Plone Foundation Secures Plone.com Domain

New website to serve as a business and marketing presence for Plone.

Ever since Plone was first released in 2001, interested users have been excitedly typing "www.plone.com" into their browsers to find out more and coming up... empty.

Despite the proliferation of .org, .net, .me, .mobi and so many other domain suffixes, reflexively adding ".com" to a product or company name is deeply ingrained behavior for many internet users. Fortunately, search engines usually got users to our front doorstep at Plone.org with only a minor delay.

Well, today that wait is over.

The Plone Foundation has acquired the domain Plone.com from its previous owner, an individual with the last name "Plone." Board members spontaneously thanked and congratulated Plone Foundation President Calvin Hendryx-Parker for his leadership in negotiating this deal on the community's behalf.

Hendryx-Parker, CTO of Plone development and hosting company Six Feet Up, is well known for skill in such matters. In a turn that now seems contrived, he'll be presenting a talk titled "How to Seal the Deal" at Plone Conference 2011 in San Francisco this November.

Ownership of the Plone.com domain has long been high on the board's list of goals for marketing. The effort to secure the domain began over a year ago as part of a board initiative to provide Plone with a business-and-marketing focused web presence which would compliment the more development-and-community focused Plone.org.

The board reaffirmed that the communications and marketing team will be leading an effort to turn Plone.com a place where interested users can come for the high-level product information, reviewer's guides, and links to companies providing Plone services and consulting. The goals and plans for the site have been underway during the process, but with the completion of the acquisition the team will be looking for help and input from throughout the community as to how this new site can best meet their needs. Plans are being made for work to be done on the site content and implementation during the Plone Conference 2011 in November.

Due to the unpredictability of DNS updates, it may be a couple of days before Plone.com resolves to Plone.org as a temporary redirect. But in the near future Plone.com will become a destination for people seeking high-level product information to skim before diving into the depths of Plone.org.