Introducing Plone Features

Internationalization

The whole Plone user interface is translated into more than 20 languages, including Korean, Japanese, French, Spanish, and German. Inserting your own translation is easy.

Usability

Plone offers an excellent user experience that provides high levels of usability and accessibility. This isn't just a matter of presenting pretty HTML but instead goes to the core of Plone. Plone provides an interface that's compatible with the industry and government standard WAI-AAA and U.S. Section 508. This allows sites built with Plone to be used by people with vision di sabilities. In addition, this provides the unexpected but related benefit that your page may index better in search engines such as Google.

Skinnable

Plone separates the content from the actual templates used to present the content, often called skins. The skins are written in the excellent HTML templating system, Zope Page Templates, and a large amount of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). With little knowledge of Plone, you can apply multiple skins, achieve multiple looks, and totally customize your Web site's appearance.

Registration and Personalization

Plone features a complete user registration system. Users register with a Plone site using their own username, password, and any other information you might want to add about the user. You can then personalize the whole user interface for that user. In addition, with add-ons, you can use information you already have about users, coming from many places, such as relational databases, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP), Active Directory, and more.

Workflow and Security

Workflow controls the logic of processing content through the site. You can configure this logic through the Web using graphical tools. Site administrators can make sites as complex or as simple as they'd like; for example, you can add notification tools such as sending e-mails or instant messages to users.

For every item of content in a Plone site, you can set up access control lists to decide who has access to that item and how they'll be able to interact with it. Will they be able to edit it, view it, or comment on it? All this is configurable through the Web.

Extensible

Since Plone is open source, it can be easily altered. You can change and configure almost any aspect of Plone to suit your needs. Countless packages and tools for Plone provide a wide array of options for smaller sites and for large-scale enterprises. Repositories of free add-ons for Plone are available at http://www.plone.org. With development tools such as Archetypes  you can generate and alter Plone code easily through the Web or using Unified Modeling Language (UML) tools.

Content Customization

Users of a Plone site can add all manner of content, but the data added isn't limited or constrained. Plone developers can create their own content types so that almost any type of content can be managed; the only limit is your own imagination.

Documentation

The Plone project maintains documentation, including this book, which is published under the Creative Commons license. The best starting place for the community documentation is at http://www.plone.org/documentation.

Community

One of the best things about Plone is the community of developers and companies that supports and develops Plone. With more than 60 developers involved to some degree in the project around the world, it's almost always possible to find a Plone developer online who is willing and able to help you. Alan Runyan, Alexander Limi, and Vidar Andersen started Plone; however, it quickly grew into a thriving open-source project as more developers became involved. The contributions from these developers form the Plone product that's now available.