After a very successful second beta, Plone 2.5 is just about ready four your production systems. That means it's time once again to get your development/testing instances ready and see if your products and sites upgrade properly, kick the tires and report any problems in the issue tracker! If you have any new projects, now is a great time to take advantage of the best Plone has to offer.

Plone 2.5 is a release with a significant focus on improved infrastructure. This is the first release of Plone that utilizes Zope 3 technologies, and is an important step in transitioning Plone to use these components throughout the system.

Download Plone 2.5 release candidate here! (updated Windows and Mac OS X installers — including Universal or Intel binaries — should be ready shortly)

Notable features in Plone 2.5 are:

New caching infrastructure

The CacheFu project now ships with Plone, and when installed can result in 10x to 40x faster page loads, depending on setup — while being entirely transparent to the end-user.

Pluggable Authentication Service

The new authentication structure in Plone 2.5 makes it very easy to integrate any kind of authentication with Plone. Plugins for LDAP and GMail (!) already exist, and more are easily added.

Support for XML exports of site configurations

It is now easy to replicate a particular site configuration across multiple instances, making it easy to create setup policies for sites.

Placeful Workflow

It is now possible to have workflow policies determined by location in the portal, not just by item type. This means that different parts of the portal can have different security settings, and entirely different workflow paths for the same types of objects.

Support for the latest technologies

Zope 2.9 and Python 2.4 are now supported, and Zope 3 technologies are used extensively throughout the Plone core.

Note: This release of Plone 2.5 requires Zope 2.9.3 and Python 2.4.2+ or Zope 2.8.7 and Python 2.3.5+. If you want to use the tarball with Zope 2.9, you will need to remove the Five product from your Products folder, as a newer version is already included with Zope 2.9.

For more detail, have a look at the included change log, and read the full release notes.