Hi, it's Laura Whitehead here, live blogging on day 2 of the Netsquared conference!  Steve McMahon is presenting a session on Building a Community Network with Plone.

Steve is a Plone consultant and integrator specializing in non-profit organizations and is also the Web Team Chair at the Davis Comminity Network (a 501c3), an organization that promotes the use of Internet technologies for local and regional community building. He's going to share with us how Plone can be used for sites large and small, and about how Plone can be used to build and used to serve for a geographic community.

So what is Plone?

Plone is an open source CMS. Steve shared thoughts about the concepts of open source. and how to understand the difference between open source and proprietry software.

Plone is a web content-management system which has the following features:

• distributed, through the web maintenance of large or complex sites
• with seperate content and presentation
• provides information architecture support, search, hierachy, navigation and taxonomy
• roles, permission and workflow
• versioning and locking
• rich variety of content types

So, who uses Plone?

From tiny non-profits, NGO's, governments (Brazil government), large organizations, businesses and even the FBI and the CIA use Plone. Some large organizations that use Plone include Oxfam, the Rosetta Project, Friends of Earth International, down to smaller sites like the Davis Park Central Parks Gardens.

So, what are the strengths of Plone?

• Plone is very usable and accessible for end users/readers of websites, as well as being very usable to content updaters.
• l18N and L10N (transferable to different languages)
• Testing and quality control
• Plone has an excellent security record
• Rad for content-management apps
• Flexible authentication (ie can work with OpenID)
• Sophisticated workflow, content rules, roles and permissions
• Scalable

So, what are the weaknesses of Plone?

• Complexity for integrators
• Lack of low cost hosting (needs better hosting than just those cheap hosting deals)

Plone as open source

The Plone Foundation is the legal owner of the Plone codebase, trademarks and domain names. The Plone Community is made up of hundreds of skilled developers worldwide held together by every imaginable web 2.0 tool, plus thousands of NGO's, nonprofits and companies.

Steve then went on to share in more detail about the work of the Davis Community Network and it's website which can be found at www.dcn.org.
Steve then shared DCN's experience with supporting small, nonprofit websites, and how they help to solve problems for local organizations who may have in the past had a simple Yahoo website which had become inflexible to their needs; or had training in HTML in the past, but not progressed into filling their site. The DCN provides simple easy to update websites, and showed examples of the sites that include all features such as RSS, calendars, donates, embed video, subscriptions and easy to create forms and more. If sites are easy to manage and update, organizations are more likely to keep them up to date.

What's happening with Plone?

Integration with other apps such as Salesforce, and integration with other web app systems and easier theming. Plone4Artists is enabling better integrations with embedded mixed media.

Discussions from participants in the session included about how to use Wiki's on a Plone site, whether to integrate social media on a site; and how to use Plone as a CMS to create your website to manage your information easily in a nonprofit in a variety of contexts and situations.