Essential Plone Add-ons

If it’s fall, it must be time for the Plone Conference. This year the annual gathering took place in Ferrara, a beautiful small city in the north of Italy. The weather was perfect, the streets medieval, the party was in a real castle, and the food – well! The food was amazing. This is the traditional dish cappellacci di zucca al ragù, pasta stuffed with pumpkin in a meat sauce. Yes it tastes as good as it looks.

Following the tradition begun at the Barcelona conference and continued in Tokyo, we held a popularity contest to identify the best add-ons for Plone, Python’s open source CMS. Plone comes with tons of features out-of-the-box – like workflows, search, a multilingual UI, conformance to accessibility standards, and granular user roles and permissions – but it also offers an extensible platform for building new add-ons. Attendees nominated their favorites and the results were posted in the conference venue where people voted their top 5 using sticky dots.

Thirty-three add-ons were nominated, and the voting revealed a few that are particularly popular – notably for form generation and faceted search. Others included add-ons for document generation (Word, PDF, etc.), image cropping, taxonomies, authentication, and lazy loading. The full results can be found at the 2019 essential Plone add-ons page.