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Plone

Score9 out of 10

23 Reviews and Ratings

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What is Plone?

Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops, and internal websites.

Categories & Use Cases

Key Features

Learn about the best (and worst!) features Plone has to offer, as determined by TrustRadius' reviewers.
Based on 23 ratings of Plone's features
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Top Performing Features

  • Page templates

    The CMS has standard webpage templates or types of web pages (e.g. homepage, article page, interior page, blog page, etc.); users can also build custom templates.

    Category average: 7.9

  • SEO support

    The CMS helps users create the right website infrastructure (pagination, page headers, titles, meta tags, url structure, etc.) to increase the site’s visibility in search engine results.

    Category average: 7.5

  • API

    An API (application programming interface) provides a standard programming interface for connecting third-party systems to the software for data creation, access, updating and/or deletion.

    Category average: 8

Areas for Improvement

  • Mobile optimization / responsive design

    The CMS helps users build webpages that work well on mobile devices – whether m-dot pages or responsively designed pages.

    Category average: 8.5

  • Content taxonomy

    Users can create multiple levels and types of content categories including tags.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Bulk management

    Users can change an attribute on a group of documents or sites all at once through features such as global search and replace, making bulk changes easier.

    Category average: 7.8

Reviews

What users are saying about Plone.
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Plone - A powerful enterprise-level content management system and application platform with great security

Rikupekka OksanenView profile
IT Specialist in Information Technology at University of Jyväskylä (1001-5000 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Plone is widely being used in our organization: from public websites to intranets, customized LMSs or customized sites designed to do some special thing, to smaller sites and different portals. We have had video publishing platforms, payment systems, customized forms, workflows and countless integrations to other internal and external systems. Plone is an extremely solid and safe platform to use, which is very important for us as a university. The content management is easy to use, and customization options are limitless. Especially important for us is the robust, yet flexible permission management; we may, if we want, to control the access permissions to a smallest detail in every page available.

Pros

  • Easy to use content management
  • Lots of features out of the box
  • Excellent security
  • Flexible permission management
  • Flexible workflow system
  • Limitless possibilities to extend and customize, also through the web without programming skills
  • Free to use, open source
  • Helpful and welcoming community
  • Customizable content types
  • Robustness
  • Accessibility
  • Multilingual features

Cons

  • As a big and mature system it might take time to learn how to develop
  • Not as well known as some other CMSs
  • Not so easy to find external developers, if needed

Return on Investment

  • Zero licence cost on 100+ systems we have on Plone. On some other systems the costs might be astronomical based on our user or content amount.
  • Our customized and well integrated LMSs - since 2009 we have received some 200,000 assignment submissions through our Plone-based systems. The amount of time saved compared to other ways of returning assignments is huge. Integration between Plone, our study management system and payments system allows students to enroll, pay and immediately access course content.
  • Workflows - we have many systems where we utilize Plone's flexible workflow management, allowing us to easily digitize manual work and sending papers around campus. Again, saves a lot of work and time.

Usability

Alternatives Considered

Drupal, WordPress and Squarespace

Other Software Used

Flowdock, Microsoft Teams, Mendix, Zulip

Plone an Excelent Open Source, Well Documented CMS Solution

Incentivized
Mauricio Quiroga-Pascal OrtegaView profile
Founder & CEO in Information Technology at Openpreneur (51-200 employees employees)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

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

Return on Investment

  • It was costly to learn how to use it. However, then it's very easy to train new members of the team. We have lower training costs.
  • Since it is an old open source platform, there is a lot of documentation, codes, and experience to copy/adapt. We have lower development costs.
  • As it is very easy to change/manage content, it allows us to save a lot of IT external companies.

Alternatives Considered

Drupal, WordPress, Joomla! and Umbraco CMS

Other Software Used

Python IDLE, Amazon Polly, Zapata Orquestra

Plone - enterprise opensource CMS

Tom CameronView profile
Technical Manager in Information Technology at Kitovu (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Very powerful and configurable security and permissions. This makes it easy to develop private intranets, secure areas of a site or simply be confident that the site won't be hacked easily.
  • Configurable workflows allow us to develop custom workflow solutions for our clients without the need for complex programming.
  • Base CMS functionality meets the needs of the vast majority of our sites without the need for significant programming, a large number of mature add-on products help in this area too.
  • Excellent SEO capabilities such as clean URLs, automated sitemaps, built in metadata management ensure Plone sites rank very highly in search engines
  • Version control of all changes with a detailed history and the ability to roll back changes. This has saved me many times in the past.
  • Plone is one of the most secure CMS solutions available. Vulnerabilities are extremely rare and the development community is highly skilled and alert to issues that do arise.

Cons

  • As a CMS its hard to find a flaw in Plone. But it is a difficult platform to learn and develop in. The Zope framework is unusual in its structure and can take a long time to become familiar with. So the one significant downside of Plone is the effort required to gain solid technical expertise.

Return on Investment

  • For out business Plone allows us to deliver enterprise level solutions at very reasonable budgets. We tender and compete against some of the much larger commercial CMS solutions and regularly win comfortably on price and deliver on functionality.
  • Plone also allows us to provide much more functionality than many clients expect. We are often able to over deliver on small budget projects because Plone comes with so much built in.

Plone, a high mountain to climb, but a beautiful view reaching the top.

Ronnie Stevens
Owner in Information Technology at Studio ZOO (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Plone is a folder-based system, organising content in a similar way desktop-users are doing for the last two decades. No need to teach non-tech customers some relational-database like paradigm for content management.
  • Plone is secure. It is the most secure CMS you can get your hands on.
  • Plone is flexible, and makes fast development easy.

Cons

  • Plone development is hard to learn. Plone is on the right track to make simple development more easy, but is far from its goal.
  • Documentation is always a problem. This is due to Plone's complexity.
  • There are only few providers capable of running Plone-websites.
  • Plone is not very well known to the public, making it harder to sell.

Return on Investment

  • Plone makes it possible to maintain and update the running websites with very small effort.
  • My customers need little to no support on using the CMS.
  • Creating custom content types is really fast.

The best CMS most people will never use...

Incentivized
Peter Fraterdeus
Director of Design in Professional Services at SlowPrint.com (1-10 employees employees)

Pros

  • Rock-solid technology stack. The python/Zope/Plone stack is as solid as anything else out there.
  • Highly customizable TTW, if needed, via the Zope Management Interface, or Diazo XSL-transform theme design.
  • Good support from core developers, lots of solid add-ons which address just about any needs.
  • Amazingly customizable workflow, permissions and security management.

Cons

  • Error messages are often cryptic, rising up with a traceback from deep in the system.
  • It's perhaps hard to control this, since add-ons will always bring uncontrolled elements to bear.
  • Perhaps some way to better visualize the source of the problem? End users should never see a traceback.
  • TTW design options. In fact, Diazo based theming is remarkably powerful, and there are many tools for TTW design, but to better integrate this essential part of web development would make for a more useful end product.

Return on Investment

  • Positive in that we were able to launch a new site in a few days, mostly copying and pasting directly through-the-web from our old site.

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