What is Plone?

Plone

Plone is an open-source content management system that is used to create, edit, and manage digital content, like websites, intranets and custom solutions. It comes with over 20 years of growth, optimisations, and refinements. The result is a system trusted by governments, universities, businesses, and other organisations all over the world. 

The Plone Foundation protects and promotes Plone by furthering the development, marketing, and legal affairs of Plone and the Plone community.

These are the core values of Plone:

Plone is human

Plone is the core of a bright and passionate open-source community that loves Plone and works to make sure others love it too. Its intuitive interface, content organization system, and workflows make it a breeze to use. It is truly a system built by humans, for humans. 

Plone is power

Powerful organizations need powerful websites, which is why many large organizations choose Plone to manage their huge content networks. Even a small one-page Plone website is backed by the full power of Plone and can grow with your organization.

Plone is security

You can be sure that your website and everything on it will be safe with Plone. The very essence of Plone is security and its track record is unmatched by any other CMS. Plone is peace of mind. 

Plone 6

Plone 6 - secure, solid and easy to use. Content management for the users. 

Features

With Plone, you can build websites, intranets and custom solutions that have no limits.

Plone is Modern

Easy to use and fast

The new frontend has been designed to make it easy to use for both power users and seasonal users. It is also super fast, making editing a breeze. Try Plone 6.

Adaptive Layout and Modern Blocks System

Plone 6 is built from the ground up for modern web layouts that adapt to each device. At the same time, those blocks are easy to use and to create by editors and do not require any in-depth knowledge about web technologies like HTML or CSS. Plone comes with a bunch of powerful blocks and there are plenty more to install.

No Code Content Types

Plone 6 allows the creation of new content types through the web. Say you want to create a new section for press releases. Go to the Content Types control panel and create a new Content Type “Press Release” with a few mouse clicks, add powerful new features ( Behaviors) like …. Then go to the page template editor and define a template for how the press release will look like. Done.

Flexible Form Builder

Plone 6 comes with a powerful form builder that allows editors to create new forms in no time. Editors can create a new form via drag and drop and define actions such as sending the form data via email or storing them as CSV data for later use.

Faceted Search Made Easy

Plone 6 comes with a faceted search block that allows editors to easily create sophisticated seach elements. With a few clicks you can create a search page that can filter results based on various facets.

Rich Add-ons Ecosystem

Plone 6 has a rich ecosystem of more than 100 add-on products. An active and enthusiastic community of developers and companies are developing new add-ons every day. Extend Plone.

For developers it is easy to create new blocks, using the very popular JavaScript framework React.

Ready for Production Use

Under the hood, Plone 6 is a battle-tested Plone 5.2 plus the new Volto frontend framework. Volto has been actively developed since 2017. Volto already powers high-profile government websites in Germany and Italy as well as multiple University websites worldwide, Intranets of some of the largest research institutions in the world, and European Union websites. Examples of sites using Plone 6.

Plone is Mature

Over 20 years of technical excellence and robust track record from thousands of sites, Plone excels as one of the most long-lived open source projects.

Enterprise Integration

Finally, all of your services and content function as one. Plone seamlessly connects with specialized applications and standard enterprise systems like CRMs, Salesforce, and Oracle. It integrates with web servers, SQL and NoSQL databases, continuous integration tools, web services, and frameworks

Integration with LDAP, Active Directory, Oracle, OpenID, Shibboleth, CAS, Kerberos and many other authentication systems. You name it, Plone talks to it.

Content Management for Life

Manage the life cycle of your content (from initial creation to publication and storage) with version control, content locking, document, and digital asset management, and search. Digital rights and process management tools such as role and group permissions, editorial flow, and content collaboration are 100% customizable. View content history, revert to previous versions and edit without disrupting the user experience. Use Content Rules to automatically publish, move content, send notifications, and more.

Industrial Strength Security

The creativity and speed of Open Source blended with technologically-advanced Python backend yields superior security without sacrificing power or extensibility. The extremely low number of vulnerabilities found in Python and Plone demonstrates the maturity of Plone’s security and development processes. Plone's outstanding test coverage and continuous integration testing combined with a fine-grained security model make it the best choice for security-conscious environments.

Limitless Extensibility

Plone is yours. The open source model of Plone, backed up by non-profit Plone Foundation guarantees it stays forever that way.

Choose from hundreds of add-ons for document and content storage, content delivery, forms processing, social syndication, personalization, and more. If you can’t find it, you can make it.

Robust Scalability

Perfect as a standard or complex installation. Out-of-the-box Plone provides superior content search and retrieval services, along with integration capability, backup and recovery; localization; caching; and system security. Manage digital assets, documents, web content with a consistent interface. Plone also has outstanding clustering capabilities - allowing websites to be split across multiple servers to handle high traffic.

Plone REST API

Connect Plone easily to any other external source. Use Plone as a headless CMS for your custom frontend.

Read more about Plone REST API.

Search Capabilities

Plone's natural way of organizing things in folderish nature makes finding and accessing pages and files easier than putting everything in one bin.

Live search gets inside Word documents and PDF files. Supercharge search with add-ons for Google Search Appliance, Elasticsearch and Apache Solr.

Intranets and Extranets

Why have an intranet with one service and a public site with another when you can have both in Plone? Keep it simple and lightweight for small teams or scale it to serve a global business. Either way, because Plone is Open Source, you have complete control over how you use it. Plone's strong security model and very flexible permission and workflow capabilities make any scenario possible in one site.

Accessibility Standards Compliant

From day 1, accessibility has been in the core of Plone. Plone is WCAG 2.0 compliant and meets or exceeds W3C’s WAI-AA and the US government's Section 508 standards for sight- and motor-impaired individuals. Plone’s JavaScript has fallback modes to work with any browser.

Multilingual

Plone speaks your language and supports all character encodings. Thanks to the global community, Plone is available in over 30 languages and can be easily extended to account even more.

Documentation and Support

Everything you want to know about Plone can be found in the documentation; GitHub repositories; Plone community forums, chat rooms, and mailing lists. The official Plone documentation was created and is maintained by the community for content contributors, developers, site administrators, designers, and integrators. Additional support is available from numerous service providers around the world.