What is Zope?

Zope is an open source application server for building content management systems, intranets, portals, and custom  applications. It has a reputation for being both robust (its used by NATO ) and flexible.

What is Plone?

Plone is a user friendly content management system built on the Zope server. It is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, as a document publishing system, a portal server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities.

Plone is simple to use and accessible. The Plone Team includes usability and accessibility experts who have made Plone easy and attractive for content managers to add, update, and maintain content.

Zope and Plone are free!

The software is free (in all senses of the word) and open-source. It has been tested by tens of thousands of users which makes it very robust. Many companies selling their homegrown content management systems cannot match this level of testing having only tested their systems on a handful of previous clients.

Sites that use Zope and Plone

EBay

Lastminute.com

Oxfam

Lufthansa

Nato

These companies are all large enough to easily afford more expensive content management systems (costing £35,000 upwards) but choose Zope/Plone because of flexibility and ease of use.

Plone is good at 

• Accessibility SENDA DDA compliance
  

• managing your content for Freedom of Information requests (FOI)
  

• Managing Websites with large number of users and authors

• Manging sites that have frequent updates
  
• Providing a robust framework on which to build complex web applications
  

Plone in Higher Education

I have worked with Cardiff University to set up Zope Plone to manage following parts of their website:

School of Medicine
School of Dentistry
School of Nursing
School of Healthcare Studies
School of Postgraduate Medical and Dental Education.