Timo Stollenwerk: State of Plone

I make bad life choices. Years ago, for my first web programming language I picked PHP. I created my own CMS, of course. I skipped the cryptocurrencies long time ago, so today I am not rich.

I saw a job offer on the wall: "Help wanted". That was for Plone, which I did not know, but if someone wanted to pay me for learning it: cool.

I learned that architecture is important. I wrote a database application, but it become unmaintainable by all the spagghetti code and missing architecture. Same in lots of CMSes. But in Plone I saw architecture. Not everything was good by today's standards, but there was an idea behind it.

JavaScript become popular. Plone had KSS before jQuery even was created. But I was skeptic. That may be surprising when you know my role in Volto today.

Around the Barcelona Plone conference in 2017, Ramon approached me and was totally enthousiasic about AI, or I prefer to call it machine learning. Again, I was skeptic. I read three books about AI, but only to proof him wrong. The Plone community attracts smart and innovative people. I don't need to have FOMO, fear of missing out. We were talking about AI before it got hip. There are plans for an MCP to let an AI agent interact with Plone, for example creating news items.

Main competitors for Plone are Drupal, Typo3, other open source CMSes. Usually the UI is outdated, using old technology. Plone is the only open source CMS with a modern JavaScript stack. You have Wordpress, but that is not truly open source, look at the fight between two big Wordpress companies. Others have gotten modern, but their community is split.

Plone 6.2 will be released end of 2025, beginning 2026. No revolution, small improvements. In Volto: restore unsaved content, improve image upload widget, relative path support, blocks control panel (how many blocks of which type are in my site?) And one last important thing in the Python backend: move to native namespaces. That is a needed improvement because of changes in the Python packaging ecosystem.

Plone 6.3 is for end of 2026. Again small improvements. Improved and renamed Listing/Search block variants, improving link widget, keyword manager, recycle bin.

Plone 6.x: peace of mind. We offer 5 years of security support for all Plone 6.x minor versions. We might extend that, depending on when Plone 7 is released.

Plone 7 will be innovation. Expected in 2027.

• It will be a lot faster. Main problem in performance measurements is the bundle size. How? Static site generators? Wait, why did I not hear about those the past years? Reason: javascript frameworks have gotten so fast that static site generators are basically not needed anymore. We will use those techniques.
• We will use React Router 7.
• Plone will be more flexible, component based, so you can build your own UI.
• We will remove Semantic UI, and switch to react-aria. This is for accessibility, especially in the editor interface.

Can we do this in small steps? Unfortunately not. We modernize the frontend. Volto was created in 2017 ,following best practices then. Now it needs an update. The codename for that is: Seven. We did 5 code sprints this year, working on this, and others. See the pictures with the people who were there. Do you see someone on all five photos? Victor Fernandez d'Alba and Piero Nicolli. They are leading this effort.

Improved editing experience. With Block model 3 we improve the wysiwyg experience: there is almost no change when you view a page and then start editing it. This model also helps a lot when you want to have an own design system.

Plone: between stability and innovation.