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An article was recently published comparing the usability of Joomla with Wordpress for simple tasks. The article argues that whilst Wordpress is not necessarily as powerful as Joomla, it does many of the simple, common tasks that one might want a CMS for and does them in a much simpler, easier manner.

So just for completeness and to see how Plone stacks up doing the same things I'm going to present how Plone fares doing the exact same tasks in that original article. One aspect that Plone has always been really hot on is usability and accessibility. Before some of these other CMSes were even born, Plone had access keys, tab ordering, and a pretty strict concept of what functions go where in the UI. Back in 2004, at the Plone Snow Sprint in Austria, we had a woman from the Austrian Institute of the Blind come in to test out Plone. She was not only just navigating the site with text to speech software and a braille reader, but she was actually authoring and workflowing content! To make it even more impressive, she spoke no English, and was using Plone's amazing internationalisation features so the the user interface was all in German.

So, back to the task at hand, how does Plone compare to Wordpress and Joomla for simple tasks then?

Example 1: Create a blog-post with an image

1. From the 'Add new...' drop down menu select 'News Item' (or 'Blog entry' if you've installed Scrawl, or one of the Plone blogging tools)
2. Enter the Title, Body Text (and description if you want one)
3. Click on the 'Browse' button next to the image field and upload your image (also give it a caption if you want)
4. Click save
5. Select 'Publish' from the 'State...' drop down menu

Example 2: Create a static page accessible from the menu

1. Navigate to where you want the page to appear
2. From the 'Add new...' drop down menu select 'Page'
3. Enter the Title, Body Text (and description if you want one)
4. Click save
5. Select 'Publish' from the 'State...' drop down menu

Plone will automatically add the page to the Navigation for you. If you don't want it to show up in the navigation, you simply click on the 'Setting' tab at the top and check the 'Exclude from Navigation' checkbox.

You might have noticed something about the two screenshots and list of steps... yes, they are virtually identical. That is one aspect Plone is very strong on -- Consistency. Virtually all Plone content types are added and edited in the same manner. This leads to very short training times needed to get people up and running on the site.

Since by default Plone's editing is done 'in-line' ie. you are editing in the same interface as the public will see the site, it is very easy for new people using Plone to understand where there content is going to show up. Of course that is not for everyone, and you can easily split the process and have a public site and a separate admin site (at different URLs) if you want to really heavily brand the public site and want to have the editing separately. As an example:

So where does this put Plone with respect to Joomla and Wordpress? I would say if you just want a blog, then Wordpress might be the best for you, but if you are looking for something much more powerful with the ability to integrate with many different systems, with fine grained role-based authorisation, workflow, etc yet still retain a very simple UI for end users, then Plone might be the tool for the job.