What's New in Plone?#

This is a list of major changes in the last major Plone versions.

Plone 5.0 was released in September 2015. Plone 5 was a major release that changed the default content type framework, the default theme and the way CSS and JavaScript resources are bundled and delivered to the browser.

Plone 5.1 was released in October 2017 and holds a couple of smaller improvements.

Plone 5.2 was released in March 2019. Plone 5.2 is the first version that supports Python 3. It also has some improvements like a new drop-down navigation and built-in URL-management.

Plone 6 is not yet released. Plone 6 will only run on Python 3 and will ship with Volto, a new ReactJS-based frontend. The "Classic UI" frontend will stay in place.

Plone 5.0#

Content Types#

While Plone 4 used Archetypes all default types since Plone 5.0 are based on Dexterity. This means you can use behaviors to change their features and edit them through the web. Existing old content can be migrated to the new types.

Default Theme#

The default theme of Plone 5.x is called Barceloneta.

It is a Diazo theme, meaning it uses plone.app.theming to insert the output of Plone into static html/css.

It uses HTML5, so it uses <header>, <nav>, <aside>, <section>, <article>, and <footer> for semantic HTML.

New UI and widgets#

While Plone 4 had a green edit bar above the content, Plone 5 introduced a toolbar that is located on the left.

The widgets where you input data were also completely rewritten.

Folder Contents#

The view to manage the content of a folder was rewritten and allows a multitude of features.

Resource Registry#

The resource registry was introduced to configure and edit the static resources (JavaScript, CSS) of Plone. It replaced the old JavaScript and CSS registries of Plone 4.

Chameleon template engine#

Chameleon is the new and much faster rendering engine of Plone 5.

Control panel#

  • You can finally upload a logo in @@site-controlpanel.

  • All control panels were moved to z3c.form.

  • Many small improvements.

Date formatting on the client side#

Using the JavaScript library moment.js, the formatting of dates was moved to the client.

<ul class="pat-moment"
    data-pat-moment="selector:li;format:calendar;">
    <li>${python:context.created().ISO()}</li>
    <li>2015-10-22T12:10:00-05:00</li>
</ul>

returns

  • Today at 3:24 PM

  • 10/22/2015

plone.app.multilingual#

Plone 5 ships with plone.app.multilingual. That is the new default add-on for sites in more than one language.

New portlet manager#

plone.footerportlets is a new place to put portlets. The footer (holding the footer, site_actions, colophon) is now built from portlets. This means you can edit the footer through the Web.

There is also a useful new portlet type Actions used for displaying the site_actions.

Plone 5.1#

Plone 5.1 comes with many incremental improvements. None of these changes the way you develop for Plone. Here are three noteworthy changes:

  • The operations for indexing, reindexing, and unindexing are queued, optimized, and only processed at the end of the transaction. This change can have big performance benefits.

  • Actions now have a user interface in the Plone control panel. You no longer need to use the ZMI to manage them by hand.

  • "Retina" Image scales: Plone now has scales for high pixel density images.

For a complete list of changes see https://5.docs.plone.org/manage/upgrading/version_specific_migration/upgrade_to_51.html#changes-between-plone-5-0-and-5-1.

Plone 5.2#

Plone 5.2 supports Python 2.7, 3.6, 3.7, and 3.8. It is based on Zope 4.x and runs WSGI. These three are major changes under the hood, but have only limited effect on end users and development of add-ons.

Plone 5.2 comes with many bug fixes and a couple of nice improvements. Here are some noteworthy changes:

  • New navigation with dropdown. Site-Administrators can use the navigation control panel /@@navigation-controlpanel to configure the dropdown-navigation.

  • Plone 5.2 ships with REST API.

  • New Login. The old skin templates and skin scripts were replaced by browser views that are much easier to customize.

  • Merge Products.RedirectionTool into core. Site Administrators can use the URL Management control panel (/@@redirection-controlpanel) to manage and add alternative URLs including bulk upload of alternative URLs. As an Editor, you can see the URL Management link in the actions menu of a content item, and add or remove alternative URLs for this specific content item.

See also

Plone 6#

Plone 6 comes with Volto, a new React-based frontend for Plone, implemented on top of the Plone REST API. This combines the stability, maturity, and security of the Plone backend with a modern, mature, user-friendly and well maintained frontend. Volto provides a block based new editing experience.

Plone 6 continues to allow the current server-side rendering and Diazo theming without Volto. This will be referred to as "Plone Classic UI". The classic Barceloneta-based frontend in Plone 6 is modernized to use Bootstrap 5. This frontend will stay in place to give developers and users time to adapt to Volto and to provide an easy upgrade path for existing projects.

Plone 6 will be a long-term support (LTS) release. We anticipate it will be around for several years.

Plone 6 supports Python 3 only and runs on top of Zope 5.

See also