Plone

Easy to use content management

Lots of features out of the box

Excellent security

Flexible permission management

Flexible workflow system

Limitless possibilities to extend and customize, also through the web without programming skills

Free to use, open source

Helpful and welcoming community

Customizable content types

As a big and mature system it might take time to learn how to develop

Not as well known as some other CMSs

Not so easy to find external developers, if needed

Very powerful and configurable security and permissions. This makes it easy to develop private intranets, secure areas of a site or simply be confident that the site won't be hacked easily.

Configurable workflows allow us to develop custom workflow solutions for our clients without the need for complex programming.

Base CMS functionality meets the needs of the vast majority of our sites without the need for significant programming, a large number of mature add-on products help in this area too.

Excellent SEO capabilities such as clean URLs, automated sitemaps, built in metadata management ensure Plone sites rank very highly in search engines

Version control of all changes with a detailed history and the ability to roll back changes. This has saved me many times in the past.

Plone is one of the most secure CMS solutions available. Vulnerabilities are extremely rare and the development community is highly skilled and alert to issues that do arise.

As a CMS its hard to find a flaw in Plone. But it is a difficult platform to learn and develop in. The Zope framework is unusual in its structure and can take a long time to become familiar with. So the one significant downside of Plone is the effort required to gain solid technical expertise.

Rock-solid technology stack. The python/Zope/Plone stack is as solid as anything else out there.

Highly customizable TTW, if needed, via the Zope Management Interface, or Diazo XSL-transform theme design.

Good support from core developers, lots of solid add-ons which address just about any needs.

Amazingly customizable workflow, permissions and security management.

Error messages are often cryptic, rising up with a traceback from deep in the system.

It's perhaps hard to control this, since add-ons will always bring uncontrolled elements to bear.

Perhaps some way to better visualize the source of the problem? End users should never see a traceback.

TTW design options. In fact, Diazo based theming is remarkably powerful, and there are many tools for TTW design, but to better integrate this essential part of web development would make for a more useful end product.

Security management: Plone handles security pretty well out-of-the-box due to its Plone/Zope stack, also Plone doesn't use a SQL database so it's not vulnerable to injection.

It's easy to learn: Final users usually need only 1 single session to learn how to use a Plone powered website and manage it's content. There isn't a different back-end, content can be edited from the front-end.

Speed: Plone is memory efficient, and plays well with caching systems like Varnish.

Learning curve for developers: Plone is not a simple solution, it's complex and it needs some serious learning time to start being really productive and being able to make a good use of the tool.

Plone requires a dedicated server and some deep knowledge to build and mantain your projects.

It's difficult to find Plone expertise and consulting services in some countries.

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.

Plone development is hard to learn. Plone is on the right track to make simple development more easy, but is far from its goal.

Documentation is always a problem. This is due to Plone's complexity.

There are only few providers capable of running Plone-websites.

Plone is not very well known to the public, making it harder to sell.

Websites - with Plone you can give the complete management of the website to editors who don't have to be expert in web development. Thus, they can even create complex web application without coding.

Intranets - Plone has a strong content distribution system where anyone can only see and search what is reserved to him. It can be used to create workgroups and can handle many different types of content.

Collaboration portals - Plone can be easily integrated with any user base and provides natively tools that let people to collaborate together both within organization and outside.

Plone has a steep learning curve if you want to manage all its aspects. Some things can be done easily, but others require great skills.

The Plone templating system is very specific and requires to be fully understood if you need to customize it deeply.

Good security record.

Flexible workflows.

Indefinitely extendable.

Ease of use.

Not widely known.

Slightly esoteric software stack.

Better desktop integration.

Plone shines in its usability for content editors: unlike other CMSes, there is no "admin" interface separate from the public-facing site, with many confusing settings and screens. Instead, when you edit or create a page, you do so right in the place where the change needs to occur.

One of Plone's greatest strengths is its ability to model your organization's specific workflows, and to give all your staff members the appropriate roles and permissions on different sections of your site. Therefore, you can give certain users a role that allows them to create new content, other users will have the ability to review newly created or edited content and publish it or send it back for further edits. You have full control over what content is made available to the public, etc.

In the last few years, Plone has made great strides in two specific directions: theming, and custom content types. For theming, Plone has embraced a new technology named Diazo, which allows virtually unlimited flexibility in mapping any arbitrary page elements into an existing HTML theme. Thus, it is possible to select any theme from the thousands of free or low-cost designs created for any other blogging or CMS platform, and very quickly and cheaply turn it into a native Plone theme. For content types, the Dexterity architecture allows site administrators to very easily create new custom content types through a browser, with no programming required, and integrate them into the full set of features available in Plone.

Plone's security track record is legendary. NASA, the CIA, the FBI and many national, regional and local governments, as well as higher education institutions have chosen Plone because it's secure.

Plone scales up to any size website, with any level of traffic, thanks to its solid architecture and the availability of an industrial-strength ecosystem of add-ons for virtually any applciation.

Plone's main drawback is that it has higher system requirements that make it more expensive to host. Recently, newer low-cost cloud-based offerings have emerged that might eliminate this weakness.

When uploading files, Plone gives great options of where you'd like your content to be stored.

After uploading your content and easily storing it, its extremely simple to retrieve it from any page you're working on.

Plone has a great toolbar for writing and editing content for your pages. Managing links, files, and aesthetic aspects of your site using Plone is simple and enjoyable.

When creating a table-like view (for example - an organized and lined-up photo gallery), Plone doesn't give you the option of holding down your cursor and sliding the picture (r other content) to a specific spot. Plone only allows you to move pictures to an absolute-positioned area, sometimes causing content to not be aligned.

I've had a few problems when uploading files with certain file extensions. It would be nice for Plone to have a pop up window or some sort of message that stops you from adding a file that doesn't fit their compatibility, rather than you encountering error messages or bad-looking sites due to having the wrong type of file uploaded.

Plone is slightly more complicated than Wordpress, a large CMS competitor, possibly causing people to stray away from it.

Very easy to use framework, even without any training.

Pages are made exactly the same each time, giving all your pages a coherent look. Also, company specific templates are available to reach this goal.

Easy and clear management of pages and visibility into the process.

Bullets and formatting sometimes make it difficult to add text to an existing paragraph. The 'code' button is useful in those cases, but only to those who know html.

Sometimes the pages don't save correctly and you use information.

Uploading and displaying images is a bit too much work.

Does a lot straight out of the box - user and content management with varying levels of privileges

Fairly easy to set up a running instance of Plone on either windows or linux

There are various themes and plugins that can be integrated (the existence of them is good, actually doing so is not so fun)

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).

Easily update content on pages

Create content rich pages on the fly

Easy to manage

In 3.x Plone still needed someone with python and coding experience.