23 August 2007

Plone upgrades content management system

By China Martens, IDG News Service

The Plone Foundation has launched a new version of its open-source content management software this week, emphasising improvements in ease of use and the addition of automatic versioning.

Plone helps users manage documents, files and images through a Web interface and also lets them publish that content to the Internet or to an intranet. The project got under way in 2000 and the software has been downloaded over 1 million times, according to Alexander Limi, Plone’s co-founder. Users include eBay, the US Central Intelligence Agency and Novell.

Plone remains a community effort with the Plone Foundation, in place since 2004, acting as a support organisation for the software, its development and marketing. The foundation is the legal owner of the Plone code.

Versioning was the single most requested feature by Plone’s user community, Limi said. As changes are made in online content, Plone 3.0 now automatically keeps track of those alterations, providing a trail of who edited what information as well as the ability to roll back to earlier versions of the content.

The new release also reflects a lot of work done by the community to make Plone simpler to use, particularly for those ad-hoc users who may not be fully conversant with content management technology. The improvements are the beginning of a plan to introduce a role-based user interface, Limi said. That capability will likely appear in the next Plone release, he added.