TrustRadius Insights for Plone are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Usability for Content Editors: Plone's usability for content editors has received high praise from users. They appreciate how it eliminates the need for a separate admin interface, making it less confusing. Users find it intuitive and efficient to edit or create content directly in the relevant location.
Modeling Specific Workflows: The ability to model specific workflows is considered one of Plone's greatest strengths by many users. They commend its flexibility in assigning different roles and permissions to staff members for different sections of the site, resulting in better content management and control.
Theming Capabilities with Diazo: With the introduction of Diazo, Plone's theming capabilities have significantly improved as highlighted by users. They value the virtually unlimited flexibility offered by mapping page elements into existing HTML themes, which allows them to easily select and adapt designs from other platforms.
Is a old proven open source tool very flexible to communicate the content we need to our customer´s employees. We help our employees to design and implement strategies supported with our proprietary app. Thus, for us is very important to be able to have a flexible way to communicate:
Strategies
Goals
Best Practices
Whitepapers
Instructions
It´s easy to make changes in separate parts or our clients divisions. It´s easy to use the same content structures and exported to new situations.
Pros
Security
Scalability
Extensibility
Documentation Availability
Cons
Graphics and design
Notification customization
eCommerce Framework
Likelihood to Recommend
Well Suited: When you need a lot of customization in the management of the content (our case).
Less Appropriate: When you have simple content management necessities. Since it is open source, the learning curve could be complex, so in simpler cases is much better to use simpler and broad use CMS solutions.
I'm a Plone developer and integrator, and provide managed hosting services specialized for Plone to my clients. Plone is a solid, enterprise-level and extremely secure content management system that can faithfully serve many different usage types over the long term.
Pros
Plone shines in its usability for content editors: unlike other CMSes, there is no "admin" interface separate from the public-facing site, with many confusing settings and screens. Instead, when you edit or create a page, you do so right in the place where the change needs to occur.
One of Plone's greatest strengths is its ability to model your organization's specific workflows, and to give all your staff members the appropriate roles and permissions on different sections of your site. Therefore, you can give certain users a role that allows them to create new content, other users will have the ability to review newly created or edited content and publish it or send it back for further edits. You have full control over what content is made available to the public, etc.
In the last few years, Plone has made great strides in two specific directions: theming, and custom content types. For theming, Plone has embraced a new technology named Diazo, which allows virtually unlimited flexibility in mapping any arbitrary page elements into an existing HTML theme. Thus, it is possible to select any theme from the thousands of free or low-cost designs created for any other blogging or CMS platform, and very quickly and cheaply turn it into a native Plone theme. For content types, the Dexterity architecture allows site administrators to very easily create new custom content types through a browser, with no programming required, and integrate them into the full set of features available in Plone.
Plone's security track record is legendary. NASA, the CIA, the FBI and many national, regional and local governments, as well as higher education institutions have chosen Plone because it's secure.
Plone scales up to any size website, with any level of traffic, thanks to its solid architecture and the availability of an industrial-strength ecosystem of add-ons for virtually any applciation.
Cons
Plone's main drawback is that it has higher system requirements that make it more expensive to host. Recently, newer low-cost cloud-based offerings have emerged that might eliminate this weakness.
Likelihood to Recommend
The larger your organization, the more appropriate Plone will be. This is not to say that Plone is a worse choice for small websites, only that the minimum investment for a Plone site is certainly higher than for other platforms. If you already use Plone for your site and are looking for a redesign or an overhaul, I would only advise switching to a different platform such as WordPress or Drupal if your organization is downsizing. For any other situation, Plone is the natural choice for your growth.
Plone was used for a 3rd party organization to manage their workings as an organization serving a large interest based community. For them, it was a place to manage information about the organization leaders, current events and eventually for community involvement. As a software engineer I built and plugged new pieces of product into Plone so that they could solicit and facilitate community involvement.
Pros
Does a lot straight out of the box - user and content management with varying levels of privileges
Fairly easy to set up a running instance of Plone on either windows or linux
There are various themes and plugins that can be integrated (the existence of them is good, actually doing so is not so fun)
Cons
Not everything is configurable or editable by Plone, and when you need to adjust or add custom pieces in, you need to deal with Zope. Zope has an ugly, confusing and difficult UI and structure as a backend.
Using 3rd party products is difficult to do - there are a few different ways to get them installed, all of which take a bit of luck to get right.
Building custom products for Plone is not fun. You've got to deal with an archaic framework to tie in that is not well documented (there is documentation about many things, but not great documentation and there are a lot of holes in the documentation).
Likelihood to Recommend
If you're not going to do anything different than what Plone offers out of the box then it could be a good choice. If when you do want things configured differently, you don't mind paying a premium for someone to go and fix things for you then Plone would be fine for you. It's just unfortunate that tweaking and adding things in is not more intuitive.
