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.
Plone an Excelent Open Source, Well Documented CMS Solution
Plone - A powerful enterprise-level content management system and application platform with great security
Plone - enterprise opensource CMS
The best CMS most people will never use...
I also use Plone for other web properties, …
Fast, secure, and solid CMS that your clients will love.
Plone, a high mountain to climb, but a beautiful view reaching the top.
Plone the enterprise open source CMS
Plone. It pays off in the long run.
You cannot go wrong with Plone
Plone - A Superb CMS
Plone GG 24.02.2014
Developing for Plone is not fun
Plone the CMS solution for the future.
Popular Features
- API (5)9.090%
- WYSIWYG editor (6)8.080%
- Role-based user permissions (5)8.080%
- Code quality / cleanliness (5)8.080%
Pricing
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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Alternatives Pricing
What is ExpressionEngine?
ExpressionEngine is a content management system from EllisLab in 2002, a successor to pMachine Pro, a blogging system, which is written in object-oriented PHP and uses MySQL for data storage. ExpressionEngine is their flagship Content Delivery Platform.
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
Ploneconf 2020: Getting Started with your Plone site
Plone Workflow
PloneEdu hangout: plone.app.toolbar, and how to build a workflow application
collective.takeaportrait: face detection and webcam Plone demo
Plone 4 Demo - How to manage content
Features
Security
This component helps a company minimize the security risks by controlling access to the software and its data, and encouraging best practices among users.
- 8Role-based user permissions(5) Ratings
Permissions to perform actions or access or modify data are assigned to roles, which are then assigned to users, reducing complexity of administration.
Platform & Infrastructure
Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.
- 9API(5) Ratings
An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.
- 8Internationalization / multi-language(5) Ratings
The software supports multiple languages, countries, currencies, etc.
Web Content Creation
Features that support the creation of website content.
- 8WYSIWYG editor(6) Ratings
What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get editing tool allows users to build pages without writing code.
- 8Code quality / cleanliness(5) Ratings
Code generated by WYSIWYG editor is clean and validates according to W3C standards.
- 7Admin section(5) Ratings
The admin page is easy to navigate and use.
- 10Page templates(5) Ratings
The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.
- 8Library of website themes(5) Ratings
A library of website frameworks or themes is available as a starting point for building a website.
- 7Mobile optimization / responsive design(5) Ratings
The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.
- 8Publishing workflow(5) Ratings
The software allows users to set up a custom workflow for updating the website, including approval processes.
- 8Form generator(5) Ratings
Users can build website forms for visitors to fill out.
Web Content Management
Features for managing website content
- 7Content taxonomy(5) Ratings
Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.
- 10SEO support(4) Ratings
The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.
- 5Bulk management(5) Ratings
Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.
- 8Availability / breadth of extensions(5) Ratings
There is a broad library of extensions, plug-ins, modules or add-ons that allow users to easily customize their websites without building custom code.
- 9Community / comment management(5) Ratings
Users can put post/page comments through an approval process, auto-approve commenters based on their email addresses, block commenters by IP address, delete comments, etc.
Product Details
- About
- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
What is Plone?
Plone Video
Plone Competitors
- Drupal
- Joomla!
- Kentico Xperience
- Magnolia (V5 and later versions)
Plone Technical Details
Operating Systems | Unspecified |
---|---|
Mobile Application | No |
Frequently Asked Questions
Comparisons
Compare with
Reviews and Ratings
(23)Community Insights
- Business Problems Solved
- Pros
- Cons
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)- Strategies
- Goals
- Best Practices
- Whitepapers
- Instructions
- Security
- Scalability
- Extensibility
- Documentation Availability
- Graphics and design
- Notification customization
- eCommerce Framework
Less Appropriate: When you have simple content management necessities. Since it is open source, the learning curve could be complex, so in simpler cases is much better to use simpler and broad use CMS solutions.
Plone - A powerful enterprise-level content management system and application platform with great security
- 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
- Huge public sites with hundreds of content managers and granulated permissions
- Intranets with hundreds of content managers and granulated permissions
- Customized services with workflows, automated content rules and integrations
- Sites that require excellent safety and flexibility to develop further
- International, multi-language sites
- Customized forms
- Small sites with little amount of content editors
Plone - enterprise opensource CMS
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.
Plone is also very good for scaling both in terms of large volumes of data and heavy site traffic. If used properly it can easily be deployed on clusters of servers with a shared backend data store.
Plone is not strong in the e-commerce area and it is not ideally suited to systems that require complex relational databases, though these can be connected if necessary.
The best CMS most people will never use...
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.
- 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.
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.
The templating engine makes it possible to connect virtually any design to a Plone-site, making it also very suitable for the more creative designs.
Building a webshop in Plone is not advisable.
Plone the enterprise open source CMS
- 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.
Plone. It pays off in the long run.
- Good security record.
- Flexible workflows.
- Indefinitely extendable.
- Ease of use.
- Not widely known.
- Slightly esoteric software stack.
- Better desktop integration.
You cannot go wrong with Plone
- 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.
Plone - A Superb CMS
- 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.
Key questions when choosing your CMS: How large is your site, how educated are the developers or employees that are going to be updating the site using Plone?
Plone GG 24.02.2014
- 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.
Developing for Plone is not fun
- 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).
Plone the CMS solution for the future.
- 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.