Plone

Passion from every point of view

Editors love the integration of custom content types and new tools such as drag-and-drop and batch operations, for faster content creation and editing.

Designers love the new editing toolbar that separates theme from function and the new theming control panel with visual mapping, cache control, preview, built in help, and LESS support.

Integrators love the included training manual. With its up-to-date screenshots and recommendations for theming, developing, deploying, and editing, Plone makes it easy to get sites up and running faster than ever before.

Developers love how the Plone REST API allows them to use Plone in a headless mode and create new outstanding frontends with Angular and React JS toolkits

Site visitors from around the world love the multilingual enhancements that set fallback languages and use translation APIs to help translate content.

Extensibility

Plone is built to perform immediately. It can be installed by following the recipes to deploy Plone in the cloud but there are also several installers avaliable. Out of the box, the CMS provides content search and retrieval services – integration capability – digital asset, document, and web content management – backup and recovery – localization – caching – system security, and replication.

Customize and enhance – Plone has add-ons to enhance document and content storage, content delivery, forms processing, social sharing, personalization, and integrate with other systems. Custom add-ons may be integrated as well.

Authentication and single sign on – Plone integrates with LDAP, Active Directory, OpenID, Shibboleth, CAS, Kerberos and many other authentication systems.

Search capability – Live search includes Word documents and PDF files. Supercharge search with add-ons for Google Search Appliance, Apache Solr, and Elasticsearch.

Designer friendly – Powered by Diazo, Plone’s theming engine incorporates existing brands. Designers can focus on their essential tasks instead of fighting the CMS.

APIs – Plone connects with specialized applications and standard enterprise systems like CRMs, Salesforce, and Oracle and integrates with web servers, SQL and NoSQL databases, continuous integration tools, web services, and frameworks. Plone’s REST API allows it to function as a headless CMS for modern JavaScript clients and apps.

Object-oriented database – Plone features a built-in transactional NoSQL, ACID-compliant object database. Program code and content are stored transparently as objects, with high levels of data security. Tools for incremental backups and other administrative tasks are also core parts of Plone.

Industrial-strength security – The creativity and speed of open source blended with a Python back-end yields superior security without sacrificing power or extensibility. The extremely low numbers of vulnerabilities found in Python and Plone demonstrate the maturity of Plone’s security and development processes. Plone’s test coverage and continuous integration testing combined with a fine-grained security model make it a smart choice for security-conscious environments.

Flexible Workflows

The life cycle of content (from initial creation to publication and storage) is managed with version control, document management, digital asset management, and search. Digital rights and process management tools such as role and group permissions, editorial flow, and content collaboration are 100% customizable.

What is changed is never lost with Plone’s version control. Content locking avoids cross-editing conflicts. The content history allows for reverting to previous versions. Plone warns editors if they are about to delete internally linked items. When editors move items, Plone forwards visitors to the new location.

Plone handles repetitive tasks. Content Rules can be used to automatically publish, move content, send notifications, and more.

Usability

Plone is available in 65 localizations, including Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and even right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew. Out of the box, Plone creates multilingual websites.

Plone is WCAG 2.0 compliant and meets or exceeds W3C’s WAI-AA and the U.S. Government Section 508 standards for sight and motor impaired individuals. Plone’s JavaScript has fallback modes to work in any browser.

Weaknesses

Because Plone is targeted at the enterprise market where corporate identity is always implemented on the CMS, there are not a lot of themes for free download and install.

The community is objective about Plone’s strengths and capabilities and will not recommend Plone for things it is not suited for. As a result, Plone integrates well with systems that provide those capabilities. As Plone is targeted at the enterprise market, it may be overkill to install in order to create just a blog, for example.

And it is not widely available for cheap hosting on domain name providers like GoDaddy.com (most mass providers do not support Python). However, Plone is commonly hosted on cloud providers like Amazon Web Services, Rackspace, and Linode.

Documentation and Support

Plone is 100% Open Source, and owes its success and long-term stability to the diverse and dedicated members of its community. In that community you’ll find expertise on content and content management, and a culture dedicated to sharing those skills and talents.

Everything about Plone can be found in the documentation, in GitHub repositories, in the Plone community forums, chat rooms, and mailing lists. The official Plone documentation is created and maintained by the community for content contributors, developers, site administrators, and designers. Additional support is provided by numerous service providers.

The annual Plone conference is the place to meet the entire community.