What is Plone?
Plone is one of the world's most popular and powerful content management systems. People love Plone for its wide range of features and its exceptional ease-of-use. System administrators love it for its security and stability. Programmers love its modular, component-based design, and the ease with which it can be customized and extended. But Plone is much more than just a content management system. It is a flexible, extensible framework for building custom web site applications. Moreover, Plone is also a vibrant global community of users, consultants, and developers.
In short, Plone is both a powerful piece of software for building and managing web sites, and the global community of people who support it.
Plone: the product
Plone is one of the world's most popular, powerful, and easy-to-use content management systems. Plone makes it easy for people to build and manage web sites without any knowledge of HTML, web servers, or computer programming.
Plone has too many built-in features to be listed here, but a few highlights are:
- An intuitive, graphical HTML editor
- Automatic resizing of images
- Granular, role-based permissions, and an advanced workflow engine
- Versioning, staging, and locking of content
- Human-readable and search-engine friendly URLs
- Full-text indexing of all content, including Word and PDF files
- Accessibility support for visually-impaired users, including compliance with WAI-AA and US Section 508 standards
Note
A complete list of the features of Plone 3 can be found at: http://plone.org/products/plone/features/3.0.
Plone: the framework
Plone can also be customized and extended to meet almost any content management or web site development need. There are hundreds of free add-on products for Plone, and you can easily build your own to handle more specialized needs.
Plone is written in the programming language Python, and is built on top of the Zope web application server and its Content Management Framework (CMF). These systems provide Plone with a powerful underlying framework and make it easy to add new features to Plone. Plone's use of Python and Zope also allow us to leverage a wide range of Python software not written specifically for Plone.
Plone runs equally well on Mac OS X, Windows, and *nix. A commercially-supported distribution of Plone for Windows and Internet Information Service (IIS), called Enfold Server, is also available.
Plone: the community
Plone isn't the product of a company. As an open source project, it's the product of a community. Plone started in 2001 as a collaboration between Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan. It quickly blossomed into a worldwide community of thousands of users, integrators, and developers. It is this community that builds, improves, documents, supports, and implements Plone.
In many ways, Plone is this community. Plone-the-software continues to change (in some cases quite radically), but Plone-the-community, with its core values of openness, accessibility, democracy, and friendliness, is the bedrock upon which Plone's ongoing success is built.
By picking up this book, you stand upon the doorstep of this warm, open, and friendly community. We invite you to come on in and stay awhile.
You can connect with us both online and in the real world.
The main online channels for the Plone community are its email lists and the #plone IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel. You can find these at http://plone.org/support, and these are the best ways to get help with Plone.
Plone has a strong culture of face-to-face gatherings. Local Plone user groups meet regularly in cities around the world. The Plone community has an annual global conference, as well as a number of smaller regional 'symposia'. Various Plone consultants offer regular training classes. In addition, much Plone development takes places through 'sprints'—small groups of people getting together for intensive, pair-programming development and mentoring sessions.
You can find an up-to-date list of Plone user groups at http://plone.org/support/local-user-groups .
Tip
What does the name 'Plone' mean, anyway?
It doesn't mean anything. Plone is the name of a defunct electronic music band from England. When Alan and Alex first started discussing the project-that-would-become-Plone, they soon discovered their mutual admiration for the band Plone, and decided to name their software after it. It could be observed that the name 'Plone' continues a long open source tradition of giving incredible products obscure names that belie their true quality and power.