Plone is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) and is designed to be extensible. Major development is conducted periodically during special meetings called Plone Sprints. Additional functionality is added to Plone with Products, which may be distributed through the Plone website or otherwise. The Plone Foundation owns and protects all copyrights and trademarks. Plone also has legal backing from the council of the Software Freedom Law Center.

The name Plone is an homage to the Warp Records band Plone, whose music is both simple and playful. The logo represents collaboration with three dots together in a group.

MediaWiki’s “Monobook” layout is based partially on the Plone style sheets.

History

The Plone project was begun in 1999, by Alexander Limi, Alan Runyan, and Vidar Andersen. It was made as a usability layer on top of the Zope Content Management Framework. The first version was released in 2001. The project quickly grew into a community, receiving plenty of new add-on products from its users. The increase in community led to the creation of the annual Plone conference in 2003, which is still running today. In addition, “sprints” are held, where groups of developers meet to work on Plone, ranging from a couple days to a week. In March 2004, Plone 2.0 was released. This release brought more customizable features in Plone, and enhanced the add-on functions. In May 2004, the Plone Foundation was created for the development, marketing, and protection of Plone. The Foundation has ownership rights over the Plone codebase, trademarks, and domain names. Even though the foundation was set up to protect ownership rights, Plone remains open source. In March 12, 2007, Plone 3 was released. This new release brought inline editing, an upgraded visual editor, and strengthened security, among many other enhancements. Up to September 2007, there have been over 200 developers contributing to Plone’s code. Plone won two Packt Open Source CMS Awards.

Design

Plone is built on the Zope application server, which is written in Python. Plone is made such that all information stored in Plone is stored in Zope’s built-in transactional object database (ZODB). Plone comes with installers for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, along with other operating systems. New updates are released regularly on Plone’s website. Plone is available in over 35 languages. Its interface follows the government standard WAI-AAA and U.S. section 508, which allows people with sight disabilities to properly access and use Plone. A major part of Plone is its use of skins and themes. When working with Plone, templates can be used to customize a website’s look. These templates are written with Cascading Style Sheets. In addition, Plone comes with a user management system called Pluggable Authentication Service. Introduced in Plone 2.5, “PAS” is used to properly sort actions from different users to their respective folders or accounts. PAS is also used to search for users and groups in Plone. Most importantly, PAS covers the security involved for users, requiring authentication in order to login to Plone. This gives users an increase in both security and organization with their content. A large part of Plone’s changes have come from its community. Since Plone is open source, the members of the Plone community regularly make alterations or add-ons to Plone’s interface, and make these changes available to the rest of the community via Plone’s website.

Community

Since its release, many of Plone’s updates and add-ons have come from its community. Events called Plone “sprints” consist of members of the community coming together for a week and helping improve Plone. The Plone conference is also attended and supported by the members of the Plone community. In addition, Plone has an active IRC channel to give support to users who have questions or concerns. Up through 2007, there have been over one million downloads of Plone. Plone’s development team has also been ranked in the top 2% of the largest open source communities.

Strengths and weaknesses

Plone excels when compared to other content-management systems in standards conformance, access control, internationalization, aggregation, user-generated content, micro-applications, active user groups and value. It’s available on many different operating systems, due to its use of platform-agnostic underlying technologies such as Python and Zope. Plone’s Web-based administrative interface is optimized for standards, allowing it to work with most common web browsers, and uses additional accessibility standards to help users who have disabilities. All of Plone’s features are customizable, and free add-ons are available from the Plone website.

Plone has an excellent security record compared to other popular content management systems.

Plone’s weaknesses include Python and Zope experience requirements for those wishing to add or extend the feature set, making for a considerable learning curve for developers. Plone has been rated as lagging in repository services when compared to other major CMSs.

Features

These are some of the features available in Plone 3.0:

• Inline editing
• Working Copy support
• Link and reference integrity checking
• Automatic locking and unlocking
• Collaboration and sharing
• Versioning, history and reverting content
• Upgraded visual HTML editor
• Workflow capabilities
• Authentication back-end
• Full-text indexing of Word and PDF documents
• Collections
• Presentation mode for content
• Support for the search engine Sitemap protocol
• Support for multiple mark-up formats
• Wiki support
• Automatic previous/next navigation
• Rules engine for content
• Auto-generated tables of contents
• Portlets engine
• Support, development, hosting & training
• LiveSearch
• Multilingual content management
• Time-based publishing
• Human-readable URLs
• Powerful graphical page editor
• Navigation and updated site maps
• Resource compression
• Caching proxy integration
• Drag and drop reordering of content
• XML exports of site configurations
• Localized workflow configuration
• Adjustable templates on content
• Standard content types
• Content is automatically formatted for printing
• Standards-compliant XHTML and CSS
• Accessibility compliant
• RSS feed support
• Automatic image scaling and thumbnail generation
• Free add-on products
• Cross-platform
• Comment capabilities on any content
• Microformat support
• Installer packages for multiple platforms
• WebDAV and FTP support
• In-context editing
• Backup support
• Cut/copy/paste operations on content

Other Information

• Developed by  Alan Runyan, Alexander Limi, Vidar Andersen and the Plone Team
• Latest release  3.1.7 / #REDIRECT Template:Start date and age
• OS  Cross-platform
• Platform  Zope
• Type  Content management system
• License  GNU General Public License
• Website  http://plone.org/

MiaCMS is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL) Version 2. It is written with the PHP & JavaScript programming languages and uses the MySQL database. The official project site can be found at http://miacms.org, and an online demo of MiaCMS is available at Open Source CMS Demo.

Requirements

* A Web Server (ex) Apache (version 1.3.19 or above) or Windows IIS
* PHP 4.3.2+
* JavaScript
* MySQL 4.0+

MiaCMS is thoroughly tested on Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Linux or one of the BSD’s are recommended, but anything else that can run the three pieces of software listed above should work just fine.

MiaCMS History

MiaCMS started as a fork of Mambo. Mambo is a Trademark of the Mambo Foundation, Inc. http://www.mambo-foundation.org. Mambo was originally developed by Miro International Pty Ltd in 2000. Mambo became Open Source software in April, 2001 under a GNU/GPL license. Miro assigned the copyright in Mambo to The Mambo Foundation in 2005 to ensure that Mambo remained free Open Source software owned and managed by the community. The rights to the Mambo CMS codebase, name and copyrights, are protected by the Mambo Foundation, a non-profit corporation formed to support and promote the Mambo Open Source project.

• April 2008: Four former Mambo core developers fork Mambo and form MiaCMS. The founding members are Chad Auld, Ozgur Cem Sen, Richard Ong, and Al Warren. The reasons behind the fork can be found on the project’s main site here. The initial fork is based on a Mambo 4.6.3 SVN snapshot just prior to their 4.6.4 release.
• May 2008: The first release, MiaCMS 4.6.4, is launched. It’s code name is Flourish. Here are the release notes for 4.6.4.
• June 2008: The 2nd release, MiaCMS 4.6.5, is launched. It’s code name is Eclipse. Here are the release notes for 4.6.5. The project also launches it official site designs and creates the official logo.
• August 2008: A security patch was released to deal with some XSS issues in the 4.6.5 release.
• September 2008: Version 4.6.5 SP1 was released. This version was the 4.6.5 release prepacked with the SP1 patch so users would not have to install and then immediately patch. MiaCMS is also selected as a finalists in the Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards competition under the “Most Promising Open Source CMS” category. Another former Mambo core developer, Neil Thompson, has joined the MiaCMS core development team.
• October 2008: MiaCMS ties for 3rd place in the Packt Publishing 2008 Open Source CMS Awards competition under the “Most Promising Open Source CMS” category. One of the teams core developers, Chad Auld, is also named in Packt Publishing’s 2008 list of “Most Valued People from Open Source Content Management Systems”.

Other Information

• Developed by  The MiaCMS Team
• Latest release  4.6.5 SP1 Latest releases
• Written in  PHP & JavaScript
• OS  Cross-platform
• Type  Content management system
• License  GNU General Public License v2
• Website  http://miacms.org

Overall Winner

1. Drupal – Drupal is a free software package that allows an individual or a community of users to easily publish, manage and organize a wide variety of content on a website, Tens of thousands of people and organizations are using Drupal to power scores of different web sites, including
   
2. Joomla! – Joomla is an award-winning content management system (CMS), which enables you to build Web sites and powerful online applications. Many aspects, including its ease-of-use and extensibility have made Joomla the most popular Web site software available. Best of all, Joomla is an open source solution that is freely available to everyone..
3. DotNetNuke - DotNetNuke is an open source web application framework written in VB.NET for the ASP.NET framework. The application’s content management system is extensible and customizable through the use of skins and modules, and it can be used to create, deploy, and manage intranet, extranet, and web sites.

Most Promising Open Source CMS

1. SilverStripe – SilverStripe is a free and open source programming framework and content management system (CMS) for creating and maintaining websites. The CMS provides an intuitive web-based administration panel, allowing any person to maintain their website without knowledge of markup or programming languages.
2. CMS Made Simple – CMS Made Simple is an open source (GPL) package, built using PHP that provides website developers with a simple, easy to use utility to allow building small-ish (dozens to hundreds of pages), semi-static websites. Typically our tool is used for corporate websites, or the website promoting a team or organization, etc. ..
   
3. ImpressCMS
4. MiaCMS

Best PHP Open Source Content Management System

1. Drupal
2. Joomla!, CMS Made Simple

Best Other Open Source Content Management System

1. Plone
2. dotCMS
3. DotNetNuke

Over the past few years, eZ Systems have made a name for themselves with eZ Publish, their open source content management software. They hit the 2.5 million download mark earlier this year, and show no signs of slowing down. As announced last week, eZ Publish is a finalist for Packt Publishing’s 2008 Open Source CMS Awards. It’s an honor to be nominated, goes the old saying, but it’s even better to win, and voting on Packt Publishing’s website is open until mid October.

In addition to the free open-source version of their content management software, eZ Systems offers a number of licensing options, some of which include a technical support subscription. That’s apparently where the bulk of their revenue comes from, and they announced this past week that they enjoyed 583% growth in new subscription sales with a renewal rate of over 90% for the first half of 2008. These are incredible numbers and have given eZ Systems two profitable quarters in a row, their first ever.

Finally, I wanted to mention the release of eZ Publish 4.0.1, 3.10.1, and 3.9.5, various versions of their flagship content management system. Although they include just a handful of enhancements, these releases focus mainly on addressing some security issues and bug fixes, reportedly over 300 for eZ Publish 4.0.1 alone.

eZ Publish is a solid, well-regarded platform with a substantial user community, and is certainly worth a look for organizations considering an open source content management system. And 2.5 million downloads is pretty convincing, too.