Plone and DISCOVER Magazine

CMSWire has a recent piece about Gartner's evaluation of commercial CMS. They also have the first installment of an article describing how DISCOVER Magazine came to retire its old web environment and set up a Plone-based web publishing system. The article is profusely illustrated with actual content examples from DISCOVER. Their key points (and I quote):

• DISCOVER chose Plone for its ease-of-use, robust feature set, strong open source community, reduced vendor lock-in, outstanding customizability, standards compliance, reputation, economics, and high performance.
• Before Plone, it took DISCOVER up to three weeks to publish a magazine issue online. With Plone, that has been cut to as few as three days.
• Plone’s WYSIWYG editor greatly facilitates the management of the site for non-technical users and enforces design consistency.
• Plone automatically generates related articles for each of the thousands of articles on the site. No manual intervention is required.
• Video and multi-media content is easily managed
• Thousands of articles were successfully and automatically migrated from DISCOVER’s old CMS into Plone with no loss of inbound links.

It reminds me of the day when we were just starting out testing Plone and I learned of Oxfam's Plone site. It went online in November 2004, the great Sumatran Earthquake struck in late December, and within a month Oxfam had processed over $14 million in donations. Its that kind of real-world story that makes you realize that this dog will hunt.

For those who need more than the Oxfam story and the DISCOVER example, take a stroll through http://plone.net/sites. There you'll find ACM SIGGraph and a host of other powerful organizations and companies who are using Plone.