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.

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 store, 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 the Download section on plone.org.