Skyward 's Public Library

However, of the three tools here, Plone is the most robust and proven application, with implementations in major institutions and organizations world wide. It offers powerful functionality and customization features, while still providing strong ease-of-use so that non-technical staff can be easily trained in how to update content once the site has been setup. Like Drupal, it provides standards-compliant, accessible pages out of the box, and strong support for administrative workflow.

Plone’s developer community strongly emphasizes software quality and reliability – and has built thousands of automated “unit tests” to help demonstrate that it continues to function as intended even as it rapidly evolves. Plone also excels at more complex content management tasks such as versioning (the CMS equivalent of Word’s “Track Changes” feature), internationalization/multilingual content, permissioning, and custom workflows.

Plone has a regular release schedule: its next major release is scheduled for March, 2007, and the one after that is scheduled for October, 2007. The March release is focused on out-of-the-box usability, which should make it even easier for web developers to give content editors exactly what their site’s visitors want.

Plone is rarely used by hobbyist web developers because its barriers to entry for small projects are higher than those for Joomla or Drupal:

• It requires a more unusual, and thus typically more expensive, hosting environment.
• The learning curve for understanding how to create and tailor a new site is steeper than with other tools. Configuration is done in a number of different layers in the system, requiring a fair amount of understanding of Plone’s structure in order to setup a basic site, though documentation, books, and training classes are widely available.
• It is written in Python, which is a powerful but less commonly used language than PHP. While many highly skilled programmers prefer Python, it is likely to be more difficult to find a Python programmer to extend Plone— if extension should be needed—than a PHP programmer to extend Drupal or Joomla.

Plone

URL: www.plone.org

Marquee nonprofit clients:

Creative Commons
Oxfam America
Church of England

Plone is the product of careful, well planned programming. It provides a powerful, mature platform for complex, world-class applications, combined with strong ease-of-use for the content editors responsible for maintaining sites on a day to day basis. However, the learning curve for web developers responsible for creating a site is substantial, and there are special hosting requirements. Plone can be a great choice for meeting sophisticated website needs, but may not be the best one for someone with no Plone experience who is looking to get a straightforward site set up quickly.

Drupal, like Joomla, will work fine in a shared hosting environment. Also, like Joomla, it is fairly easy to get started—if you are technically savvy, you may be able to install Drupal yourself and begin customizing it. It likely will not be quite as easy to get a simple Drupal site set up as it is to get a simple Joomla site set up (compare Joomla’s installation guide to Drupal’s or the website interface for Joomla’s extensions with Drupal’s modules), but an experienced web developer should not have much trouble with either.

Drupal offers extensive and powerful tools for content editors or web developers to create websites without having to delve into the code, and serves standards-compliant, accessible pages out of the box. Its native workflow makes life easier for content editors who require mutli-level approval processes. Those looking to build complex custom applications, though, may find that Drupal, in comparison with Plone has not yet been as widely deployed and proven in mission-critical applications and large institutions.

Drupal has a pragmatic and integrated approach to functions that are not core to a CMS, such as email newsletter and online donation functionalities. While Joomla and Plone emphasize a “best-of-breed” approach, which involves integrating other specialist tools (for instance, Democracy in Action or Salesforce), Drupal offers deeply integrated (but often less powerful) plug-ins for many of these tasks. The CivicSpace distribution of Drupal provides a set of nonprofit-specific add-ons that address a number of common requirements. This project takes advantage of Drupal’s full integration with CiviCRM.

Joomla is designed to work just fine in basic shared hosting environments (the least expensive, most common web hosting package). Its installer looks much like the simple installers used for common desktop software, and the administrative interface that content editors use looks much like a desktop program as well. There are few barriers to entry with Joomla, which means it should not take a web developer much time to get you up and running, and if you’re technically savvy you may be able to do it yourself.

If you need to extend Joomla in a way not covered by its extensions—which happen to be beautifully documented and easy to find at extensions.joomla.org—you should not have to pay too much for a programmer, because Joomla is written in PHP, a widely-used general-purpose scripting language that is especially suited for Web development.

As is usually true, this ease of getting started comes with a tradeoff. Joomla can be a great choice to build a sophisticated website with hundreds of pages, solid navigation, and common content types such as news items or events. However, it has limited out-of- the box functionality for dealing with sophisticated dynamic content structures. For instance, the site navigation is limited to no more than two levels of hierarchy, and you can only link one page to another (for a “you might also be interested in” type of structure) based on free-form page tags, rather than more rigorous metadata and rules.

Drupal

URL: www.drupal.org

Marquee nonprofit clients:

American Cancer Society’s Relay for Life
Participate.net
Science Buzz

Drupal walks the line between power and ease of getting started. Like Joomla, it is built in PHP, can be hosted in a basic shared hosting environment, and provides a number of tools to allow non-techies to setup a website. In general, it requires more of a learning curve than Joomla, but offers more functionality for sophisticated websites out-of-the-box as well as a richer platform for programmers to extend. One of Drupal’s strengths is its wide variety of a nonprofit-centric plug-ins, such as event registration, email newsletter and online donation functionality.

Joomla

URL: www.joomla.org

Marquee nonprofit clients:

Al Gore’s website
Women's Edge Coalition
United Nations Regional Information Centre

Joomla strives for power in simplicity. Its programmers believe that anyone with a bit of technical know-how should have no problem setting up and maintaining a website. They have created a tool that is friendly, comparatively easy to get started with, and prioritizes ease of use.

Every website needs up-to-date content, intuitive navigation, and a great design. And every site administrator wants to be able to get a website up quickly, make changes easily, and add new content with a minimum of effort. That’s where a Content Management System (CMS) comes in. A CMS does three things:

1. Makes it easier to get your website up and running – once you’ve designed exactly what will best serve your site visitors, of course;
2. Promotes good website practices; and
3. Allows your non-technical staff members to easily make site updates.

You can do all of this without a CMS, just as you can stay in touch with people without using email. But like email, a CMS can make your life a lot easier.

A Common Set of Core Features

These tools have perhaps more similarities than differences. All are useful, sophisticated content management systems that will support most of the tasks that your content editors and your site visitors care about. They can:

• Help you set up a useful site structure and navigations system
• Allow non-technical content editors to update content, add new pages or change navigation menu items
• Support a completely configurable graphic design—there is no reason for your site visitors to know what CMS you are using, or even that you’re using one at all
• Facilitate internal work sharing by allowing some staff members to update only one set of things and other staff members to update others
• Automatically pick the appropriate content items to show site visitors based on rules—for instance, your home page could automatically display only the four most recent news stories or the events you have upcoming over the next four weeks
• Provide accessible sites, search engine optimization and human readable URLs
• Offer lots of plug-ins to support a wide range of common needs—and plenty of not so common needs as well
• Allow a good programmer to modify the website and CMS so that it does exactly what you want it to do
• Answer your questions, provide updates, and supply plug-ins through a strong user and developer community

But there are certainly differences between the tools. Let’s delve into each CMS in more detail.

De sorte que tout d’abord, vous voyez, nous commençons par, lentement, vous voyez, par simplement être spacieux, et permettre à toutes nos pensées et nos émotions de se déposer dans le silence, dans la paix, dans la tranquillité. Le corps immobile, la parole silencieuse, l’esprit en paix. Comme vous laissez les choses se déposer, comme l’esprit se dépose, la confusion se dissout. Quelquefois même, la négativité est désamorcée. D’une certaine façon, c’est le plus grand désarmement. C’est le désarmement du mal envers nous-mêmes. Parfois, n’avez-vous pas remarqué, nous avons ce nœud ? Quelquefois, un nœud émotionnel. Nous avons besoin de desserrer ce nœud, cette douleur, la frustration, la colère, le speed, la stupidité aussi.

Et juste tranquillement, juste tranquillement, juste en étant. Tranquillement. C’est très naturel ! Très naturel ! Rien d’anormal à cela. Très naturel. En fait, dans les enseignements, il est dit que le plus haut niveau, par exemple la nature de l’esprit, est parfois appelé l’esprit ordinaire. Pourquoi ? Parce que la sagesse est ordinaire. C’est la confusion qui est extraordinaire. L’illusion est extraordinaire. Et aussi quand vous avez des illusions, vous n’êtes pas particulièrement heureux ! Quand nous sommes dans la paix de notre nature, il y a un sentiment d’une immense bonté, et la paix, et la félicité qui est parfois au-delà de toute imagination. Vraiment. Cette sorte de paix que vous pouvez atteindre sans avoir recours à quoique ce soit. Tout est à l’intérieur de nous-mêmes ! Dans notre nature. Le problème avec nous, c’est que, parfois, nous sommes tellement aveugles. Nous ne réalisons pas ce que nous avons. Et nous cherchons toujours à l’extérieur de nous-mêmes. Tout le temps, c’est à l’intérieur de nous-mêmes. C’est clair ?

Donc vraiment, tranquillement, vous voy

Dans rigpa, il n’y a pas de saisie

Quelquefois, dans les moments (un claquement de doigts !) où l’esprit est capable d’être libre de la saisie, cela libère cette saisie. Nous pouvons l’expérimenter en un moment, l’esprit peut vraiment être comme cela. Mais, à un autre moment, quand vous entrez en méditation. Particulièrement dans les enseignements Dzogchen, qui sont les enseignements les plus élevés, cela parle de l’esprit, quand vous êtes dans l’état de l’esprit, vous êtes comme cela. Quand vous êtes dans l’état de rigpa, qui est la conscience pure essentielle de notre véritable être, alors il n’y a pas d’attachement. C’est clair ? De quoi devons-nous nous libérer, de la saisie, qui est la cause de toute notre souffrance.

Tout le problème avec l’esprit, c’est la saisie, par insécurité, par ignorance
>
>

Mais, pas collant. Tout le problème, la chose avec... notre perception. Toujours. C’est le mot tibétain ordinaire " sem ". Le mot ordinaire pour l’esprit, c’est " sem ". " Sem " est comme cela... toujours. Toujours, comme cela, vous voyez ? Comme cela. Toujours en train de saisir. Il ne peut pas être simplement ! Il doit toujours saisir. Et cette saisie vient. D’où vient cette saisie ? La saisie est l’insécurité fondamentale. D’où vient cette insécurité ? D’où vient l’insécurité fondamentale ? De ne pas savoir qui nous sommes ! Parce que dans la connaissance de notre vrai moi, il y a la liberté, et la sécurité, en conséquence, pas de saisi
>e.
>