Plone 2.5 Released!

by Alec Mitchell

May 30, 2007

At long last, the latest and greatest Plone is ready.

After some diligent testing by the community, we are pleased to announce the release of Plone 2.5 Final. This release, while outwardly very similar to Plone 2.1, has a number of important changes under the hood which will hopefully pave the way for many exciting things to come.

Download Plone 2.5 here [ http://plone.org/products/plone/releases/2.5 ] (Windows and Mac OS X installers are available)

Notable features in Plone 2.5 include:

New caching infrastructure

The CacheFu [ http://plone.org/products/cachefu ] project now ships with Plone, and when installed can result in 10x to 40x faster page loads, depending on setup — while being entirely transparent to the end-user. Numerous other optimizations make this the snappiest plone ever.

Pluggable Authentication Service

The new authentication structure in Plone 2.5 makes it very easy to integrate any kind of authentication with Plone. Plugins for LDAP and GMail (!) already exist, and more are easily added. This allows you to mix and match data sources for different pieces of the authentication/membership/group/role puzzle without having to create specialized user folder implementations.

Support for XML exports of site configurations

It is now easy to replicate a particular site configuration across multiple instances, making it easy to create setup policies for sites.

Placeful Workflow

It is now possible to have workflow policies determined by location in the portal, not just by item type. This means that different parts of the portal can have different security settings, and entirely different workflow paths for the same types of objects.

Support for the latest technologies

Zope 2.9 and Python 2.4 are now supported, and Zope 3 technologies are used extensively throughout the Plone core for the first time.

Note: This release of Plone 2.5 requires Zope 2.9.3 and Python 2.4.2+ or Zope 2.8.7 and Python 2.3.5+. If you want to use the tarball with Zope 2.9, you will need to remove the Five product from your Products folder, as a newer version is already included with Zope 2.9

For more detail, have a look at the included change log, and read the full release notes [ http://plone.org/products/plone/releases/2.5 ] or take a look at what's new in Plone 2.5 [ http://plone.org/documentation/whatsnew/2.5/what-s-new-in-plone-2.5 ].