What's The future of Plone cms?

Hi ,
I am a python developer fresher, and looking forward to plone cms to chose it as my main stream , but when i look for the resources for being plone developer is not that much reliable and then even i can't figure out a roadmap to a plone developer , so i would like to know that what will be the future of this cms and should i go furthermore ahead.

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What is the purpose of your posting? Are you asking for picking up Plone as a CMS or are you asking for getting into Plone as a developer in order to do something/make money as a developer with Plone?

I am asking about being a plone developer in order to work with it

Plone

Inofficial and highly opionated answer of Plone dev and Plone solution provider for almost 20 years:

  • the Plone backend is very mature
  • but old, complex, technologically outdated and far away from being state of the art (database layer, search engine)
  • the Plone frontend with Volto using Plone's REST APi is a different story
  • Plone was always in a niche market and remains in a niche market that is constanly shrinking since many, many years
  • the business opportunities regarding Plone are limited, very limited in particular with regard to new business
  • Plone for us was a good business. Meanwhile it is just a minor side business, not very relevant and technologically boring and of little interest for building decent solutions.
    Plone of course has its strength in certain areas but the opportunities here are shrinking and many Plone customers moved over to other systems.

Take your own conclusions out this statement :upside_down_face:

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Very sad but true. :cry:

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From my limited corner, looking at the companies that use Plone in combination with Volto, business seems to be booming. When viewed from the perspective of the modern stacks, where the headless CMS is only one piece of the overal broader architecture, Plone is not bad at all. Well documented, easy to operate.

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On the other hand we have several customers that request specific Plone support and development, and we have quite big contracts with them offering development and support on Plone.

And we also keep selling Plone to our customers. Some of them don't care about the technology behind, they want websites or intranets, and we develop them for them using Plone.

Nowadays we keep selling both Classic and Volto.

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Hello Mario,

First of all, thank you for reaching out and expressing your interest in Plone.

I will write my personal opinion (disclaimer: I'm currently the President of the Plone Foundation), based on years of working with Plone and other solutions.

  • Plone is a CMS. A very mature, stable and secure CMS.
  • Our backend stack is not the sexiest in the market today, but that is the price to pay when you are a 21-year-old software (with a concern with backward compatibility). You can always replace/extend parts of Plone with other solutions (Search with Solr, ElasticSearch, Nuclia; Authentication with OAuth2, OIDC, Keycloak, etc)
  • CMS is a commodity these days. Even though everyone needs some CMS, your web presence usually needs many other things besides content management. (Imagine a service site. Most of the codebase is related to the application, not the public-facing website).
  • In a previous life, I was the CTO for German Taxes, where all the codebase (back then) was written in Ruby, but the headless CMS was Plone (mainly because it required close to no new development). A basic Plone installation with RESTApi calls (from the Ruby app) did the trick.
  • Plone comes with batteries included. You can do much without ever needing to write a single line of code.
  • There has been some movement in our community to adopt the toolset used by the rest of the Python community (i.e. pytest)
  • And we have a new, shiny, and potent frontend solution built with React: Volto (Demo, Docs).

In summary, the CMS business is not as mainstream as it was years ago, but we are probably the best open-source solution written in Python, and we are a good solution to integrate into other projects.

Best,
Érico Andrei

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