For complex Content Management Systems

Plone is a fairly heavy duty application server designed to host and implement complex portals and content managements systems on an industrial scale. As a complex system it is fairly specialised and hold a steep learning curve for the beginner, so if you’re just looking to host a website and are unfamiliar with Plone, please consider looking at the WordPress or Joomla
products first.

Features

Your Plone instance will come with full access to your ZMI instance minus the ability to install / remove third party products. We have a wide range of third party products pre-installed which can be enabled on on request at no additional cost. In addition we can install additional products depending on their availability and stability.

Pricing

Pricing is based on the number of CPU’s, the amount of storage and the amount of bandwidth you require. Unless you know your site is likely to attract a lot of attention, we would generally recommend you start on the Bronze package and upgrade if and when necessary.

Basic Packages

Enhancements

Our Platform

Encryptec provide website hosting based on the Zope application server and Plone Content Management System. Currently we can offer Plone instances based either on version 2.1.4 or on version 2.5.2. We provide full access to the ZMI hence you can also override Plone settings and use raw Zope if you wish.

Processor Speed and redundancy

The bronze package is serviced by a single Xeon processor and although very quick, you do only have access to one server and if for any reason the server is busy, then delivery of your pages will be slower than the “fastest” speed available. Also, if the processor fails or becomes unavailable for any reason (for example if the server is restarted or shutdown for maintenance) then your site will be unavailable until the processor is available once more. [note that it is very unusual for the processor to be unavailable, but it can happen]

The Silver and Gold packages spread all requests over two servers such that even if one of the servers fails, requests will still be serviced by the other server (transparently). The Silver package uses two CPU’s so under normal circumstances will be twice as quick as the Bronze, and the Gold uses 4 CPU’s so should be twice as quick as the Silver.

Plone Hostingand Zope Hosting

Plone is one of the premiere Content Management Systems and is becoming the application server of choice for many companies who desire a dynamic website that can actually interact with the end-user. Zope is an established web application server based on the Python language.

What is Plone?

Plone is a ready-to-run content management system that is built on the powerful and free Zope application server. Plone is easy to set up, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, web sites, extranets and intranets.

• Plone is easy to use. The Plone Team includes usability experts who have made Plone easy and attractive for content managers to add, update, and mantain content.
• Plone is international. The Plone interface has more than 35 translations, and tools exist for managing multilingual content.
• Plone is standard. Plone carefully follows standards for usability and accessibility. Plone pages are compliant with US Section 508, and the W3C’s AAA rating for accessibility.
• Plone is Open Source. Plone is licensed under the GNU General Public License, the same license used by Linux. This gives you the right to use Plone without a license fee, and to improve upon the product.
• Plone is supported. There are close to a hundred developers in the Plone Development Team around the world, and a multitude of companies that specialize in Plone development and support.
• Plone is extensible. There is a multitude of add-on products for Plone to add new features and content types. In addition, Plone can be scripted using web standard solutions and Open Source languages.
• Plone is technology neutral. Plone can interoperate with most relational database systems, open source and commercial, and runs on a vast array of platforms, including Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, Solaris and BSD.

Technical overview

Plone is a content management framework that works hand-in-hand and sits on top of Zope, a widely-used Open Source web application server and development system. To use Plone, you don’t need to learn anything about Zope; to develop new Plone content types, a small amount of Zope knowledge is helpful, and it is covered in the documentation.

Zope itself is written in Python, an easy-to-learn, widely-used and supported Open Source programming language. Python can be used to add new features to Plone, and used to understand or make changes to the way that Zope and Plone work. By default, Plone stores its contents in Zope’s built in transactional object database, the ZODB. There are products and techniques, however, to share information with other sources, such as relational databases, LDAP, filesystem files, etc.

Plone runs on Windows, Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, and many other platforms; double-click installers are available for Windows and Mac OS X, and RPM packages are available for Linux. For full information, see Download.

What is Zope?

Zope is an open-source, object-oriented web application server written in the Python programming language. Zope stands for “Z Object Publishing Environment.” It can be almost fully managed with a web-based user interface. Zope publishes on the web Python objects that are typically persisted in an object database, ZODB. Basic object types, such as documents, images, and page templates, are available for the user to create and manage through the web. Specialized object types, such as wikis, blogs, and photo galleries, are available as third-party add-ons (called products), and there is a thriving community of small businesses creating custom web applications as Zope products.

There are two major generations of the software in use today. As of July 2007, Zope 2.10.4 is the latest stable release of Zope 2 codebase, and Zope 3.3.1 is the latest release of Zope 3. Zope is distributed under the terms of the Zope Public License, a free software license.

Some background information

• Over the past twelve months, 84 developers contributed new code to Plone.
• The first lines of source code were added to Plone in 2001. This is a relatively long time for an open source project to stay active, and can be a very good sign.
• A long source control history like this one shows that the project has enough merit to hold contributors’s interest for a long time.
• Over the last twelve months, Plone has seen a substantial increase in activity. This is a good sign that interest in this project is rising, and that the open source community has embraced this project.
• The central place for Plone documentation is Documentation.

What is a CMS (Content Management System)?

A content management system (CMS) is a program used to create a framework for the content of a Web site.[1] With most CMSs, the framework can be customized with a “skin” that defines the graphic design. This approach is opposite to defining the graphic design first, then coding the functionality second. Whereas the majority of cost of a Web site is in the functionality, the CMS approach is often significantly more cost-effective. For example, the software for the Web site Wikipedia is based on a wiki, which is a particular type of content management system. As used in this article, content management means Web content management.

Need help or more information? Feel free to give us a call on 0845 508 2719 or email us at sales@encryptec.net.

Tags: additional products, bandwidth, bronze package, complex system, content management system, content management systems, enhancements, features setup, heavy duty, platform features, plone, processor speed, redundancy, steep learning curve, storage space, third party products, wordpress, zope application server