Patrick Shaw’s Weblog

We’ve been implementing Plone websites for our nonprofit customers for about two years now - almost one a month, which seems like a lot of website development for a modest sized agency such as ours.

As we’ve become more and more expert with Plone, I’ve sometimes had to take a step back to remember some of the GREAT features that Plone has that I’ve started to take for granted:

• You can edit your content from a modern web browser. It’s almost as simple as that - visit your site, login, click the edit button, and change your text!
• You can quickly and easily create a news or event or “spotlight” posting that populates the home page (or any other page, matter of fact!) of your website, and then stops publishing when the event is over.
• You can create as many pages as you want.
• Your sitemap is always up to date
• The search tool searches both your site and the innards of your Word and PDF documents
• You can have “member only” sections of the website for board members or staff or for other stakeholders
• We can implement a Plone website (where you get more of a website, a LOT more) for the same effort level as websites that were challenging for you to edit.
• Yes, you can integrate your Plone website with Salesforce!

I’m delighted about how well this is working out - we’re more efficient, customers are getting much better websites, we’re contributing to the local and world wide Plone community, and we have experts on our team that are leading the way.

Special thanks to our colleagues and collaborators at ONE/Northwest for their cheerful and timely help as needed, and to our own Jesse Snyder, who has moved our Plone hosting and creation efforts to maturity.