Plone Features

Powerful, flexible, secure, and open source

Plone is an enterprise-quality content management system that is easy for end-users to work with. Best-in-breed security, scalability, access control, standards support, internationalization, and SEO make Plone out-perform many expensive commercial systems.

Why Plone?

Plone is powerful and flexible. It is ideal for public websites, as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, and as a groupware tool for collaboration. Plone provides excellent user, group, and role management facilities, and a  robust and flexible permission system for controlling access to content.

Plone has 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.

Plone is secure. 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 like Drupal, Joomla! and Wordpresss.

Plone is accessible. Plone carefully follows standards for usability and accessibility. Plone is WCAG 2.0 compliant and meets or exceeds W3C’s WAI-AA and the U.S. Government Section 508 accessibility standards. 

Plone is scalable. Plone has client/server capabilities with which a website can be split across multiple servers to handle high traffic. Plone's object database can handle millions of pages.

Plone is international. The Plone interface has been translated into over 40 languages, and tools exist for managing multilingual content. Plone handles Chinese, Japanese, Greek, and even right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew.

Plone is searchable. Plone provides built-in, permission-aware search of all site content, optionally including full text search of PDF and Word documents.

Plone comes with flexible workflows. A selection of workflows ships with Plone, providing private, review, and published states with transitions of varying complexity. Different workflows can be used in different parts of the site.

Plone has SEO. Plone has built-in search engine optimization, with meaningful URLs (words, not numbers) and automatically created metadata.

Plone is easy to use. The Plone team includes usability experts who have made Plone easy and attractive for content managers to add, update, and maintain content. Plone provides an intuitive, edit-in-place interface that lets non-technical people create and maintain website content using only a web browser.

Plone is easy to theme. With Plone’s theming engine you can easily incorporate your existing branding or update it. Your designers don't need special Plone knowledge, the  HTML/CSS that they create can be used directly.

Plone is easy to install. You can try out Plone with a click-and-run installer, and have a content management system running on your computer in just a few minutes.

Plone is open source. Plone is licensed under the GNU General Public License, the same license Linux uses. This gives you the right to use and improve upon Plone without a license fee.

Plone is extensible. There are many add-ons for Plone that add new features and content types.

Plone is protected. Plone's codebase and intellectual property are owned by the non-profit Plone Foundation which was formed in 2004 to promote the use of Plone around the world and protect the Plone IP and trademarks.

Plone is supported. Plone is a vibrant and active open source project used on thousands of websites worldwide, with 350+ core developers working together through a well-organized process. Plone began in 2001 and has steadily improved with frequent releases. Significant effort has been expended to ensure smooth automatic upgrades from one version to the next.

Read More