# Ruby on Rails versus Zope/Plone

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-versus-zope-plone/90961>\
**Category:** Rails\
**Created:** [April 3, 2007, 12:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-versus-zope-plone/90961 "2007-04-03T12:49:30Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 2\
**Page:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![sgudibanda](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/a9adbd/32.png) [@sgudibanda](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/sgudibanda)\
**Post date:** [April 3, 2007, 12:49pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-versus-zope-plone/90961/1 "2007-04-03T12:49:30Z")

</div>

Hi,

I am a fresher to webapplication world. I am planning to build a website  
for my college with student profiles containing details necessary data.  
I see that the database is going to big , so a scalabale solution is  
necessary. And maintainenace is an important factor as well. fatures  
like blogs, forums, data acquistion forms need to be added.

Considering these things, can someone guide me what is better between  
RoR and Zope/Plone. Pros and Cons in them will be very helpful in making  
a decision.

Regards,  
Sandeep G

---

<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![sgudibanda](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/s/a9adbd/32.png) [@sgudibanda](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/sgudibanda)\
**Post date:** [April 3, 2007, 1:42pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/ruby-on-rails-versus-zope-plone/90961/2 "2007-04-03T13:42:37Z")

</div>

Sandeep G. wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am a fresher to webapplication world. I am planning to build a website  
> for my college with student profiles containing details necessary data.  
> I see that the database is going to big , so a scalabale solution is  
> necessary. And maintainenace is an important factor as well. fatures  
> like blogs, forums, data acquistion forms need to be added.
> 
> Considering these things, can someone guide me what is better between  
> RoR and Zope/Plone. Pros and Cons in them will be very helpful in making  
> a decision.
> 
> Regards,  
> Sandeep G

Plone is a very feature-rich content management system, but it doesn’t  
sound like it suits your needs, and managing large amounts of data is  
particularly troublesome, as it doesn’t sit on a relational database,  
you can use relational databases with it, but this is complicated and  
quite hacky. Plone is also extremely slow, there are lots of tricks to  
speed it up but this will take up more precious development time. The  
language its written in is Python, which is a good language to use and  
has a large community, if you are familiar with Python and you want to  
get off the ground quickly, then you should be looking at a framework  
called Django, its Python’s answer to Rails.

Personally though I would recommend Ruby on Rails, Ruby on its own is a  
brilliant language to learn. I wrote a lot of systems in Zope/Python  
previously, but I found the framework and the language very  
restrictive, and constantly found myself hacking to get simple things to  
work. Since I’ve moved to Ruby on Rails I am developing applications in  
days that took weeks in Zope/Python. I haven’t looked much at Django but  
nothing I have seen has made me even think of choosing it over Rails,  
the main factor is the language itself, Ruby is much more fun than  
Python.