• Plone is easy to install. You can install Plone with a a click and run installer, and have a content management system running on your computer in just a few minutes.
• Plone is easy to use. The Plone Team includes usability experts who have made Plone easy and attractive for content managers to add, update, and mantain content.
• Plone is international. The Plone interface has more than 35 translations, and tools exist for managing multilingual content.
• Plone is standard. Plone carefully follows standards for usability and accessibility. Plone pages are compliant with US Section 508, and the W3C's AAA rating for accessibility.

• Plone is Open Source. Plone is licensed under the GNU General Public License, the same license used by Linux. This gives you the right to use Plone without a license fee, and to improve upon the product.
• Plone is supported. There are close to a hundred developers in the Plone Development Team around the world, and a multitude of companies that specialize in Plone development and support.
• Plone is extensible. There is a multitude of add-on products for Plone to add new features and content types. In addition, Plone can be scripted using web standard solutions and Open Source languages.
• Plone is technology neutral. Plone can interoperate with most relational database systems, open source and commercial, and runs on a vast array of platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and BSD.

Technical overview

Plone is a content management framework that works hand-in-hand and sits on top of Zope, a widely-used Open Source web application server and development system. To use Plone, you don't need to learn anything about Zope; to develop new Plone content types, a small amount of Zope knowledge is helpful, and it is covered in the documentation.

Zope itself is written in Python, an easy-to-learn, widely-used and supported Open Source programming language. Python can be used to add new features to Plone, and used to understand or make changes to the way that Zope and Plone work.

By default, Plone stores its contents in Zope's built in transactional object database, the ZODB. There are products and techniques, however, to share information with other sources, such as relational databases, LDAP, filesystem files, etc.

Plone runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and many other platforms; double-click installers are available for Windows and Mac OS X, and RPM packages are available for Linux. For full information, see Download.

Plone in numbers (September 2007)

(All information from Ohloh)

Very large, active development team

• Over the past twelve months, 84 developers contributed new code to Plone.
• This is one of the largest open-source teams in the world, and is in the top 2% of all project teams on Ohloh, which lists most of the major open source projects in the world.
• Over the entire history of the project, 219 developers have contributed.

Mature, well-established codebase

• The first lines of source code were added to Plone in 2001. This is a relatively long time for an open source project to stay active, and can be a very good sign.
• A long source control history like this one shows that the project has enough merit to hold contributors's interest for a long time.

Increasing year-over-year development activity

• Over the last twelve months, Plone has seen a substantial increase in activity. This is a good sign that interest in this project is rising, and that the open source community has embraced this project.

More information

• The central place for Plone documentation is Documentation. This also details other sources of help, such as mailing lists and online discussion channels.
• Additional information and case study articles on Plone can be found at in Plone Articles.
• A list of sites running Plone is at Plone Sites.