* Plone open source content management system
If there is one thing certain in the world of Web applications it is that the perfect content management system does not exist. Given the range of needs that content owners have and the features that CMS software provide and how the software pieces interact, none of the CMS products could ever satisfy everyone.
Anyone trying to manage a Web site’s content is doomed to spend lots of time trying to figure out which of the systems available might actually fit their needs and after choosing one, which CMS newcomer might be a better choice and worth moving to.
In this issue of the newsletter, we have YACMS (yet another CMS) for you to consider: Plone (see editorial links below), a free, open source (GNU General Public License), fully featured, sophisticated Web-based content management system.
Written in Python, Plone is technology neutral and has installers for Windows, Mac OS X, Unix, and Linux. The system will work with most relational database systems and runs on more or less anything that runs Python.
Plone has been localized for more than 20 languages and tools are available for managing multilingual content. It also follows standards for usability and accessibility and its output complies with U.S. Section 508 and the World Wide Web Consortium’s AAA rating for accessibility.
The Plone team claims around 100 developers worldwide. Due to Plone’s extensibility through scripting, there are a number of add-on products and several companies that specialize in Plone development and support.
Plone uses the Zope application server (also written in Python), which we discussed in this newsletter a long time ago (see “Hope for Zope” link below). The Plone installation program also installs Zope and Plone’s designers claim that you need to know nothing about Zope to run the system (in fact, Plone makes Zope easier to use).
Plone is extremely well and exhaustively documented (the basic guide to Plone alone runs to 425 pages) and there are even four books written about the system.
What an impressive piece of engineering. I plan to test Plone in the near future – look for a Gearhead review sometime in July. If you are already using Plone, please let me know your experiences.
