tace / products.cmfplone

The core of the Plone content management system

About Plone

Plone is a user friendly Content Management System running on top of Python, Zope and the CMF.

It benefits from all features of Zope/CMF such as: RDBMS integration, Python extensions, Object Oriented Database, Web configurable workflow, pluggable membership and authentication, Undos, Form validation, amongst many many other features. Available protocols: FTP, XMLRPC, HTTP and WEBDAV Turn it into a distributed application system by installing ZEO.

Plone shares some of the qualities of Livelink, Interwoven and Documentum. It aims to be the open source out-of-the-box publishing system.

Installing Plone

Plone is available on Microsoft Windows, Linux, OSX and BSD platforms.

Install Plone by downloading an installer from plone.org.

What is Plone?

Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.

• Plone is easy to install. You can install Plone with a a click and run installer, and have a content management system running on your computer in just a few minutes.
• 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 is international. The Plone interface has more than 35 translations, and tools exist for managing multilingual content.
• Plone is standard. Plone carefully follows standards for usability and accessibility. Plone pages are compliant with US Section 508, and the W3C's AAA rating for accessibility.
• Plone is Open Source. Plone is licensed under the GNU General Public License, the same license used by Linux. This gives you the right to use Plone without a license fee, and to improve upon the product.
• Plone is supported. There are over three hundred developers in the Plone Development Team around the world, and a multitude of companies that specialize in Plone development and support.
• Plone is extensible. There is a multitude of add-on products for Plone to add new features and content types. In addition, Plone can be scripted using web standard solutions and Open Source languages.
• Plone is technology neutral. Plone can interoperate with most relational database systems, open source and commercial, and runs on a vast array of platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and BSD.

Technical overview

Plone is a content management framework that works hand-in-hand and sits on top of Zope, a widely-used Open Source web application server and development system. To use Plone, you don't need to learn anything about Zope; to develop new Plone content types, a small amount of Zope knowledge is helpful, and it is covered in the documentation.

Zope itself is written in Python, an easy-to-learn, widely-used and supported Open Source programming language. Python can be used to add new features to Plone, and used to understand or make changes to the way that Zope and Plone work.

By default, Plone stores its contents in Zope's built in transactional object database, the ZODB. There are products and techniques, however, to share information with other sources, such as relational databases, LDAP, filesystem files, etc.

Plone runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and many other platforms; double-click installers are available for Windows and Mac OS X, and RPM packages are available for Linux. For full information, see the plone.org product page.