08 Sep 2005
Plone Community Releases Plone 2.1
A Major Release For A Best Of Breed Content Management System
The Plone Foundation proudly announces the release of Plone 2.1, a significant upgrade to a continually growing open source Content Management System. Plone 2.1 introduces a number of new features and performance enhancements and has been rigorously tested.
Tame Your Content
"Content is king, but only if you can find it" says Plone co-founder Alexander Limi.
Plone 2.1 gives content managers and end users two new sophisticated, yet simple ways to more effectively search and organize their content.
"LiveSearch" is a fast, in-page search of a site's content with an instant preview of results as the user types. Immediate feedback to the user's search terms helps them quickly drill down to what they need.
"SmartFolders" are virtual folders that allow content managers to arrange content according to how they need to use it. Rather than labor over where to save something, users store a rich search as a SmartFolder.
In addition to LiveSearch and SmartFolders, Plone 2.1 includes additional batch content management features, enhanced user management and navigation as well as other user interface improvements.
This new set of rich functionalities provides users with the tools they need to greatly enhance their productivity and user experience.
Work Horse / Race Horse
Under the hood, Plone 2.1 shines. This release is not just a realization of features, but an affirmation of the Plone Community's dedication to quality and process. Plone developers have written more than 1,519 unit tests and functional tests to ensure the code works and works well.
This attention to detail has wrought notable gains in performance.
"Plone's scalability has been proven time and time again," said Matt Hamilton of Netsight UK.
With Plone 2.1, much of the custom work previously required to scale Plone for the largest websites comes right out of the box.
"In fact, Plone 2.1 is instantly 50 percent faster than Plone 2.0 without any effort whatsoever," Hamilton said.
Solid Foundation
Plone 2.1 builds on Plone's intuitive interface and rich out-of-the-box features such as time-based content publishing and role-based authoring and publishing.
Peter White of Surrey NHS Health Informatics Service said, "Our choice wasn't only based on cost. From a rigorous analysis of seven major systems, we found that the Plone system came out on top in terms of performance and features too".
- A proven user interface. Years of testing have 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 with Plone can easily 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 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, Active Directory, or relational databases.
- Internationalization support - There is absolutely no system available at any price with better international support, including user interface, content administration, and managing multilingual content.
"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, Runyan said. 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.
Aidan McGuire, Sales Director at Blue Fountain Systems said, "This decision by Surrey HIS sends a clear message that open source systems are viable as business solutions and are well able to compete with propriety software applications."
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.
This year Plone has sustained record-breaking growth, seeing deployments for OxFam America, Mark of the Unicorn, Motorola, and Ebay. Plone is a favorite choice for corporate, educational, government and non-profit environments.
Plone provides a highly customizable, server-side architecture, and boasts a simple yet flexible API. Plone is highly scalable, stable, extensible, and uses open standards throughout. It runs on many operating systems, including Linux, Windows, Solaris, Mac OS X, and many varieties of Unix.
Plone has wide international support, and is shipped with the interface available in more than 48 languages. Users of Plone include Marriott, NASA, Lufthansa, Continental Airlines, Warwickshire Police Force (UK), Columbia University (USA), and many others.
Download and learn more about Plone at www.plone.org.