Big sites suffer from a common problem: where did you put that article or image? LiveSearch increases the value of Plone's search engine by simplifying the search process. Results from a search are now instant. As you type letters for a search, possible matches appear below the search box — without changing the current page. Handy shortcut keys increase the convenience of LiveSearch, and you don't have your leave your keyboard to navigate search results.

So, instead of entering a search term, waiting for results, and refining your search, this live feedback on searching makes finding things faster and more effective. Try it — after using it a couple of times, you'll wonder how you managed without it!

The Plone Team would like to thank Christian Stocker for coming up with the initial implementation that inspired the LiveSearch implementation in Plone, and for the name.

With Plone, creating and maintaining sites in multiple languages is easier than in any other system.

Plone has native support for the LinguaPlone component, meaning that all the standard content types are translatable effortlessly.

Plone also supports Right-to-Left (RTL) languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Persian as one of the first content management systems in the world. This is done without having special templates, and both Left-to-Right and Right-to-Left content can exist on the same site.

LinguaPlone has a lot of features to help you manage your multilingual site.

• Split-screen editing for translations
• Full WebDAV, External Editor and FTP support
• Separate workflows for translations to help you manage updates to the content
• Add-ons to support the standard XLIFF export and imports for working with translation agencies
• For developers: Easy to add multilingual support to new content types

In addition, Plone currently has over 35 user interface languages, and more are being added.

All this reaffirms Plone's position as the most capable and user-friendly multilingual content management system in the world.

You need to publish the press release on Monday — at 8 in the morning. In a different time zone.

Plone allows you to snooze longer by allowing you to do time-based publishing, so you can set the date and time a document should become available.

Who hasn't seen URLs like these:

• http://www.somesite.com/page.php?articleid=32984179823&viewmode=alternate&user=blah&sessionid=FC78956BA
• http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/enus/vccore/h tml/core.2f.MD.2c_2f.ML.2c_2f.MT.2c_2f.LD.asp
• http://download.oracle.com/docs.jsp?cd=B19306_01/server.102/b14225/ch8gdk.htm

Both humans and search engines are much happier if they get proper URLs, which is why Plone's standard URLs look like this:

  http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/understanding-permissions

This gives you two advantages:

• URLs are understandable by humans — try reading any of the other example URLs over the phone to someone
• Search engines get key parts of the content as part of the URL, which leads to better search engine visibility

Authors enjoy working with word processors, and CMS teams have responded with browser-based graphical HTML editors. Most solutions stop at the basics of text highlighting and image insertion, but the new release of Plone achieves a productive balance between giving users creative freedom and enforcing consistent styles and layout.

Plone includes the cross-CMS Kupu visual editor. Kupu produces standards-compliant, clean XHTML -- it can even clean up the "messy" HTML that Microsoft Word produces.  Kupu also includes a high-performance asset browser for images and links.   Kupu allows site administrators to define paragraph and text span styles, and lets users easily apply these stylesheets to their text.   Plone extends Kupu's features to include easy configuration of editor features, handling broken links, and much more.

All of this means that users will have a more familiar, desktop-style editor for editing their content.

The visual editor also has an option to hide everything but the editor itself — letting you focus on what's important: producing high-quality content.

Of course, for users that prefer to edit their content in Microsoft Word, Macromedia Dreamweaver, or other client-side programs, Plone still offers the External Editor option — allowing users to seamlessly edit web content with a client-side application. Plone can even automatically convert non-HTML content (like Microsoft Word documents) to HTML.

As CMS sites get bigger, the need for efficient and flexible navigation increases. Plone provides many significant enhancements, including:

• Configuration of search results
• Automatic site map generation
• Configurable folder home pages
• Hiding individual items
• Blacklisting of an entire content type class

Site administrators can now easily control the appearance of items in the navigation with only a mouse click.

In addition, Plone ships with a full-featured, flexible site map that provides user- and security-specific sitemaps of sites — without any coding or maintenance. The site map is also color-coded by state, making it easy to do a quick, visual security inspection of your site.

Javascript and CSS files typically constitut more than 80% of the initial page download in a site, resulting in slow first-load page renders and heavy bandwidth usage. The built-in compression in Plone reduces the size of these files by about 25% out-of-the-box, and up to 50% when maximum compression is enabled.

The CacheFu add-on product now ships with Plone. CacheFu can increase the speed of your Plone site 10× to 40× (depending on setup) and makes caching transparent to the end-user.

The important part is that CacheFu allows Plone to explicitly invalidate old caches, so your content is always fresh, even if you have an aggressive caching policy.

It supports several different caching proxies, the most capable and recommended ones being Varnish and Squid — but also works with Apache and IIS to improve caching on these web servers.

The folder contents view supports Ajax-based drag and drop reordering of content in a folder. This makes it much easier to reorder many objects, and gives you full control of how it should be presented.

It is easy to replicate a particular site configuration across multiple instances, making it easy to create setup policies for sites. This is the standard for site creation/configuration and product customization in CMF, and is now an integral part of Plone.

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

Included view templates makes it easy to redefine the presentation of your content listings directly from the editing view. Want to turn that folder into a photo album with thumbnails for all your images? No problem, two clicks is all it takes!

Since Plone provides a lot of useful functionality by default, the standard content types are very capable out of the box, which let you get started quickly, and grow with your needs.

• Content can refer to other content with an easy interface for authors.
• Images support scaling and thumbnail generation.
• Events support the iCal and vCal standards for desktop calendar integration.
• Content supports multilingual sites out-of-the-box using LinguaPlone.
• All content types are now Archetypes-based, giving them a rich set of additional services like transformations and validation.

In addition, the content types can be extended by customers who need extra fields and features.

Plone was the first 100% XHTML and CSS standards-compliant CMS in the world, and is based on open standards.

Plone degrades gracefully, and works on any device that supports HTML — including old browsers, cell phones and text-based browsers like Lynx — as well as screen readers used by the blind.

Plone was the first Content Management System in the world to be compliant with the WAI-AA and US Section 508 accessibility standards, and meets or exceeds other strong accessibility standards.

This means that users with visual impairments or motor impairments are capable of using your site.

Plone takes a novel approach to syndication of content:

• Any Collection has its own RSS feed
• Any search result can be subscribed to as an always-updated RSS feed:

This means that you can create specialized RSS feeds on-the-fly — and subscribe to updates on the content that interests you. It also makes it easy to syndicate specialized content feeds to other sites.

Any image in Plone is automatically be scaled down to several different sizes. This makes it easy to have (for instance) smaller thumbnail previews showing in a photo gallery, and show the full-sized images when clicked.

Upload an image, and it's automatically rescaled to a variety of sizes, ready to be used in your content. No Photoshop needed!

Plone has an amazingly rich ecosystem of add-on products available. Need a message board? How about a plugin that lets you authenticate against an SQL database? Need support for that obscure bibliography standard in your site? A ticketing system or an issue tracker?

All these, and more are among the over 700 add-on modules available for Plone in the Add-on Products area on plone.org. All of these add-ons are free, and licensed under open source licenses, which means you can freely use them in your site.

Plone can be deployed on a number of platforms, and seamlessly moved between them.

Do you develop on your laptop that runs Mac OS X? Does the server run Linux? Does your co-worker develop on Windows?

No problem! Plone works the same regardless, and this gives you the flexibility to mix and match servers independently — as well as move systems that are running a certain operating system to a different platform — Plone doesn't care what platform it is running on.

No matter what kind of content you put in your Plone site, you have the ability to turn comments on the item on or off.

This provides an easy way to leave feedback on documents, images and other content — directly inside the system.

Microformats are a way to expose formats like calendar/event information, people and organization information, and more — in a human-friendly, machine-readable way.

Plone currently supports the hCalendar and rel-tag microformats, more formats may be added in the future.

Plone is one of the easiest-to-install content management systems around.

The Plone Team provides simple, click-through installers for Windows and Mac OS X, as well as the "Unified Installer", which makes it easy to set up Plone on any UNIX-like (Linux, Solaris, BSD, Mac OS X) system with a single command.

Plone comes "batteries included"

you'll be up and running within minutes!

Any location in the site can be mounted as a WebDAV folder (aka. "Web Folders") or as an FTP server.

This eases the job of uploading or downloading hundreds or thousands of content items, and lets you create site content with ease.

In Plone, what you see is what you edit. Unlike various other systems, there is no separate editing interface that looks and works differently from your site.

You simply navigate to the content item you want to change — or to the location where you want to add new content — and click the edit button.

Plone 3.0 adds additional conveniences, and allows you to edit a page without reloading the page again. Simply click on the element you want to edit. Perfect for quick corrections.

Backup is critical to security and reliability, and Plone allows you to back up without any downtime to the system.

A hot backup — also called a dynamic backup — is a backup performed on data even though it is actively accessible to users and may currently be in a state of being updated.

Plone supports hot backups, and does not require any downtime for the system — which is convenient when you have people around the world and in other time zones using your system.

It's easy to reorganize your content and perform operations on multiple content items in Plone.

Familiar cut/copy/paste operations are supported throughout the system, and reordering is done by simply dragging the content items up or down.

New in Plone 3.0: You now have the ability to select and entire range of items by holding down the shift key between the first and last item you want to select, and you can also select all items in the folder in addition to the ones that are displayed on your screen. Useful when you have a folder with 500 items in it.