Plone the enterprise open source CMS
Updated July 07, 2015

Plone the enterprise open source CMS

Fabrizio Reale | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Software Version

4

Overall Satisfaction with Plone

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.

Pros

  • 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.

Cons

  • 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.
  • 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.
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.

Plone Feature Ratings

Using Plone

Plone has been used for more than ten years and it already has an interesting roadmap for its future. I do not know any other open source CMS with the same story of continuous evolution and security track. Interesting new features are added at each release and new modules are created continuously.

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