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What is the Plone CMS?
- Plone is a web content management system (CMS) that is available to University of Leicester staff as an alternative to doing complex HTML websites.
- The University has chosen to adopt a CMS because this approach de-emphasises bespoke design and re-focuses on the content. It also lowers the level of web skill/experience needed to create and maintain sites, thus enabling a large majority of staff to contribute to the website.
- The University has opted for Plone over other CMS solutions because:
- a) as an open source product it doesn't tie us to a contract with a single commercial company;
- b) the costs involved in developing it are significantly less than those of a commercial solution;
- c) it is highly versatile and customisable (we can add our own features and designs)
- and d) that by using it we become part of a global community collaborating to develop the product further and sharing the fruits of that collaboration.
- The University intends for Plone to be the main system by which all department and corporate service websites will be served in the near future.
- Everyone who has a CFS account has access to the Plone CMS.
- You don't need a web account to be able to own a Plone site.
- Department and Corporate Service sites still need to appoint someone to be their official web maintainer with overall responsibility for the main site and any sub sites, in line with the University’s Internet Code of Practice.
- You do need to be given a folder on Plone before you can create a site. This can be done by the Web Team or your web maintainer (if your Department/service site already exists within Plone).
- You don't need any web page editing software like Dreamweaver or Frontpage to be able to create pages in Plone. All editing is done via your web browser e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.
- Training in Plone is available from three sources - see Getting Web Training
- Guides and support are available online.
- Plone can do more than just simple text and image web pages. It has the following additional built-in features:
- Survey and web form tool
- Blogs
- Discussion boards
- Syndication – meaning that you make your web content easily available to other people as an RSS feed and you can take in RSS feeds from other sites e.g. you could have the BBC news coming through on a page on your site.
- Accepts Flash and YouTube video content.
