon for mod_perl) and already convinced of what it can do for you, I do like Lenya.