Plone: Powerful, Flexible, Secure, and Open Source

Plone is an ideal solution for public websites, private intranets, document management, and collaborative workspaces. It is especially suited for use in medium and large organizations.

• Security - Plone handles all common website vulnerabilities (such as unvalidated input, buffer overflows, and SQL injection) and has an order of magnitude fewer reported issues compared to PHP-based web frameworks. For more  information about Plone’s security, see the Plone security overview.
• Access Control - Plone provides excellent user, group, and role management facilities (improved in Plone 4), and a  robust and flexible permission system for controlling access to content.
• Usability - Plone's content management features were designed by usability experts. Plone provides an intuitive, edit-in-place interface that lets non-technical people create and maintain website content using only a web browser.
• Standards Compliance - Plone adheres to W3C web standards and Section 508 accessibility standards and is  compatible with all modern browsers. Plone is compatible with both iCal and vCal standards. RSS feeds are available  for all site content, and all pages are printer-friendly.
• I18N - Plone is internationalized in more than 40 languages.
• Mobile Support - Plone comes with support for mobile devices out-of-the-box. Mobile interfaces can be further enhanced with add-on products. (See the article Making a Mobile Version of your Plone Site.)
• Flexible Workflows - A selection of workflows ships with Plone, providing private, review, and published states of varying complexity. Different workflows can be used in different parts of the site. (See Joel Burton’s presentation on Workflows and Wisdom.)
• Rich, Dynamic Content - Plone comes with easy to edit content types for web pages, news items, events, files, and images. A word processor-like editor makes it easy for novices to create great looking pages with embedded images, pull-quotes, headings, lists, tables - all while conforming to the overall style of the site. Content can be dynamically displayed in many ways, such as on calendars, portlets, and lists defined by search criteria.
• Search - Plone provides built-in, permission-aware search of all site content, optionally including full text search of PDF and Word documents.
• SEO - Plone has built-in search engine optimization, with meaningful URLs (words, not numbers) and automatically created metadata.
• Adoption and Longevity - Plone is used on thousands of websites worldwide, including Oxfam America, Discover Magazine, and Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences. Plone is a vibrant and active open source project, with 340 core developers working together through a well-organized process. Plone's codebase and intellectual property are owned by the non-profit Plone Foundation. Commercial support is easy to find, with more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. Plone began in 2001 and has steadily improved with frequent releases. Since Plone 2.1, significant effort has been expended to ensure smooth automatic upgrades from one version to the next. Interest in Plone 4 has been high, with more than 22,000 downloads in the first month after its release.

For more information about the benefits of Plone and open source, download our Plone brochure, visit Plone.org, read the CMS Wire review of the Plone 4 release, and Idealware's independent comparison of Plone and 3 other open source CMSs.