Plone - A powerful enterprise-level content management system and application platform with great security
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
Overall Satisfaction with Plone
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
- 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.
Plone Feature Ratings
Using Plone
30000 - Teachers, students, administration, researchers, external audience
Evaluating Plone and Competitors
- Price
- Product Features
- Product Usability
- Prior Experience with the Product
Using Plone
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Like to use Relatively simple Easy to use Technical support not required Well integrated Consistent Quick to learn Convenient Feel confident using Familiar | None |
- 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.