Earlier this year I had been working on software upgrades to the Plone software it was running. The software upgrades were part of some goals I had in mind for the new site. First, I wanted a clean, more modern theme because my inverted black was getting old. Second, I was looking for my ultimate gallery software plug-in to display my photos.

Unfortunately I found neither.

To be fair, I had found a theme plug-in that was basically a template to be used as the base for creating your own theme. I knew that I could do it, but also knew that it was going to take time. For the photo gallery, I couldn't find exactly what I wanted, but knew that it was a combination of my old photo gallery (which didn't run on the current Plone) and two other gallery plug-ins I had found. I too could hack those items together, but that was going to take even more time.

Undaunted, I continued on.

The next step was the software upgrade which would give me the coolest and latest features of Plone. I started to download all of the software, read about the upgrade process, took copious notes, etc. I spent several weekends on the project before the time came to actually do the data migration and once I did I immediately ran into problems. Something about, well, I don't even remember exactly, but something about a text mimetype that was null or something. Suddenly the light at the end of my tunnel dimmed.

I was dishearted because I knew that to find a solution to the data issue was going to take even more time; time I didn't really want to spend. I didn't want to go down into the bowels of Zope or Plone to figure this one out. The theme was going to take time, the photo gallery was going to take a lot more, but this data problem could be the grand-daddy of all timesinks. So, I thought long and hard about other options. In the end I decided to drop Plone. I weighed a lot of factors in my decision: from the cost of hosting, to the flexibility in changing user interface, available themes, etc.

With the decision made, I scoured the Internet to find current applications which could do what I wanted. I boiled down my choices to two pieces of software: iWeb from Apple and RapidWeaver from Realmac. I decided on RapidWeaver.

The decision to switch to an application running on my desktop means that I can no longer edit my site anywhere in the world using a web browser, but I really never did anyway. A side benefit of switching is that my hosting fees will go down about 75% ! And, because the sites created by RapidWeaver are static and not dynamic, I can put them just about anywhere ... including a server residing at home.

So, I'm having fun learning RapidWeaver and seeing what kind of web site I can create with it. Pardon the dust.

Before I finish, I will say that I still respect Zope and Plone. I think that they are amazing pieces of software, but together they comprise a full content management system and it was a little overkill to run my small web site.