What is Plone?
Plone is an open source web based content management system. What does this mean? Basically it means that Plone provides you a powerful fully customizable web site that you can use to manage your organisation's content.
Content types
Content here refers to basically anything that can be stored on a computer for example web pages, spreadsheets, documents, videos, executables, and pictures. Plone provides default content types for the most common uses but it is also easy to create new ones specific to your needs.
Security
Since most organisations are hierarchical, it makes sense that access to the information and content on a Plone site should be governed by a fine grained security system to allow administrators of the site to specify exactly who is able to view, edit or create specific content. Plone provides roles-based and group-based security. This allows you to restrict access to individual content or content types to specific indivuals or groups.
Workflow
Another feature that comes built in with Plone is workflows. Each content type can have a workflow and the current state of the workflow on some piece content will determine who can do what it.
Third party add ons
Since Plone is designed to be fully customisable and open source, it is possible to customize a plone site to create just about any type of website imaginable. So altough plone is geared towards content management solutions, it can be applied to various other use cases as well. Plone makes it easy to develop third party applications (called products) that extend or specialise a vanilla plone site. Dozens of these products already exists and are free to use. Visit plone.org for more information.
Internationalisation
Plone is being developed and used by people from all over the world. At this years conference in Naples, there were people from at least 15 countries. This means that Plone is good at internationalisation. It has been translated into over 30 languages and new translations are easy to do.
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