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Plone

Plone

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.

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Recent Reviews

TrustRadius Insights

Plone has gained popularity across various organizations for its versatility and customizable features. Users have leveraged this platform …
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Plone - A Superb CMS

10 out of 10
March 01, 2014
Plone is the software used to manage the content on the entire University of Wisconsin Oshkosh's website. My place of work (the department …
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Plone GG 24.02.2014

8 out of 10
February 24, 2014
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 …
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Popular Features

View all 16 features
  • API (5)
    9.0
    90%
  • WYSIWYG editor (6)
    8.0
    80%
  • Role-based user permissions (5)
    8.0
    80%
  • Code quality / cleanliness (5)
    8.0
    80%
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Pricing

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N/A
Unavailable

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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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.

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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
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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.

8
Avg 8.0

Platform & Infrastructure

Features related to platform-wide settings and structure, such as permissions, languages, integrations, customizations, etc.

8.5
Avg 7.7

Web Content Creation

Features that support the creation of website content.

8
Avg 7.6

Web Content Management

Features for managing website content

7.8
Avg 7.3
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Product Details

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

Plone Technical Details

Operating SystemsUnspecified
Mobile ApplicationNo

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.

Drupal, Joomla!, and Kentico Xperience are common alternatives for Plone.

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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Comparisons

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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!

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
Mauricio Quiroga-Pascal Ortega | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Well Suited: When you need a lot of customization in the management of the content (our case).

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.
Rikupekka Oksanen | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Well suited for:
  • 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
Not fo good for
  • Small sites with little amount of content editors
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Plone is first and foremost a CMS, it is ideal for a large content heavy website, and it is also perfect for private intranets. It can also serve as an excellent document management system in many cases.

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.
Peter Fraterdeus | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Incentivized
Is there an experienced sysadmin to install and maintain the stack? If not, Plone is not a good choice. However, hosted solutions are available. It's important to have qualified and knowledgeable personnel available who are able to address development concerns. For end-users, and content managers, it's a great system overall. Publishing workflow, multi-level undo and rollback, etc make Plone very attractive in active publishing environments.
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Plone is best suited for large websites. It's complex and sometimes requires a big effort to correctly setup the development and production environments, that's why it's being used mainly in medium-large sites being managed by more than one author at the same time. Intranets are another good example, Plone can handle a large volume of files and it supports a wide range of authentication methods.
Ronnie Stevens | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Plone is very well suited for medium and large websites with a lot of authenticated users. That said I mainly use Plone for very small companies with only one user.
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.
Fabrizio Reale | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Its best job is to manage generic contents even mixed together. For example web pages, files, images, events, projects, user discussions can be easily managed in the same portal. It is less appropriate when you need a traditional database application such as an accounting software or an ERP. Being based on an object oriented database is most suitable for non structured contents.
Fulvio Casali | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
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.
March 01, 2014

Plone - A Superb CMS

Gracie Wardin | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Managing a large site, for example a university, Plone makes it easy to access all pages securely and edit them easily and appropriately. One must be properly trained in order to use it though.
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?
Kelv Cutler | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 3 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
If you're not going to do anything different than what Plone offers out of the box then it could be a good choice. If when you do want things configured differently, you don't mind paying a premium for someone to go and fix things for you then Plone would be fine for you. It's just unfortunate that tweaking and adding things in is not more intuitive.
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
If you are using this for a large organization then the time it takes to setup and get going it worth the effort. If you are going for a small quick fix I probably would not use plone unless you are savy web coder.
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