I recently gave a small introductory talk about Plone at the CONSOL (National Free Software Congress) here in México. The aim was to introduce new developers to Plone.
There were about a couple dozen students present, most of them quite familiar with Drupal or Joomla. They barely had heard about Plone or Python. No one had actually installed Plone at all.
The talk went reasonably well, but I was disappointed in that no one asked a question at the end. A couple of days later, however, one of the students contacted me by email to ask advice on how to install Plone.
He was specially interested in finding out how to upload what he did on his machine to a cheap hosting service shared by him and some friends. You see, with the poor economic situation for many students of state universities in México, the pooling of resources with other friends to have a web development testbed shows a lot of initiative. Even as I was writing to him that he just can't use Plone on that kind of hosting environment, I knew that would be the last of his experiences with Plone.
Of course, customers will always be able to use a real hosting solution for their projects, but new developers sometimes won't. In some countries, like México, this can have an impact in the adoption of Plone, since customers will be scared of going with it and then not finding any developers to maintain and extend their sites.
Now, I don't think that the solution is to try to make Plone run in cheap hosting environments. The effort is just not worth it. What could be done, a thing which would help Plone adoption at all levels, is to pursuit Martin Aspeli's vision of the Big Green Button that turns a Plone site into a static (or even potentially dynamic) version of itself that can be hosted with one of those $5 a month providers.
I have been looking at Entransit, from Enfold Systems, and I think it can do most of what Martin describes on his blog post. However, Entransit's out of the box experience is, according to Alan Runyan, very limited and just a small glimpse of what is possible with it.
Entransit also has little documentation and very few mentions on plone.org, but that could change fast, since it has been tagged as a possibility for delivering Plone content on the 4.0 release notes.
I am currently testing Entransit for a client's project. I'll let you know how it goes.
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