Plone 2.0: The Most Productive Content Management System The Plone Team announces the release of Plone 2.0, the next generation of its rapidly growing open source Content Management System. After an impressive launch, Plone continues to garner attention. Plone was the highest-voted open source project for the O'Reilly pavilion at COMDEX and was the only open source system invited to the Jupiter Content Management Conference. Widely deployed worldwide, Plone has been downloaded over 100,000 times, with many companies throughout the world offering consulting, customization, and support. "We chose Plone for many of our client projects because of its out-of-the-box ease-of-use and features," says Barry Reicherter, Vice President for Porter Novelli Interactive, a division of the international media communications firm. "We could customize it quickly for our clients' needs, while retaining the intuitive interface and accessibility. That's critical for our clients' success. We're looking forward to the improvements that Plone 2 offers, especially for larger organizations." Porter Novelli Interactive has delivered Plone solutions as part of its mission to deliver marketing-driven value to their clients, such as the recent launching of usepropane.com, a national site designed and managed entirely with Plone, and backed with a $25 million ad campaign. Plone 2.0 offers significant productivity gains for content managers and developers. It includes an intuitive interface and out-of-the-box features such as time-based content publishing and role-based authoring and publishing. Particularly compelling for many organizations is that Plone is available without licensing costs and offers a similarly stable, feature-rich CMS environment as competing commercial systems costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. There are dozens of new features and improvements in Plone 2.0, including: * A user interface that has been streamlined and improved. Testing has shown it to be both flexible and intuitive. It takes existing features such as sophisticated workflow, wizard-style forms and content editing and offers many improvements. * Sites deployed on the Plone 2.0 platform conform with government standards for website accessibility as the Plone interface is compliant with Section 508 and WAI-AAA standards. * The entire Plone interface is customizable using standards-compliant programming and graphics tools. * Add-on enhancements can now be installed, uninstalled, and examined with a one-click process. Trying out new additions is a snap. * For enterprise users, user/group management features allow sophisticated security configurations. User data can come from many external sources, including LDAP, ActiveDirectory, or relational databases. Workspaces allow intuitive group collaboration. "The Plone community continues to amaze everybody who chooses to be a part of it" said Alan Runyan, co-founder of Plone. "Many open source projects are only attractive to hard core software developers but the Plone project has attracted varied groups such as artists, musicians, usability specialists, and industry gurus. The Plone project management team is thrilled at the number of entities that offer training, full support, hosting, and consulting services These services provide a level of security and professionalism that allows Plone to fit the needs of organizations around the world." About Plone Plone is the leading Content Management System for the award-winning Zope application server. Supported by thousands of developers from around the world, it is one of the most sophisticated, popular, and easy to use Enterprise Content Management Systems on the market today. Plone provides a highly customizable, server-side architecture, and boasts a simple yet flexible API. Plone is highly scalable, stable, extensible, and has open standards as its core mentality. It runs on many operating systems, including Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X, and many varieties of Unix. It has wide international support, and is shipped with the interface available in over 30 languages. Users of Plone include Marriott, NASA, Lufthansa, Continental Airlines, the Governors of Texas and Hawaii, and many others. Information about Plone is available at http://plone.org. Press Contacts Paul Everitt Zope Europe Association paul@zope-europe.org -- __________________________________________________________________ Alexander Limi · Interaction Architect · Plone Solutions Development · Training · Support · http://www.plonesolutions.com __________________________________________________________________ Plone Co-Founder · http://plone.org · Connecting Content