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What is Plone?

by admin last modified 2008-02-10 22:25

Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.


Easy to get started


Batteries Included

Supports Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, FreeBSD, Solaris. The installers get you up and running within minutes. No complex set-up procedures.

Speaks Your Language

Available in over 35 languages, Plone was designed from the ground up for multilingual content management. It handles Chinese, Japanese, and even right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew with ease.

Nicest Kid on the Block

The Plone Team includes leading usability experts who have made Plone easy and productive to work with.

Everybody Loves Plone

“An eWeek Labs Analyst's Choice award winner, this open-source product is one of the best solutions — period — for company portals and intranets”
eWeek, April 2006 issue


User Friendly


Gets Out of Your Way and Lets You Write

Plone includes a powerful, rich editor with text formatting, image and link insertion abilities. If you're used to working with an office suite, you'll feel right at home.

Instant, Full-text Searching

All content is searchable immediately; even Word documents and PDF files. LiveSearch puts it all at your fingertips. Try the search box on this site for a demo.

Built-in Image Resizing

Upload an image, and it's automatically rescaled to a variety of sizes, ready to be used in your content. No Photoshop needed.

Look Your Best

Plone is easy to theme. It can seamlessly blend with your existing look, or allow you to create a bold new style that’s all your own.



Powerful


Powerful Workflow Engine

Make your business processes part of the document workflow — complemented by fool-proof security management.

Speed and Scalability

Comes out-of-the-box with clustering capability and intelligent caching proxy integration.

Security and Flexibility

Fine-grained role-based security model secures your content. Plone's sandbox architecture ensures that even if your system should be compromised, intruders will not have access to your server or your network.

Syndicate and Aggregate

Smart folders and smart updates. Plone automatically produces RSS feeds from folders, search results and more — the ideal way of staying on top of the information explosion and customize information delivery.



Standards compliant


Accessibility Compliant

Meets or exceeds U.S. Government Section 508 and W3C's WAI-AA standards for sight and motor impaired individuals. All Javascript usage comes with fallback modes that work in any web browser.

Outstanding Search Engine Visibility

100% valid XHTML and CSS keeps search engines and web browsers happy. Plone sites are consistently ranked well in Google search results.

Plays Well with Others

LDAP, SQL, SOAP, Web Services (WSDL) and WebDAV — Plone works with them all.

Pluggable Authentication

Easy integration with LDAP, Active Directory and SQL databases. You name it, Plone talks to it.


Supported


World-class Support

Whether you use the online documentation, mailing lists and chat rooms — or the services of the hundreds of companies around the world that support Plone — you're never alone.

Open Source, Open Standards

Plone is available under the same open source license as Linux, and uses the open source Python programming language and Zope application server. This avoids vendor lock-in, expensive licenses, and gives you a predictable future — and the freedom to innovate.

Great Documentation, in Print and Online

Currently, there are five published books about Plone, which have been translated into German, Japanese and several other languages.

Innovative and Extensible

Hundreds of add-on products are available — forums, issue trackers, blogs and collaboration tools.


Mature


Protected and Mature

Plone has been around for over five years, and the nonprofit, community-governed Plone Foundation owns and protects all intellectual property and trademarks. Plone also has legal backing from the experts at Software Freedom Law Center.

In Good Company

Organizations as diverse as NASA, Oxfam, eBay, Trolltech, Nokia, Utah State University, Creative Commons and Wolford use Plone for content management. We'd love to welcome you to the Plone community.

Plone is Your Secret Weapon

Whether used for a company intranet or for a community web site, Plone delivers.



Technical overview

Plone is a content management framework that works hand-in-hand and sits on top of Zope, a widely-used Open Source web application server and development system. To use Plone, you don't need to learn anything about Zope; to develop new Plone content types, a small amount of Zope knowledge is helpful, and it is covered in the documentation.

Zope itself is written in Python, an easy-to-learn, widely-used and supported Open Source programming language. Python can be used to add new features to Plone, and used to understand or make changes to the way that Zope and Plone work.

By default, Plone stores its contents in Zope's built in transactional object database, the ZODB. There are products and techniques, however, to share information with other sources, such as relational databases, LDAP, filesystem files, etc.

Plone runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and many other platforms; double-click installers are available for Windows and Mac OS X, and RPM packages are available for Linux. For full information, see Download.

More information

  • The central place for Plone documentation is Documentation. This also details other sources of help, such as mailing lists and online discussion channels.
  • Additional information and case study articles on Plone can be found at in Plone Articles.
  • A list of sites running Plone is at Plone Sites.

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