It's time get those development/testing instances ready and see if your products and sites upgrade properly, kick the tires and report any problems in the issue tracker!

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 beta here! (Windows and Mac OS X installers — including Universal or Intel binaries — should be ready sometime next week)

Notable features in this Plone 2.5 beta are:

New caching infrastructure

The CacheFu project now ships with Plone, and after setup leads to between 10x to 40x faster page loads of the view templates, depending on setup — and makes caching 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 by default.

Note: Users wishing to use the Release with Zope 2.9 must remove the Five product from their instance Products directory, or replace it with the latest release of Five 1.3.

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