Plone (software)

Infobox Software
name = Plone



caption = Screenshot of default Plone install
collapsible = yes
developer = Alan Runyan, Alexander Limi, Vidar Andersen and the Plone Team
latest_release_version = 3.1.5.1
latest_release_date = release date|2008|08|26
latest_preview_version =
latest_preview_date =
operating_system = Cross-platform
platform = Zope
genre = Content management system
license = GNU General Public License
website = http://plone.org/

Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. It is suited for an internal website or may be used as a server on the Internet, playing such roles as a document publishing system and groupware collaboration tool.

Plone is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is designed to be extensible. Major development is conducted periodically during special meetings called "Plone Sprints." Additional functionality is added to Plone with "Products", which may be distributed through the Plone website or otherwise. The Plone Foundation owns and protects all copyrights and trademarks. Plone also has legal backing from the council of the Software Freedom Law Center.

The name "Plone" is an homage to the Warp Records band Plone, whose music is both simple and playful. The logo represents collaboration with three dots together in a group.

MediaWiki's "Monobook" layout is based partially on the Plone style sheets. [http://www.mediawiki.org/skins-1.5/monobook/main.css]

History

The Plone project was begun in 1999, by Alexander Limi, Alan Runyan, and Vidar Andersen. It was made as a usability layer on top of the Zope Content Management Framework. The first version was released in 2001. The project quickly grew into a community, receiving plenty of new add-on products from its users. The increase in community led to the creation of the annual Plone conference in 2003, which is still running today. In addition, "sprints" are held, where groups of developers meet to work on Plone, ranging from a couple days to a week. In March 2004, Plone 2.0 was released. This release brought more customizable features in Plone, and enhanced the add-on functions. In May 2004, the Plone Foundation was created for the development, marketing, and protection of Plone. The Foundation has ownership rights over the Plone codebase, trademarks, and domain names. Even though the foundation was set up to protect ownership rights, Plone remains open source. [ [http://plone.org/foundation/about/faq Plone Foundation FAQs — Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management ] ] In March 12, 2007, Plone 3 was released. This new release brought inline editing, an upgraded visual editor, and strengthened security, among many other enhancements. [ [http://plone.org/news/plone-3.0-released/ Plone 3.0 released! — Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management ] ] Up to September 2007, there have been over 200 developers contributing to Plone's code. Plone won two Packt Open Source CMS Awards. [ [http://www.packtpub.com/open-source-cms-award-previous-winners Open Source CMS Award Previous Winners ] ]

Design

Plone is built on the Zope application server, which is written in Python. Plone is made such that all information stored in Plone is stored in Zope's built-in transactional object database (ZODB). Plone comes with installers for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, along with other operating systems. New updates are released regularly on Plone's website. Plone is available in over 35 languages. Its interface follows the government standard WAI-AAA and U.S. section 508, which allows people with sight disabilities to properly access and use Plone. A major part of Plone is its use of skins and themes. When working with Plone, templates can be used to customize a website's look. These templates are written with Cascading Style Sheets. In addition, Plone comes with a user management system called Pluggable Authentication Service. Introduced in Plone 2.5, "PAS" is used to properly sort actions from different users to their respective folders or accounts. PAS is also used to search for users and groups in Plone. Most importantly, PAS covers the security involved for users, requiring authentication in order to login to Plone. This gives users an increase in both security and organization with their content. [http://plone.org/documentation/manual/definitive-guide/definitive_guide_to_plone.pdf] A large part of Plone's changes have come from its community. Since Plone is open source, the members of the Plone community regularly make alterations or add-ons to Plone's interface, and make these changes available to the rest of the community via Plone's website.

Community

Since its release, many of Plone's updates and add-ons have come from its community. Events called Plone "sprints" consist of members of the community coming together for a week and helping improve Plone. The Plone conference is also attended and supported by the members of the Plone community. In addition, Plone has an active IRC channel to give support to users who have questions or concerns. Up through 2007, there have been over one million downloads of Plone. Plone's development team has also been ranked in the top 2% of the largest open source communities.

Strengths and weaknesses

Plone excels when compared to other content-management systems in standards conformance, access control, internationalization, aggregation, user-generated content, micro-applications, active user groups and value. [ [http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/164-WCM-Marketplace CMS Watch: Web CMS Kudos and Shortcomings, Circa 2007] ] It's available on many different operating systems, due to its use of platform-agnostic underlying technologies such as Python and Zope. Plone's Web-based administrative interface is optimized for standards, allowing it to work with most common web browsers, and uses additional accessibility standards to help users who have disabilities. All of Plone's features are customizable, and free add-ons are available from the Plone website.

Plone has an excellent security record compared to other popular content management systems. [ [http://web.nvd.nist.gov/ National Vulnerability Database, 2008-09-20, 9 records for Plone, 145 Drupal, 259 Joomla!, 149 WordPress; none of the Plone vulnerabilities were rated severe.] ]

Plone's weaknesses include Python and Zope experience requirements for those wishing to add or extend the feature set, making for a considerable learning curve for developers. [ [http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200503/content_management_with_plone/ Content management with Plone | 456 Berea Street ] ] Plone has been rated as lagging in repository services when compared to other major CMSs. [ [http://www.cmswatch.com/Feature/164-WCM-Marketplace CMS Watch: Web CMS Kudos and Shortcomings, Circa 2007] ]

Features

These are some of the features available [ [http://plone.org/products/plone/features/3.0/ Features in Plone 3.0 — Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management ] ] in Plone 3.0:
*Inline editing
*Working Copy support
*Link and reference integrity checking
*Automatic locking and unlocking
*Collaboration and sharing
*Versioning, history and reverting content
*Upgraded visual HTML editor
*Workflow capabilities
*Authentication back-end
*Full-text indexing of Word and PDF documents
*Collections
*Presentation mode for content
*Support for the search engine Sitemap protocol
*Support for multiple mark-up formats
*Wiki support
*Automatic previous/next navigation
*Rules engine for content
*Auto-generated tables of contents
*Portlets engine
*Support, development, hosting & training
*LiveSearch
*Multilingual content management
*Time-based publishing
*Human-readable URLs
*Powerful graphical page editor
*Navigation and updated site maps
*Resource compression
*Caching proxy integration
*Drag and drop reordering of content
*XML exports of site configurations
*Localized workflow configuration
*Adjustable templates on content
*Standard content types
*Content is automatically formatted for printing
*Standards-compliant XHTML and CSS
*Accessibility compliant
*RSS feed support
*Automatic image scaling and thumbnail generation
*Free add-on products
*Cross-platform
*Comment capabilities on any content
*Microformat support
*Installer packages for multiple platforms
*WebDAV and FTP support
*In-context editing
*Backup support
*Cut/copy/paste operations on content

See also

* Content management system
* Open source
* List of content management systems
* Zope

References

* [http://www.openadvantage.org/articles/oadocument.2005-04-25.0390317971 Plone review]

External links

* [http://plone.org/ Plone website]
* [http://plone.net/ Directory of Plone services providers, case studies, and Plone-related news items]
* [http://plone.tv/media/689203017 Introducing Plone, a Screencast]
* [http://www.openadvantage.org/articles/oadocument.2005-04-25.0390317971/view Review of Plone 2.0.5]
* [http://www.456bereastreet.com/archive/200503/content_management_with_plone/ Review of Plone, Pre 2.1]
* [http://plonehostingdemo.nidelven-it.no/ Plone demo]
* [http://www.infoworld.com/article/07/10/08/41TC-open-source-cms_1.html InfoWorld review of 5 open source CMSs - Oct. '07]