Likelihood to Recommend The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.
Read full review Love the product and I really like how we use it for public sites. The only negative aspect is that it is just hard to find Tridion devs that understand the tool, grasp .net, react, and understand the blueprint, etc.
Read full review Pros Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management. Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on. Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy. Read full review Makes it easy to spin up a new site quickly Allows for numerous users to work on the same site without conflicting with each other's changes Allows you to unpublish changes or revert to old versions if you make a mistake Allows you to time publishing actions (for example, you can set it to happen overnight) Read full review Cons Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend. Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right. Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation). Read full review Tridion is complicated in enough ways that it makes it difficult to train new users. Therefore, we have to limit the number of people with access to the system since we have not yet implemented Workflow. When something goes wrong (items fail to publish, or there is unexpected behavior with components), there is little explanation provided that would point us in the right direction to troubleshoot. As a result, content Authors and Editors have to frequently ask for IT assistance. Read full review Likelihood to Renew I no longer use Plone because I got an internship in the web development field and my current place of employment uses their own content management system that they created. After getting to know other CMS's and similar software and comparing them to Plone, I would enjoy using Plone again in the future, but there are more complicated software that I'd like to learn as I progress in my field of study.
Read full review I am giving this a semi-high rating because we have already got Tridion up and running and we are still in the process of moving the sites over to Tridion. It is unlikely we will be moving things to a new CMS AGAIN in the near future as the cost to get Tridion was high.
Read full review Usability Compared to the amount of Plone sites, users and customizations we have in our organization, the amount of support requests and training needed is really small
Read full review The editor user interface is very user friendly and in-site editing makes simple updates fast and easy. The extensibility of Tridion is a big plus and the ability to add our own options into the default Tridion interface helps us integrate with external systems. Finally, the user permissions and security system helps us deploy it within our large organization.
Read full review Performance Plone is very intensive in its operations, and if not configured well it can be slow. However it is designed and built with speed in mind and with proper use of coding, templates and caching can perform extremely well under high loads. It is capable of scaling to very high load availability environments with no specific coding requirements.
Read full review Alternatives Considered Drupal : Plone is cheaper, so with
Drupal is more complex to reach the required ROI. However,
Drupal has a lower learning curve
WordPress : For our necessities it has a more expensive learning curve than plone.
Joomla , is easier to use. However, it have some issues on security and web content where Plone is much better
Read full review It is a nuclear missile compared to the other handguns and knives on the market today. But it also requires nuclear technicians and expertise that a handgun doesn't require. Do you need to decimate your competition and you have the investment capabilities necessary to put a nuclear missile into the sky? Then definitely do it. Especially if you need a very good multi-lingual blueprint provider like Tridion.
Read full review Return on Investment As a development company Plone allows us to provide complex web applications in a short amount of time. Plone is quite robust and reliable so when you customize some parts you do not risk to damage other parts. This is quite positive for a web development framework, Plone allows our clients to spread their activities among different employees improving the efficiency of content generation and management. Read full review SDL is a very complex system. Creating custom components by external vendors turned out to be expensive. The learning curve is very slow, so training takes a lot of time and cost. The revamped corporate site looks clean, modern, and is mobile-friendly. Read full review ScreenShots