After installing Alfresco and admittedly suffering a few hiccups with it I seem to be making enough progress that I also decided to investigate Liferay as an alternative to Plone as our intranet portal and internal information site.

There are some areas that Plone really does well such as the content type handling and content workflow. But lack of documentation in other areas has left me pulling my hair out at times, such as ldap user and group integration with openldap and active directory, debugging modules and some new gotcha each time something is updated in a buildout.

Liferay has also had a steep learning curve, but I found it no where as bad as Plone. No messing in the ZMI for setting up ldap auth, changing database backends or setting portal defaults. Just one config file. I have found the speed surprising compared to Plone on the same hardware too. With java webapps I have tried in the past I have been left with the impression of them being bloated, memory hungry and slow. But I am slowly coming around thanks to Alfresco and Liferay. (more…)