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Plone has gained popularity across various organizations for its versatility and customizable features. Users have leveraged this platform …
Overview
What is Plone?
Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.
Recent Reviews
Popular Features
- API (5)9.090%
- WYSIWYG editor (6)8.080%
- Role-based user permissions (5)8.080%
- Code quality / cleanliness (5)8.080%
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What is Plone?
Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.
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What is Square Online?
Square Online (formerly Weebly) is a basic content management system with blogging and eCommerce features. It can be utilized for building standard websites or specialized webpages for online stores.
Product Demos
Publisher's Plone theme
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Ploneconf 2020: Getting Started with your Plone site
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Plone Workflow
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PloneEdu hangout: plone.app.toolbar, and how to build a workflow application
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collective.takeaportrait: face detection and webcam Plone demo
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Plone 4 Demo - How to manage content
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What is Plone?
Plone is a free and open source mobile and multichannel capable content management system built on top of the Zope application server. In principle, Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops and internal websites. It is also well positioned to be used as a document publishing system and groupware collaboration tool. The strengths of Plone are its flexible and adaptable workflow, very good security, extensibility, high usability and flexibility. Its users are varied from large enterprises to small businesses, non-profits, universities, and governments. It is available on any platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, BSD).
Plone Video
What's Plone for you?
Plone Competitors
- Drupal
- Joomla!
- Kentico Xperience
- Magnolia (V5 and later versions)
Plone Technical Details
| Operating Systems | Unspecified |
|---|---|
| Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.
Reviewers rate Page templates and SEO support highest, with a score of 10.
The most common users of Plone are from Small Businesses (1-50 employees).
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(23)
Community Insights
TrustRadius Insights are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, 3rd-party data sources. Have feedback on this content? Let us know!
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Plone has gained popularity across various organizations for its versatility and customizable features. Users have leveraged this platform to create a wide range of solutions, including video publishing platforms, payment systems, customized forms, workflows, and integrations with other internal and external systems. Plone's solid and secure platform has made it a preferred choice for universities and organizations that prioritize security. The easy-to-use content management system in Plone allows for limitless customization options, making it suitable for both public websites and intranets. With robust and flexible permission management, users have precise control over access permissions on every page. Plone is widely used by universities like the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh and the University of Jyväskylä to manage the content on their entire websites. It enables multiple users to collaborate on editorial work effortlessly. For over a decade, Plone has been extensively utilized to deploy websites, intranets, document management systems, and collaboration portals for clients. Its scalability, complex workflow configuration, permission management capabilities, external authentication system integration, and content revision tracking are highly valued by users. Plone serves as a powerful tool for effectively communicating a variety of content types such as strategies, goals, best practices, whitepapers, and instructions. Moreover, it has proven to be an efficient solution for developing help pages related to ICT products, reducing the need for additional help desk support. The reliability and versatility of Plone have made it a popular choice among both public administrations and private companies in building solid e-government solutions without incurring additional license fees. Users appreciate how easy it is to learn and use Plone from the perspective of the final user.
Usability for Content Editors: Plone's usability for content editors has received high praise from users. They appreciate how it eliminates the need for a separate admin interface, making it less confusing. Users find it intuitive and efficient to edit or create content directly in the relevant location. Modeling Specific Workflows: The ability to model specific workflows is considered one of Plone's greatest strengths by many users. They commend its flexibility in assigning different roles and permissions to staff members for different sections of the site, resulting in better content management and control. Theming Capabilities with Diazo: With the introduction of Diazo, Plone's theming capabilities have significantly improved as highlighted by users. They value the virtually unlimited flexibility offered by mapping page elements into existing HTML themes, which allows them to easily select and adapt designs from other platforms.
Higher System Requirements: Some users have expressed that Plone has higher system requirements compared to other CMSs, resulting in increased hosting costs. This can be a deterrent for individuals or organizations with limited resources.
Difficult Development and Lack of Documentation: Several reviewers have found Plone development to be challenging to learn, and they have mentioned the lack of comprehensive documentation as an obstacle. This makes it harder for new users to grasp the intricacies of Plone and effectively utilize its features.
Limited Provider Options: According to user feedback, there are only a few providers capable of running Plone websites. This limited availability may restrict users' choices when it comes to selecting suitable hosting providers that align with their specific requirements and preferences.
Attribute Ratings
Reviews
(1-13 of 13)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
Is a old proven open source tool very flexible to communicate the content we need to our customer´s employees. We help our employees to design and implement strategies supported with our proprietary app. Thus, for us is very important to be able to have a flexible way to communicate:
- Strategies
- Goals
- Best Practices
- Whitepapers
- Instructions
- Security
- Scalability
- Extensibility
- Documentation Availability
- Graphics and design
- Notification customization
- eCommerce Framework
September 25, 2019
Plone - A powerful enterprise-level content management system and application platform with great security
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Plone is widely being used in our organization: from public websites to intranets, customized LMSs or customized sites designed to do some special thing, to smaller sites and different portals. We have video publishing platforms, payment systems, customized forms, workflows and countless integrations to other internal and external systems.
Plone is an extremely solid and safe platform to use, which is very important for us as a university. The content management is easy to use, and customization options are limitless. Especially important for us is the robust, yet flexible permission management; we may, if we want, to control the access permissions to a smallest detail in every page available.
- 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
November 12, 2015
Plone - enterprise opensource CMS
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We develop Plone solutions for our clients and use the product ourselves. We have been using Plone since version 2 and currently use it on new projects.
Plone provides a very powerful base CMS and application platform upon which we build customised solutions for our clients. Plone provides a very scalable architecture, the ability to configure complex workflows and permissions, the ability to plug in external authentication systems, full revision history and tracking of content revisions and many other enterprise features not seen in most opensource CMSs
Plone provides a very powerful base CMS and application platform upon which we build customised solutions for our clients. Plone provides a very scalable architecture, the ability to configure complex workflows and permissions, the ability to plug in external authentication systems, full revision history and tracking of content revisions and many other enterprise features not seen in most opensource CMSs
- 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.
July 17, 2015
The best CMS most people will never use...
The slowprint.com public web presence has been on a Plone stack since SlowPrint started in 2007.
I also use Plone for other web properties, including my consulting at fraterdeus.com
As a content management system, Plone provides the ability to manage changing content requirements, for updating, adding new content, integrating a Twitter feed, etc.
I also use Plone for other web properties, including my consulting at fraterdeus.com
As a content management system, Plone provides the ability to manage changing content requirements, for updating, adding new content, integrating a Twitter feed, etc.
- 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.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We are using Plone for more than 6 years to develop websites for the public administration and private held companies. The whole organization is using Plone and not only to develop solutions for our clients but also internally, where we have built a strong set of internal tools and a knowledge management tool to help our developers to adapt to our development environment. We are using Plone as an open source software to build and implement solid e-government solutions for parliaments and administrations. Plone is a robust CMS with a strong security system and it doesn't have any additional license fees. Implementation costs are minimized because it's also easy to learn from the final user perspective.
- 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.
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I use Plone to develop professional responsive websites for small and medium companies. Plone has a perfect separation of logic and templates using Diazo and a very powerful toolkit under the hood to develop any possible web application.
For my clients it is the best I can offer as a CMS, being the most user-friendly I have encountered in the last decade. Where in my price-range mainly Joomla and Wordpress websites are developed, I have a really strong competing product, offering a much less vulnerable environment. Further more it is possible to completely version-control the whole development, and scripting the whole deployment environment using Buildout.
For my clients it is the best I can offer as a CMS, being the most user-friendly I have encountered in the last decade. Where in my price-range mainly Joomla and Wordpress websites are developed, I have a really strong competing product, offering a much less vulnerable environment. Further more it is possible to completely version-control the whole development, and scripting the whole deployment environment using Buildout.
- 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.
July 07, 2015
Plone the enterprise open source CMS
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We have been using Plone for more than ten years to deploy websites, intranets, document managements systems and collaboration portals for our clients. We also use it for our websites and intranet and also for some internal applications. It allows to easily create web applications and above all to let them be managed by non technical users.
- 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.
February 25, 2015
Plone. It pays off in the long run.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Currently Plone powers most of the websites in the University of Jyväskylä. It is used across the whole organization. Plone provides us an easy to use interface for managing our web content in a way that a lot of people can participate in the editorial work.
- Good security record.
- Flexible workflows.
- Indefinitely extendable.
- Ease of use.
- Not widely known.
- Slightly esoteric software stack.
- Better desktop integration.
March 17, 2014
You cannot go wrong with Plone
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
I'm a Plone developer and integrator, and provide managed hosting services specialized for Plone to my clients. Plone is a solid, enterprise-level and extremely secure content management system that can faithfully serve many different usage types over the long term.
- 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.
March 01, 2014
Plone - A Superb CMS
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Plone is the software used to manage the content on the entire University of Wisconsin Oshkosh's website. My place of work (the department I worked for when I used Plone) uses Plone to run it's specific pages within the department's website.
- 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.
February 24, 2014
Plone GG 24.02.2014
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
We use Plone for all the help pages of the ICT products of our group. We have decided to use it for all help pages concerning ICT products. Many of our SAP programs and web applications link to a Plone page.It's main purpose is therefore educate our users and minimize the amount of help desk questions.
- 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.
February 22, 2014
Developing for Plone is not fun
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Plone was used for a 3rd party organization to manage their workings as an organization serving a large interest based community. For them, it was a place to manage information about the organization leaders, current events and eventually for community involvement. As a software engineer I built and plugged new pieces of product into Plone so that they could solicit and facilitate community involvement.
- 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).
February 18, 2014
Plone the CMS solution for the future.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Plone is the main system for our departmental website. Our department houses many different sub-organizations that all have their own unique part in the department. With the flexibility of Plone each individual, and organization can update their profiles and information quickly. This provides the department the flexability it needs to allow heads of these organizations to keep there pages up to date with out having to call IT all the time to make simple changes.
- 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.