Wouldn't it be nice if you could click on any part of a document to do a quick update, correct a spelling error or change a date on an event?

With the new inline Ajax-powered editing of Plone, you no longer have to reload a page or go to a separate screen to make a correction — simply edit it directly by clicking on it.

And if you make a mistake? No problem, Plone will tell you immediately, and allow you to correct it effortlessly.

You might have been in a situation like this before: you have published a document, and you need to update it extensively, but you want the old version to exist on the web site until you have published the new one. You also want the new document to replace the current one, but you'd like to keep the history of the old one, just in case.

Of course, you could make a copy of it, edit the new version, and when the new version is ready, move away the old version, copy in the new version, etc. But there's an easier way to do this in Plone, which is what we call "working copies".

Essentially, you can check out a parallel version of a published document, and Plone will keep track of the two documents together. You can then go off and polish your new document to perfection — and when you're ready for the new version to go live, you just publish it.

Behind the scenes, Plone will replace the old document with the new one in the exact same location and URL — and archive the old version as part of the new document's version history.

When handling a lot of different content with links and references between them, it becomes hard to keep track of all the connections between them. You have probably managed to delete an image or a document, only to find that somebody else was actually linking to it from somewhere else.

Plone does several things to stop this from happening:

• Any reference — be it a link or an image you include from somewhere else in the system — is kept track of. If somebody tries to delete an image that is used in your document, they will get a warning, telling them that you are currently using this image in your document. (They can of course still go ahead and do this if they really want to, but at least we tell them)
• Anytime you move a resource — a document, an image, a file, it doesn't matter — Plone keeps track of where the resource ended up. So old links don't break — they are transparently redirected to the new location instead.

These two capabilities work together to mean fewer broken links and less frustration for your users.

When two people are working on the same content, you don't want them to overwrite each other's content — should they happen to be editing the document at exactly the same time.

Plone gives you a lightweight locking message that will tell you that a document was locked, by whom, and how long ago — so you won't accidentally stomp on somebody else's changes.

Oh, and it also gives you an easy way to unlock documents, so that document that you are looking at that says it was locked by John in Accounting 10 days ago — yes, the same guy that was telling everybody about his upcoming Jamaica vacation — can be unlocked without needing to call John or get the system administrators involved.

One of the most important things about working on content is to be able to share it with a specific set of users, and give them different types of access to your document.

Plone easily lets you control who can:

• View your content
• Edit your content
• Approve your content for publishing
• Add new content

You can give these permissions to individuals, or entire groups of people.

With the versioning support in Plone, you can:

• Get a full version history of your edits
• Compare certain revisions of your document with others
• Revert to an earlier version of the document

It also keeps track of who made which change, and when it was performed.

Plone 3.0 ships with Kupu 1.4, which includes a number of new features, including:

• Support for inserting resized images
• Automatic image captioning
• Support for inserting Flash content
• Character styles (in additional to paragraph styles)
• HTML Anchor tags, including automatic table of contents generation and linking directly to page anchors.

Every organization is different, and most have a standardized way to handle publishing of content, keep track of who's responsible for a task, or when content expires or is published.

Plone's powerful workflow capabilities make it easy to model this real-world process to handle your content and tasks. Security, guard roles and triggering of events when something is changed in the system all combine to give you a very flexible solution for keeping everything organized, secure and making sure everyone is up to date on what's going on at any time.

By default, Plone ships with the following pre-configured workflows, but you can create your own as you see fit:

• Simple web publishing workflow
• Intranet/Extranet publishing workflow
• Community-centric workflow
• Single-state workflow

Your organization may already have systems in place that lets people log in. You really don't want to give them another set of passwords to keep track of — which is why Plone ships with a flexible authentication back-end.

By default, Plone support its own authentication system and the OpenID standard, and integrates with LDAP and Active Directory servers via freely available plug-ins.

A lot of content on many websites consists of PDF and Word documents. Plone automatically indexes the full text of Word and PDF files. Support for other file formats can be added.

Plone's innovative LiveSearch feature gives you instant search feedback, making it easy for users to quickly find content across your entire site.

Content management isn't just about adding, editing, and approving content. It's also about helping users understand the connection between pieces of content.

The inclusion of text and metadata has allowed CMS products to become more flexible and have less rigid folder schemes. Instead of creating a process so you can remember where you saved specific files or documents, you can now store a detailed search as a Collection. Reduce your chaos. Have your content right at hand.

Plone takes this idea and makes it much more powerful and easy-to-use. Want to show all news items created by the Marketing department in the past week? Need an automatically updated list of all the files added to your project as it progresses? Collections to the rescue!

New in Plone 3.0: Collections (formerly known as Smart Folders) can now also store explicit references in addition to the stored search. This is very handy when you want to create a list of reports, with a document at the top which gives instructions on how to read them, for instance.

Creating Collections is a straightforward task, and the creator can even decide how the results should be listed visually — all without writing any HTML or a single line of code.

Collections are also RSS-enabled out-of-the-box, so a simple blog can be created with just a few clicks!

Pages in a Plone site can be turned into slide presentations. You can have text that is only shown in the print version, so your slides are simpler and easier to read.

New in Plone 3.0: There is now a new presentation implementation that works in all modern browsers: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari.

Plone supports the Sitemap protocol standard, which ensures that all your publicly visible content is indexed properly.

This standard is supported by all major search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Some people prefer using plain-text formats to write their content instead of using WYSIWYG editors. If you're one of these people, you're in luck — Plone supports the following text-based markup formats:

• Markdown
• Textile
• Structured Text
• Restructured Text
• Plain Text

And if you want to use a different format, Plone makes it easy to plug in more formats, and control which of them should be available in your site.

Plone takes a novel approach to the wiki format — incorporating support for it in all existing documents. That means that we support wiki markup in any type of content — be it plain text, any of the text-based markups, HTML — it even works with Word and PDF documents if you have display transforms set up for these.

A common complaint about wikis is that they have weak access control, and promote bad site structure. This new approach to wiki in Plone means that you can get the benefits of the quick and easy wiki content generation and linking, housed in a world-class content management system with proper access controls and the multitude of features exclusive to Plone.

It's wiki, without the wiki aftertaste!

Often, a user wants to quickly browse content in a folder and move effortlessly from one piece of content to the next without having to navigate away from the content item they are viewing.

Plone gives you this capability on any content, and you can easily control this on the Settings tab in any Folder object.

Do you want a mail to go out to the project group when reports are uploaded to a certain location in your site? Want to move a file from one location to another when it is added after a certain date?

Plone 3.0 ships with a powerful and configurable content rules engine that lets you define triggers and perform operations when these events are triggered.

Sometimes you have a long document that you want to present in a single page. One solution is to add a table of contents at the top that allows readers to skip ahead to the section they are interested in.

Maintaining such a table of contents manually is error-prone, not to mention boring. That's why Plone gives you the ability to enable an always-updated, automatically generated table of contents for pages that need it. It supports nested chapters based on the headers you already have in your document.

This saves you boring grunt work, and makes your document easier to read and navigate.

Plone 3 comes with a rewritten, more capable and higher performance portlets engine. It makes it easy to display things like news listings, review lists — as well as content from other web sites using RSS or Atom feeds.

Plone is more than just software. In fact, it can be argued that the most important part of Plone is its fantastic community of companies and organizations that offer Plone support, development, hosting and training.

On the Plone Network website, over 175 Plone providers large and small in over 40 countries around the world list themselves, their deployed Plone-based sites and their case studies.

The Plone Network was launched recently and is growing quickly — but it's already an invaluable resource for finding a Plone provider near you, should you need Plone services of any type.