Plone
Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. In principle, Plone can be used for any kind of website, including blogs, internet sites, webshops and intranets. It is also well positioned to be used as a document publishing system and groupware collaboration tool. The strengths of Plone are its flexible and adaptable workflow, very good security, extensibility, high usability and flexibility.
Plone is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is designed to be extensible. Major development is conducted periodically during special meetings called Plone Sprints. Additional functionality is added to Plone with Products, which may be distributed through the Plone website or otherwise. The Plone Foundation owns and protects all copyrights and trademarks. Plone also has legal backing from the council of the Software Freedom Law Center.
MediaWiki's "Monobook" layout is based partially on the Plone style sheets.
Installation
Plone is a lot bigger (36M) than most of the PHP based CMS's probably because it contains Zope and it's own version of Python. Plone is not for noobs to setup, it's a fully featured site administration system for managing multiple instances. After installation I was told that everything had been installed successfully, nothing was running and no indication was given as to what needed to be done next. Their installation documentation didn't give me any clues and in the end I went to their IRC channel where some helpful people quickly gave me instructions on what to do next.
I ran through the installation setting it up as standalone with all default options. By default the installer configures Plone to run on port 8080 if port 80 is already in use. The Plone daemon must then be activated, which is done as follows if default paths were used for the installation:
Going to our domain on port 8080 then allowed me to create a test Plone instance which you can see at www.organicdesign.co.nz:8080/od.
Plone in the cloud
Plone uses ZODB for its storage which can be plugged in to any storage model. This makes it an attractive candidate for moving in to the cloud or even in to P2P space by using a DHT for persistent object storage.
- NEOPPOD - Distributed Transactional NoSQL Object Database (seems to require MySQL currently though), developed for ERP5
- Bounty Program on Zope/Plone with Scality Droplet - a company offering a bounty to get ZODB working on their cloud system
- Cloud - our article on migrating into the cloud
