Content Management Matters ™

Plone, the sometimes enigmatic open source CMS, has been working hard and planning big changes. The recent wrap up of the 2008 Plone Strategic Planning Summit is proof positive that they are serious about competing in the big world of open source CMS and not getting lost in the mix that is growing rapidly as others pull ahead of the field.

DISCOVER Magazine, one of the most widely read science mags in the US, had out grown its dated web publishing infrastructure. Times were changing, multi-media was big and in general Web and CMS technology had moved forward significantly.

DISCOVER chose the Plone Web content management system as the platform for managing and delivering their primary website (http://www.discovermagazine.com). The decision was made on the basis of the system's ease-of-use, feature set, strong open source community, outstanding customizability, standards compliance, reputation and delivery performance.

In part one of this two-part series we described both how DISCOVER uses the Plone Web CMS to manage its website, and how the DISCOVER team worked through the process of migrating existing content from its older site into the Plone system.

Here in part two, we will review some of the specific features of Plone and how DISCOVER has taken advantage of them, and then we'll discuss a bit about the website's post-launch performance.

After nine months of hard work, the folks at the Plone Team have announced the release candidate build of Plone 3.0, available for all platforms.

Plone, an open source CMS built on the Zope application server, is used by hundreds of professional web sites around the world. This upcoming release is promised to be the most advanced and feature-ridden version of this popular CMS product.