Plone Web CMS Just Got A Whole Lot Better

Today, the Plone Foundation announced the release of version 3.0 of the Plone content management system. We use Plone at the CMS for many of the projects we do, and for good reason. It works well. Really well. And for lots of different types of sites.

While Plone was already considered an outstanding CMS by those in-the-know, version 3.0 has some big advances. The new features I'm most excited about personally are:

• Version control - this one is HUGE. Plone will automatically save every version of a web page, and you can easily revert to an older version. You can also edit a "checked-out" version of a page while the original stays live (something you couldn't easily do in Plone 2). This is the feature that I get asked about most frequently, and it's really important that this now exists.
• Ability to insert Flash and other embeddable video right in the content editor.
• Link integrity - this makes sure that when you move or delete content, you don't break any links that point to that content.
• Inline AJAX editing - this is just cool. Basically, the process of entering and editing content just got more efficient and faster. It feels more like a desktop application. No more waiting for the entire page to reload just to edit something.

There are many other improvements as well, and my understanding is that it is faster than previous versions. Jon Stahl recently wrote up the 8 things he finds most interesting about Plone 3.0.

I also like that our client, Discover Magazine (a Plone user), was quoted in the Plone 3.0 press release.