And cia.gov and fbi.gov run on Plone... your point is?

OK, so I'm slightly biased in that I run a company that does predominantly Plone development, but one of our biggest clients uses Confluence to actually project manage the Plone project we are developing for them. So in effect we use both, for different sides of the same coin.

Confluence is quite powerful, and some of the tools for previewing MS Office documents in your browser are pretty good. However where Plone shines is its flexibility. We use Plone ourselves for our own intranet and the great thing is it goes well beyond just storing documents:

* It shows a list of all latest SVN commits from our repository
* There is a shared calendar with SMS alerts, iCal integration, etc
* It integrates with our time tracking software to produce time tracking reports for each project
* There is a wiki on there for ad-hoc knowledge bits
* There is a directory of all our contacts with click-to-dial integration with our desk phones
* All our quotes are 'written' in Plone and converted to PDF to send to the client. It handles all the formatting via Apache FOP
* There are image galleries for both social company photos, and also library of screenshots for quotes, etc.
* Management dashboard with graphs of time spent in the past week on which projects

So whilst Confluence is pretty good, I think you'd be hard pressed to customise it quite to the extent where it really starts to deliver business value by integrating with your actual business processes and other software.

And just by co-incidence, fsf.org actually runs Plone itself.

Just do a search in the source of http://www.cia.gov/ for the word 'Plone' you will see it. They've been using it for at least the past 6 years now.

Ditto http://www.fbi.gov/

Plone's security is one of its major plus points compared to the myriad of PHP systems.

-Matt

Glib as you might be, you are almost close.... ;)

Plone is named after the experimental electronica music band, Plone from Birmingham. Known for their simple, clean sound. And they had a track called 'Plock' ;)

-Matt

If you are a python developer, or at least have python2.6 installed on your system, then check out this lightning talk screencast I did for Europython last week:

Screencast of installing Plone 4

I go from a base python2.6 installed to an installed and running Plone instance in under 3 minutes. Admittedly I had a local egg cache due to the flaky conference wifi, but if you did this without a cache it would do the same, just take a bit longer downloading all of the eggs.

Plone really is the easiest CMS I've ever worked with in terms of deployment and installation (mainly due to the fantastic zc.buildout system). There are also the binary installers for various platforms as well, which will get you up and running in about 15 minutes with just a few clicks.

-Matt

The Plone *core*, ie the main central bit, not including any of the add-ons, or 3rd party integrated parts like the visual editor, or the underlying framework Zope, has had over 10,000 commits to the SVN repo in the past 12 months alone. That is nearly 30 commits a day every day for a year. That is really quite an impressive level of activity for any Open Source project, especially in a fairly niche market (we are talking a large web content management system here, not an operating system).

The number of books being published on Plone recently shows just how many people are using it. And the 8th International Plone Conference (www.ploneconf2010.org) this year is expected to attract over 400 developers and users from across the world.

-Matt

Why is it a pain? It is probably the easiest CMS I've ever setup. Just run the installer! Or if you are more developer oriented... run buildout.

-Matt

A couple of years ago I went to a seminar by HMRC (Revenue and Customs) on R&D Tax Credits here in the UK. I stood up and asked the speaker how Open Source is seen by HMRC in terms of R&D tax credits. I explained to them that the software we help develop (Plone) is used by numerous public sector organisations in the UK. One of the key criteria for R&D Tax Credits is that you need to own the IP of whatever it is you are developing. I explained to them that our entire business model was based upon us *not* owning the IP of the software we are helping to develop.

I was laughed at. Seriously. The speaker and a good portion of the audience laughed at my ridiculous idea of my business not owning the IP of the software I was developing.

The Plone Foundation recently valued Plone using COCOMO at US$3 million.

-Matt