I've become rather disillusioned with the "wiki way". We've been using MoinMoin for maintaining the Nginx documentation, but we get an ever-increasing amount of spam. I know that Moin 1.6 adds some new features (such as captchas) to help prevent spam, but I consider these sort of techniques the equivalent of using SpamAssassin to prevent spam (an ever-escalating battle with no end in sight and the spammers always on the winning side).

Moin also has features (albeit horribly cumbersome) for reverting unwanted changes. The problem with these is that not only are they awkward and annoying to use, they allow spam to hit the web and sit there until someone notices and reverts it.

It's occurred to me that what's really needed is a built-in review process (i.e. workflow) for controlling what makes it to the front of the site. Plone has just this thing and seems like it would be a pretty ideal fit for us. Unfortunately Plone is... well, Plone. It seems to me that the only people who successfully use Plone are people who are paid to use Plone (they can spend all day tinkering).

The amount of workflow we'd need is actually fairly minimal: we'd need a few levels of control (anonymous, editor, publisher). New users (who have registered) can make changes as they please, but these changes will never see the light of day until a publisher approves those changes. This seems counter to maintaining a wiki-like set of documents, but we can address this by promoting people to publishers once they've established some small amount of credibility (i.e. they write anything legitimate).

It really does seem like Plone would be perfect here, and in fact, I installed Plone 3 in the hopes that the rumours of massive improvements I've been hearing for the last year or so are true. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to determine if Plone is really improved or not as it continues to suffer a dearth of documentation on the fundamentals. After installing Plone, I spent several hours on the Plone site, searching Google, etc trying to figure out how I might begin changing the design (I did manage to change the logo, but all that did was make the page look odd). The one bit of documentation I found warned that it wasn't updated for Plone 3. Worse, I found that there appear to be not one, but two ways to skin Plone 3 and while neither of them are well-documented, the recommended way wasn't discussed except as a footnote on the deprecated way.

Bottom line Plone guys: no documentation means no users. Seriously. If you want to know why TurboGears, Django, Pylons, roll-your-own are beating out Plone and Zope, look no further than your new user docs. They suck.