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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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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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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 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!
- 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
(1-2 of 2)Companies can't remove reviews or game the system. Here's why
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
92.5%
9.3
94%
9.4
100%
10.0
100%
10.0
N/A
N/A
- Zero licence cost on 100+ systems we have on Plone. On some other systems the costs might be astronomical based on our user amount
- Our customized and well integrated LMSs - since 2009 we have received some 200,000 assignment submissions through our Plone-based systems. The amount of time saved compared to other ways of returning assignments is huge. Integration between Plone, our study management system and payments system allows students to enroll, pay and immediately access course content.
- Workflows - we have many systems where we utilize Plone's flexible workflow management, allowing us to easily digitize manual work and sending papers around campus. Again, saves a lot of work and time.
We haven't have any need for other CMSs since 2004 when we first started using Plone. There hasn't been any feature or request or system that we couldn't have done with Plone, if that was the platform selection in case.
Sometimes there have been cases, where we pilot or test other workflow-based systems, but usually the problems come with licences - as a university we have tens on thousands of users, and the licence costs tend to go so high that we cannot use them.
30000
Teachers, students, administration, researchers, external audience
No
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
- Content management with lots of content - the ability to divide content into folders and pages is easy to understand and allows many different functions. The ability to copy, cut, paste stuff from one place to another
- Editing page content.
- Forms - easy to edit, yet powerful to use.
Yes
Responsive UI, can be used in a mobile device. Easy to customize further if needed just using CSS.
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.
- The impact Plone has had at the University of Oshkosh is as follows: this software allows student workers to learn about IT departments and CMS's in a user-friendly way. It gives many students great jobs that look great on their resumes.
- Since there are great training manuals for Plone, there is increased employee efficient in the workplace. Training doesn't take long, and if there's ever a question, the Plone manual is a great tool to refer to.
- If an employee using Plone quits, its easy to find someone to replace them with quick training and great resources.
- Adobe Photoshop,WordPress
Plone may be more complicated than Wordpress when considering organizational factors and overall use, but for a reason. It has further capabilities than Wordpress and other content management systems. It takes slight training to learn, but it provides great knowledge that many people will use in the future. Wordpress is very simple, and it shows on the websites it runs. All Wordpress sites look very similar, but Plone websites can be customized and made to look exactly how you want.
300
A university uses Plone as it's main content management system.
3
Skills required: able to go through a short training process and determination to stay organized and be willing to learn on-the-go.
People trained completely in Plone software are always available for quick questions or more in-depth questions and explanations.
People trained completely in Plone software are always available for quick questions or more in-depth questions and explanations.
- Managing files within the large website in a simple and enjoyable way.
- Keeping the website secure and accurate at all times.
- Posting to the website easily everyday without problems.
- Keeping your website well-maintained, therefore leading to greater success within your business or organization.
- We use Plone for a lot of photo galleries, which makes a website much more attractive.
- The university could expand Plone to be their primary CMS system (although it almost is, there are still a few departments that use a different one). This would create consistency among the websites and pages.