[Zope-Annce] Plone 2.0 released

[Alexander Limi]

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 at zope-europe.org



-- 
__________________________________________________________________

  Alexander Limi   ·   Interaction Architect   ·   Plone Solutions

  Development · Training · Support · http://www.plonesolutions.com
__________________________________________________________________

  Plone Co-Founder   ·   http://plone.org   ·   Connecting Content