Of course, my concern was more in terms of support issues and getting locked into a single vendor.

Well, their system worked, but the interface was clunky, bug reports were all but ignored and while it had a templating sytem, it was easier to pay them to create templates than to try to do it yourself--and it was setting on top of a fully F/OSS stack of apps and glue.  Well, fast-forward a year and a half when we have a number of F/OSS products in production use and I'm sitting down across from my boss in my annual review.

After going through my stuff, he asked for constructive criticism of his performance.  He's an old mainframe coder, so he is actually a great manager.  He still prefers to get his hands dirty, and while he doesn't really write code any more, he understands the process.  He also takes bullets for the team.  There really was very little to complain about.  So, as I was searching for something more than an ass-kissing, "you're doing great," my mind wondered back to our less than ideal CMS system.

I suggested that he made the wrong decision and that the one I had liked back then had progressed quite a bit and the consultants version had basically stood still and actually caused the very people we wanted to use it to avoid it.  My thoughts in suggesting this were along the lines of "pay more attention to my opinion next time."  Unfortunately, he is actually a good manager, so he said, "Great.  If you can get a site up and running, we'll switch over."

So, I'm not so much looking for advice on a system.  Though, if you disagree with my choice feel free to speak up.  I'm more looking for pointers and a solution to a specific problem.

What I've settled on is Plone.  I like the interface. I like the development progress.  I like the flexibility and extensibility.

However, I also like the PloneArticle add-on because it solves a number of requests that the current system makes very difficult.  However, I cannot get it running.

I'm starting with a base CentOS 4.1 system because our production server is RHEL based.  The only plone RPM available for it is an older DAG 2.0.4 based install that I think includes an even older ZOPE.

PloneArticle has some rather more recent pre-reqs.  I have successfully gotten a souce based ZOPE 2.7.5 with Plone 2.0.5.  However, the stock Plone 2.0.5 does not include Archetypes 1.3.1 or greater, nor does it have ATContentTypes at all.  And I've had real problems getting the pre-reqs for them to work.

ArcheTypes is a major reworking of the CMF Zope elements.  Plone is undergoing major re-writes to convert most of the Plone structure to actually be ArcheTypes based.  (I briefly tried Plone 2.1 alpha which has all the PloneArticle pre-reqs, but found that it was definitely alpha.)

I don't currently have access to the box I've been playing with, but my problem comes when trying to get the most recent PortalTransforms working.  Every time I try adding it, Zope fails to start.