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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%
Pricing
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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.
Entry-level set up fee?
- No setup fee
Offerings
- Free Trial
- Free/Freemium Version
- Premium Consulting/Integration Services
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Product Demos
Publisher's Plone theme
YouTube
Ploneconf 2020: Getting Started with your Plone site
YouTube
Plone Workflow
YouTube
PloneEdu hangout: plone.app.toolbar, and how to build a workflow application
YouTube
collective.takeaportrait: face detection and webcam Plone demo
YouTube
Plone 4 Demo - How to manage content
YouTube
Features
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Product Details
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- Competitors
- Tech Details
- FAQs
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 Mid-sized Companies (51-1,000 employees).
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Reviews and Ratings
(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!
- 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
(1-3 of 3)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
80%
8.0
72.5%
7.3
85%
8.5
80%
8.0
N/A
N/A
- It was costly to learn how to use it. However, then it's very easy to train new members of the team. We have lower training costs.
- Since it is an old open source platform, there is a lot of documentation, codes, and experience to copy/adapt. We have lower development costs.
- As it is very easy to change/manage content, it allows us to save a lot of IT external companies.
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
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
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.
75%
7.5
78%
7.8
90%
9.0
100%
10.0
N/A
N/A
- Using other CMS's we usually needed 3-4 hour sessions to teach our clients how to manage their websites. Using Plone we spend only 1-2 hour in each session.
- We found that there's an important learning curve in the development process. The investment pays off in long-term, but you should be prepared for that kind of cost.
- Less time spent applying hotfixes as Plone had a small number of vulnerabilities in the past years.
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.
70%
7.0
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
N/A
- 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.
Among the open source CMSs Plone is most reliable to develop large and complex application because is codebase is maintained with an object oriented approach where each parts is strictly independent from the others. So you can deeply customize it and it is still secure and efficient. We have not had the same experience with other CMSs that were great in doing their jobs, but could not be easily customized. At least with the same productivity as Plone.