Plone 4 CMS Unveiled: Advancing Power, Performance & User Experience
The Plone community has raised the bar in the Content Management System market with today's release of Plone 4, a faster, more user-friendly and more refined version of a product which has set the pace for CMS innovation for nearly a decade. Plone 4 delivers big improvements in raw speed, scalability and ease of use, and continues to advance its hallmark strengths of unmatched security, superior user interface, ease of installation and a beautiful out-of-the-box experience.
“Plone 4 is based on the most-frequently requested features and improvements from Plone's worldwide user and developer community,” says Plone co-founder and Firefox User Experience Lead Alexander Limi. “Our developers and users asked for better performance — Plone 4 is much faster, requires less memory, and performs well even when serving up massive files. They also didn't want us to sacrifice what we do well to get there — and we haven't. Plone 4 is not just more powerful — it continues to improve in areas Plone has always been known for: usability, security, and a CMS that is easy to install, upgrade, and looks great right out of the box.”
Looking back on the nine year evolution of Plone and the community that supports it, Limi is more than pleased. “It's gotten to be a lot bigger than I thought it could be. Sometimes we forget how many people are involved with Plone, and how many people have left behind PHP and Java to create successful businesses based around Plone.”
Geir Bækholt, President of the Plone Foundation, has a similar reaction. “I'm impressed with how professional, mature and focused the Plone community is. It's rare in open source to see so many companies operating to such high standards, treating their customers and employees well and running their businesses in a sustainable manner. The best thing about Plone is that we have so many mature, stable companies using it who are consummate professionals at what they do.”
For all its technical and visual improvements, one of Plone 4's most important roles is to build the under-the-hood foundation even more exciting improvements in Plone 5. It gives developers and users innovations they can use today, while allowing them to develop products and websites that will be ready to take full advantage of future Plone releases.
The list of notable changes in Plone 4 includes:
- Significant performance improvements
- New theme
- Search and indexing improvements
- Group Dashboards for a Customized User Experience
- Massively improved handling of large files & media
- New, faster folder implementation
- More powerful management of users and groups
- Dynamic forms framework based on jQuery Tools
- Improved first-run experience
- Smooth upgrade experience
- Reduced memory footprint
- Upgraded infrastructure
You can find out more about these new features than you would ever want to by visiting http://plone.org/4.
*Note: At the time of this post, the Plone.org website appears to be experiencing issues.