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by Carlos de la Guardia.
Original Post: Eat your dogfood or use the right tool?
Feed Title: I blog therefore I am
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A recent post on Coderspiel mentions that Lucene does not use Lucene for indexing their own web site and goes on to criticize projects that don't use their own software on their sites. He asks:
"How is it that some fancy-pants framework is always the right tool for an abstract job and PHP is the right tool for a real job?"
He is mostly referring to Java projects under the Apache umbrella, but I think the question is interesting for the Python world too. Does a web application or project "lose points" if it doesn't use itself on its own site?
The Grok web framework has just launched a new web site, and there was some discussion on their mailing list about using Grok for this task, the dogfood approach, or "the right tool for the job". Ultimately, they settled on Plone, because they need CMS capabilities and Plone is, well, a CMS. Check out their site, I think it went well.
Speaking of Plone, they use Plone itself for their site too, though not the latest version. A prospective user can join the site easily and learn what Plone is all about while using it. In this case, the dogfood approach just works.
Zope, on the other hand, uses itself too (more precisely, a Frankenstein old Plone setup), but the results are far from appealing. For Zope, the dogfood approach seems counterproductive, though I would say that's not because of Zope itself.
Django seems to use "the right tool for the job" and not itself for their main site, but their showcase Django projects site uses Django. I should say that Django project related sites that I have seen are generally appealing regardless of the approach taken.
Pylons uses Confluence, a commercial wiki, and Turbogears, also sporting a nice looking site, uses moinmoin, at least for their documentation site (not sure what they use for the main site, but there's a chance it could be Turbogears itself).
Of course, how the site really looks is not dependent on the dogfood or right tool approaches, but the Zope case seems a reminder that if you are going to eat your own dogfood, you may want to spice it a little at least.
Overall, I cannot say I see a clear advantage for the dogfood approach. I think it has some value to show what you can do, but it all goes for nought if presented in the wrong way. Ultimately, the mission of a web site is to present the project, which can be accomplished fairly well without using it.
In the case of very specific technologies like Lucene, eating the dogfood may be more important, but as far as I can tell, it hasn't stopped or even slowed down adoption of the technology. Having access to a demo site can sometimes be useful for a developer, but easy to install packages and good documentation are really far more important.
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