Updated July 07, 2015

Review: "Plone, a high mountain to climb, but a beautiful view reaching the top."

Ronnie Stevens

Owner

Studio ZOOInformation Technology and Services, 1-10 employees

Score 10 out of 10

Vetted Review

Verified User

Software Version
4.3.2

Modules Used
Diazo, Dexterity

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I use Plone to develop professional responsive websites for small and medium companies. Plone has a perfect separation of logic and templates using Diazo and a very powerful toolkit under the hood to develop any possible web application.
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.

Pros and Cons

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.

Return on Investment

Plone makes it possible to maintain and update the running websites with very small effort.
My customers need little to no support on using the CMS.
Creating custom content types is really fast.

Alternatives Considered

WordPress,Joomla

Plone is much harder to learn then Wordpress. Development in Wordpress is learnt in day's, where development in Plone really takes years to get to the full depth. That said, once you're able to develop in Plone, is it a rock solid system, with readable code. In my experience Wordpress websites need to be updated so often, and the code feels bad organised. I have been building Wordpress websites, choosing Wordpress only when the client has almost no money. But I can never deliver the quality I want to deliver when using Wordpress. Plone does offer the possibility to deliver professional websites.
As for Joomla, in the past I have done some Joomla development, but the whole CMS-paradigm could not settle in my brain. Being a web developer for over 15 years now, Joomla always felt contra-intuitive. Let alone the task of teaching this to my clients.
Plone is now my only choice. It gives me a fast development-cycle, a user-friendly CMS and a rock stable and very secure system.

Likelihood to Recommend

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.

Web Content Creation

WYSIWYG editor

Code quality / cleanliness

Admin section

Page templates

Library of website themes

Mobile optimization / responsive design

Publishing workflow

Form generator

Web Content Management

Content taxonomy

SEO support

Bulk management

Availability / breadth of extensions

Community / comment management

Platform & Infrastructure

API

Internationalization / multi-language

Security

Role-based user permissions

CMS programming language or framework ()

Likelihood to Renew

Plone is developing very fast. There is a lot of work being done to remove all the old code, making it the number one modern open source CMS. It is necessary to keep renewing my knowledge of Plone, to make sure my clients get the best of this beautiful CMS.