Twenty Questions about Plone
Plone at a Glance
- Top 2% of all open source projects.
- 350+ core developers.
- 300+ solution providers.
- 72 countries.
- Developed since 2001.
- Available in 40+ languages.
- Best security track record of any major CMS.
- Introduction
- References
- Features
- 4. Is Plone search engine friendly?
- 5. Does Plone support versioning?
- 6. Does Plone support multi-languages?
- 7. Does Plone support visitors with disabilities?
- User-experience
- Enterprise-Ready
- Integration
- Moving to Plone
- Competitive
- 18. How does Plone compare with Sharepoint, Drupal, Alfresco and Joomla?
- 19. How does Plone compare to other frameworks like Django?
- Professional Help
- Plone Foundation
Introduction
What is Plone?
Plone is a powerful and flexible, enterprise-quality content management system that is easy for devel- opers to download and install and easy for end-users to use. Plone lets non-technical people create and maintain website content using only a web browser. Plone offers a rich set of capabilities for public websites, private intranets and collaborative workspaces. Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with over 350 core developers and 300 solution providers in more than 70 countries. Plone has been actively developed since 2001, is available in more than 40 languages, and has the best security track record of any major CMS. Plone’s codebase and intellectual property is owned by the Plone Foundation, a non-profit 501c3 organization which can receive donations tax-free (at least in the US).
What is a Content Management System?
A Content Management System (CMS) allows users to create, manage and publish content to a website without requiring a high level of technical skill. As websites have grown larger and more complex, CMSes like Plone have become increasingly popular, since they provide an easy way for people to create and edit content in a consistent, secure and manage- able fashion. CMSes also enable website visitors to interact with content and each other by contributing comments, ratings, submitting forms and more. Using a CMS is critical to the success and long term maintainability of almost any website or intranet.
References
Who is using Plone?
Thousands of organizations use Plone to power their websites. Plone sites include large and small businesses, educational institutions, government agencies, nonprofits, science organizations, media outlets and publishers . Organizations as diverse as NASA, Oxfam, Amnesty International, Nokia, eBay, Novell, the FBI, Eli Lilly & Co., Harvard, the State Universities of Pennsylvania and Utah, as well as many governments round the world - such as the UK, Belgian, Brazilian, Australian and New Zealand - have chosen Plone to power both public and internal websites.
Features
Is Plone search engine friendly?
Very much so. Plone automatically encourages search engine optimization best practices such as keyword-rich URLs, human-readable descriptions, and crawlable sitemaps. Many sites that switch to Plone immediately notice a jump in their search engine rankings, crawl quality and relevance. For example, plone.org is one of the few websites that has a Google PageRank of 9 out of 10, the same as major sites like those of IBM and Microsoft. And if you want to improve on these out-of-the-box results, a number of products for optimizing search are available for free in the Plone products directory. You can also enhance your site’s built-in search with support for Solr and integration with Google’s Search appliance.
Does Plone support versioning?
Plone ships with a product that provides a detailed history of document versions. Users can track changes, compare versions and even revert to a previous edition of a document. Unlike many systems, where reversions may be complicated and reserved for admins only, Plone makes it easy for end-users to manage versions themselves through a very intuitive interface
Does Plone support multi-languages?
Plone has been translated into more than forty languages. Plone can manage content in multiple languages using LinguaPlone, a free add-on product. LinguaPlone gives content contributors with a simple side-by-side interface to enter content in multiple languages without duplicating their site structure.
User-experience
How do I edit/upload my content using Plone?
Users can edit and upload content to their Plone site from any computer using only a web browser. Users simply log into their site to edit existing pages, add new sections, remove old content, upload new videos, and do so using a simple web-based editor similar to a word processor. Plone’s edit-in-place strategy means user don’t have to learn a separate administrative interface in order to add and edit content - making training shorter and the learning curve much more manageable.
Does Plone support content tagging?
Plone supports keyword tagging out-of-the-box in both a freeform mode where users create their own tags, and a shared vocabulary mode where users can choose from pre-defined tags for their content. Content tagging can be very powerful when coupled with Plone’s collections, which are saved searches with almost limitless parameters. Collections allow tagged content to be easily aggregated, and pages generated on demand, based on those tags and other criteria, such as who created the content, or even terms that appear in the content. Since Plone can generate RSS feeds from collections, site users can easily find out when new tagged content is added.
Enterprise-Ready
How scalable is Plone
Plone is appropriate for very small websites and very large ones. Plone has powerful built-in caching features that can be configured to optimize site performance. In addition, Plone site administrators often use web accelerators such as Squid and Varnish to boost site speed. Thanks to its use of Zope, Plone has outstanding clustering capabilities, which allows a website to be split over multiple servers to handle high traffic.
Is Plone secure?
Plone offers superior security without sacrificing power or extensibility. As an open source product, a large number of developers frequently scrutinize the code for any potential security issues. This proactive approach is better than the wait-and-see approach in proprietary software that relies on keeping security issues a secret instead of resolving them outright.
Plone has demonstrated that this approach works. The only security issues discovered in Plone in the last 4 years were discovered by internal audits and patches made available to resolve the issues before they were ever known to the public. Built on Python and Zope, which are highly secure platforms, Plone has a technological edge that has helped it attain the best security track record of any major CMS (Source: CVE).
Because of its object-oriented backend, Plone isn’t vulnerable to SQL Injection attacks, which are one of the most common security problems that affect PHP/MySQL-based systems. Plone’s flexible ACL system for user permissions also helps ensure that users only see the content that they’re supposed to. In fact, security is a major reason why many CMS users are switching to Plone.
Integration
Does Plone integrate with Salesforce?
Plone’s large presence in non-profits and education meant developing a strong integration with Salesforce was essential. A variety of integrations are available, as well as many add-on to help your Plone content become better citizens with your Salesforce back-end systems. We have connectors directly into the Salesforce API, the ability to use Salesforce to authenticate users in Plone so you don’t have to maintain two user directories, form connectors, event registration systems, Paypal connectivity - even a tool to run advocacy campaigns from your Plone site using Salesforce for petitions and letter generation.
What databases does Plone integrate with?
Plone comes with a reliable, secure, easy-to- administer object database backend known as the ZODB (Zope Object Database). In addition, Plone can easily connect to data stored in Active Directory, LDAP, Salesforce.com, SQL databases, and more. A free Plone add-on, RelStorage, also allows enterprises with investments in Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL to store the data driving their Plone site in their existing infrastructure to be able to make use of familiar tools, clustering and failover solutions.
Does Plone have an Open API?
Absolutely. All you have to do is go to plone.org to access full documentation, tutorials and the source code of Plone to find out for yourself.
Moving to Plone
How much does Plone cost?
Plone is open source software distributed under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is free to download, use, customize and share. With no licensing fees, Plone lets users spend their resources on customizing the software to meet their specific needs, creating content, site branding and maintenance. Even after factoring in the cost of engaging consultants, the total cost of ownership for implementing a Plone solution will often be significantly less than propriety solutions such as Sharepoint or Vignette, which carry steep licensing fees. For organisations which do not have the in-house resources to deploy Plone, professional assistance and commercial support are available from over 300 Plone consulting firms located around the world. Many are listed at plone.org .
How does Plone work with my existing infrastructure?
Plone integrates with most authentication systems - including LDAP, Active Directory and many others. Its strong presence in education and government has resulted in many integrations, including third-party enterprise search engines such as Solr and Google Appliance. Plone functions seamlessly in diverse computing environments instead of expecting everything else to switch to its protocols. Since Plone is completely open source, it puts up no barriers when it comes to interfacing with other systems.
What do I need to host my Plone site?
Plone can run on Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD and Solaris. It offers a straightforward installation process to get a website up and running in no time. For organizations who would rather have someone host their website or manage their servers, over 150 hosting providers are listed at plone.org .
Competitive
How does Plone compare with Sharepoint, Drupal, Alfresco and Joomla?
Plone is a true CMS with built-in publication workflow and document management features, unlike other systems such as Sharepoint or Alfresco, which are primarily document management systems with limited web functionality. This makes Plone ideal for intranets and extranets. Plone can be customized and extended to meet the specific needs of an organization in terms of site structure, content types, workflow rules, etc. Not all CMSes offer the same level of flexibility. Because it is built on top of Python and Zope, Plone is very secure, which is a reason why many switch from Joomla and Drupal to Plone. Plone is 100% open source, so released, stable versions can be downloaded for free. There is no need to purchase a per-server or per-user license to get commercial support, as is the case with Alfresco or Sharepoint.
How does Plone compare to other frameworks like Django?
The Django framework is more comparable to the application server Zope that powers Plone. Both Django and Zope are Python-based, and offer a development environment and tools to build web applications like content management systems. In comparison, Plone is a full-blown CMS out-of-the-box that can be extended to match business requirements.
Professional Help
Is professional support and maintenance available?
Plone is supported by a global network of over 300 solution providers in more than 50 countries offer- ing development, integration, consulting, hosting, training, support and maintenance services. A list of Plone providers and consultants can be found at plone.org/providers .
Address
Plone Foundation
PO Box 344
Fortville, IN 46040 - USA
Email: board@plone.org
Phone: +1 (302) 397-2132
URL: plone.org
Twitter: #plone
IRC: #plone channel on Freenode
Download brochure Plone Foundation version as PDF
Credits
This brochure is licensed by Six Feet Up, Inc. under the Creative Commons Attribute-Share Alike 3.0 License. Find out more at www.sixfeetup.com/swag. The Plone name and the Plone logo are registered trademarks of the Plone Foundation. All other trademarks and brand names used herein are acknowledged as the property of their respective owners.