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About Plone

Plone is a powerful, feature rich, enterprise class web content management system (CMS). It is an open source product with a vibrant developer, user, and consulting community from around the world.  Plone has been in widespread use since 2001, and has the best security track record of any CMS.

What Can Plone Do?

Plone's feature set out of the box includes:

  • a natural way of creating pages and folders, and of organizing site content
  • publication of calendar events and news items, including RSS feeds to share to other sites
  • built in site map, search engine, breadcrumbs, and navigation portlets
  • a sophisticated built in workflow engine that supports content review and approval processes
  • a powerful security model that lets an administrator control who has access to what, via groups, roles, and permissions
  • scaleability to support thousands of simultaneous users and millions of site visitors

 

What is Plone Used For?

Plone is deployed internationally for a wide range of uses, including:

  • government, schools, and universities
  • public information sites, including calendar event and news publication and RSS feeds
  • collaborative community sites, where members can create and share information
  • intranets for all types of organizations (educational institutions, government, corporations)
  • personal sites
  • online business processing ("workflow") sites

 

Who is Plone?

The Plone community includes content creators, managers, designers, technical writers, developers, system administrators, integrators, and consultants from around the world. Plone is one of the largest open source communities and projects in the world. Plone development is transparent and collaborative, with participatory processes that allow anyone to make suggestions, provide feedback, contribute code and documentation, or help lead initiatives.

The Plone Foundation is responsible for the protection of the Plone software, and application for membership in the Foundation is open to anyone who has made significant long term contributions to the Plone community and/or to the project.

 

Who Supports Plone?

In addition to official Plone teams, including those for security, development, testing, and documentation, our worldwide Plone community participates in Plone's ongoing development and support with modules ("products"); documentation; support on mailing lists, chat rooms, and stackoverflow.com. There is always someone in the Plone IRC chat room because our community spans every time zone!

Other initiatives representing and supporting Plone in specific sectors include PloneEdu.org and PloneGov.

There are well known commercial consulting organizations that help you design, develop, and host sophisticated Plone and Plone-based web systems.

 

Why Use Plone?

Scalability: Plone covers the entire spectrum of web sites, from small personal ones through mid-size departmental to enterprise organizational web sites.

Freedom: unlike proprietary commercial software, you have the right to examine and enhance the Plone code, and you have the right to you contract with the provider of your choice to assist you if you so choose.  You are not held hostage by any one vendor, and you will not be left holding the bag if the vendor chooses to end of life or fails to support the product your organization depends on!

Security: over the past three years, Plone's security team has issued less than a dozen security patches, while Drupal has had 232, Wordpress 127, and Joomla 404. Because Plone is written in Python and uses Zope, which has an impeccable track record going back over a decade, you won't be vulnerable to the countless attacks that plague Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, which are based on PHP and MySQL.

Functionality and extensibility: Plone is fully capable and feature rich out of the box, but if you can think of more features you need, someone has probably already made the module available...for free!  And you have the freedom to create a new module yourself or to find someone else to write it for you.

 

How Can I Learn More About Plone?

First, take a look at Plone.org but consider coming to Plone Symposium Midwest for demonstrations of Plone's wide range of applications, and an opportunity to learn first hand from the real people working with and contributing to Plone!