Most companies with a considerable Web presence have bitten the bullet and migrated to a commercial content-management system (CMS). The benefits of a CMS include the ability to assign content ownership and responsibility, easily modify and add content, assign effective dates and create workflows to make sure proper approval is gained before publication.

But what about a full-featured CMS from the open-source world? Most early attempts were not well received, but today that has changed. The open-source arena now has its own world-class CMS, called Plone, which is built on Zope; its content-management framework provides a full-featured CMS for open-source-friendly customers. In fact, Plone is more than a CMS — it is a complete development platform that supports advanced templates and objects, and has a full rendering engine.

To take a look at the Plone solution, point your browser to www.plone.org, where you will find plenty of documentation — a rarity for open-source systems. A tremendous amount of functionality is available without having to resort to customization. The default Plone setup includes support for various content types, workflow, internationalization (as of this writing, the Plone user interface has been ported to 30 languages), portlets and more. The user interface is also compliant with the World Wide Web Consortium’s AA rating for accessibility. In case you’re worried about support, more than 100 developers around the world and plenty of companies are dedicated to the continued development and support of Plone.

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