Plone is the most popular and most full feautured Open Source Content Management System available at the moment. Here at Isotoma we are very strong advocates of Plone - its power, simplicity and extensibility make it a joy to work with and enable us to focus on the hard bits of the project, rather than struggle with the bits that should be easy.

For the customer

From the customer's perspective, taking ownership of sites built in Plone has huge benefits:

Low cost of entry

Plone is Open Source software. Not only does that mean there is no licence fee to pay up front, but it also means that the cost of implementation is lower. With full access to the source code developers can debug issues quicker, can see detailed examples from other people and make use of modules developed and released by the wider Plone community.

Stable and reliable

Plone has a large development community who have spent the last 5 years ensuring that it competes with the largest commercial products in terms of stability, reliability and scalability.

Rich features

Plone comes with a huge amount of functionality out of the box. As an example the Plone website itself is built using an almost entirely uncustomised version of the software. In most cases a deployment simply means defining a few document types, integrating with the design and pressing go!.

Easy to use

Plone is very simple to use. The team that built it includes usability experts and their touch can be felt throughout the product. This approach combined with simple yet powerful tools designed to make the complex jobs easier (such as formatting content, for example) means that even those who are least comfortable with computers can be persuaded to take ownership of their own content.

Easy to change

Because of the modular development approach and the use of Python under the hood Plone is very quick to change, meaning that a project can react to ever changing business requirements without re-engineering or grinding to a halt.

For the developer

From our perspective as developers building solutions for our customers the benefits are equally large:

Delivering value for money

Because of its simplicity and power we spend our customers' money on the customisations they want, rather than the underlying technology.

Hugely extensible

Plone is massively extensible and benefits from a large array of dedicated developers who are building a diverse range of components. These not only provide solutions to problems that our customers face, but also provide examples for us to use in tackling other problems not already solved.

Python powered

Using a dynamic language like Python allows us to deliver our solutions very quickly; no big language overhead

Content Management

Content Management is the one single problem that afflicts every website. Even the whizziest application needs text to explain its philosophy, how to use it, how to extend it or where to get help. Most organisations' only really foray on to the web is through a web site that simply presents their organisation.

These are Content Management problems. In the 10 years that we have been working on the web every project we've delivered has had a Content Management component, and most projects have in fact only been Content Management - even if they didn't first appear so.

Over those same 10 years we have worked with a vast array of products, from the homegrown ones that we built ourselves in the late 90s through the larger commercial products such as MediaSurface, Vignette, Microsoft CMS and many others. Every one of these applications has its benefits and its foibles, but so far we haven't found one that matches both our and our customers' requirements as well as Plone.