content management system (CMS): plone.org; open source

Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 340 core developers and more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries (available in more than 40 languages).
http://plone.org/

Plone lets non-technical people create and maintain website content using only a web browser. Plone offers a rich set of capabilities for public websites, private intranets and collaborative workspaces.

demo: http://plone-demo.sixfeetup.com/


A CMS allows users to create, manage and publish content to a website without requiring a high level of technical skill.

As websites have grown larger and more complex, content management systems like Plone have grown in popularity, since they provide an efficient, easy way for people to create and edit content in a consistent, secure and controllable fashion. CMSes also enable website visitors to interact with content and with each other by contributing comments, ratings, submitting forms and more.


Plone comes with a reliable, secure, easy-to-administer object database backend known as the ZODB (Zope Object Database). In addition, Plone can easily connect to data stored in Active Directory, LDAP, Salesforce.com, SQL databases, and more.

A free Plone add-on, RelStorage, also allows enterprises with investments in Oracle, MySQL and PostgreSQL to store the data driving their Plone site in their existing infrastructure to be able to make use of familiar tools, clustering and failover solutions.


How does Plone compare with Sharepoint, Drupal, Alfresco and Joomla?
Plone is a true CMS with built-in publication workflow and document management features, unlike other systems such as Sharepoint or Alfresco, which are primarily document management systems with limited web functionality. This makes Plone ideal for intranets and extranets.

Plone can be customized and extended to meet the specific needs of an organization in terms of site structure, content types, workflow rules, etc. Not all CMSes offer the same level of flexibility.

Because it is built on top of Python and Zope, Plone is very secure, which is a reason why many switch from Joomla and Drupal to Plone.

Plone is 100% open source, so released, stable versions can be downloaded for free. There's no need to purchase a per-server or per-user license to get commercial support, as is the case with Alfresco or Sharepoint.