Plone 6 today
The existing Plone platform is mature, secure, flexible, and extendable. It offers a good user experience and focuses on accessibility.
Plone 6.0 was shipped in December 2022 with Volto as its default frontend. This ensures Plone has a stable and feature-rich back-end for the foreseeable future and a state-of-the-art front-end stack.
Release Schedule and Release Policy
Plone has over 20 years of history behind it and a clear path to future.
Highlights of the current Release schedule and policy
All Plone 6 minor versions will get security support until 2027-12-31, 5 years after Plone 6.0.0 was released.
Plone 6.0.x with Volto 16.x will get maintenance support until 2024-12-31, 2 years after Plone 6.0.0 was released. Use this for your site when your primary concern is stability.
Maintenance support for Plone 6.1.x stops once 6.2.0 is released. Maintenance for Plone 6.2.x stops once 7.0.0 is released. Use this for your site when you want the latest features and most modern approaches.
Plone 5.2.x is out of maintenance support. It will get security support until 2024-10-31. Older Plone versions are unsupported.
Roadmap to Plone 6.x and Plone 7
Plone has 20+ years of history behind it, but what is the path to the future?
Download Roadmap to Plone 6.x and Plone 7 (pdf)
Plone 6.1 is planned to be shipped in late 2024
Plone 6.1 will contain new features like:
Anchor links
Plone 6 generates anchor links for headlines automatically. These anchor links can be copied to the clipboard and pasted into the link widget.
Link Integrity View
The Link Integrity view lists all content objects that currently use or link to the current object. This allows editors to clean up links and references in the view without having to click on a delete button and rely on link integrity warnings.
Plone Distributions
In Plone 6.1 we will have an API to create “distributions” of Plone. Technically, both Volto and Classic UI could be called Plone distributions. We will make a way to define a Python package as a Plone distribution. You can define your own list of add-ons that get installed when creating a new Plone site, and also define default content.
Image Optimizations with Sizes and Srcsets
Plone 6.1 will implement a new image component in Volto that offers the browser different options (srcset) for every image. With this information, the browser can decide which image to load. This helps improve page loading times, especially on mobile devices.
And more things like
- an upgrade to React 18
- TinyMCE 7 in Classic UI
- drop Python 3.8 and 3.9
- switch Package Manager from Yarn to pnpm
- and many more!
And what's next: Plone 6.2+ should have features like
- improved Drag and Drop
- enhanced Contents View
- Users/Groups Control Panel Overhaul
- Keyword Manager in Core
- and more!
Plone 7
What about Plone 7 down along the road?
Plone 7.0's main change is the introduction of The Quanta Design System for Volto. It features a common interface to interact with blocks in the block engine, called the Quanta Toolbar. It's a Volto CMSUI artifact that acts as a placeholder of buttons, handlers and menus that allows the user to interact with a block's settings.
There are lots of other ideas too, already planned. So rest assured, by choosing the Plone of today, know it will be here for tomorrow too, and ready for tomorrow's challenges.