Content Marketing

Ever Heard of Plone? Six Feet Up?

Michael posted on the blog in May, when he visited CMS Expo, that Plone was one of the tracks there. Plone? What’s a Plone? I recently found out…

Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 200 core developers and more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. The project has been actively developed since 2001, is available in more than 40 languages, and has the best security track record of any major CMS. It is owned by the Plone Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, and is available for all major operating systems.

Plone is an incredibly powerful content management system. Aside from all the typical content management system features, there are a few that really stood out:

  • Massive Scalability – it’s not uncommon for Plone implementations to have hundreds of thousands or millions of pages. This is pretty unmanageable in most content management systems.
  • Custom Routing and Approval – the most complex routing, editing and approval processes can be easily implemented. For enterprise clients, this is extremely powerful.
  • Speed and Simplicity – Plone is incredibly fast at serving pages and the interface is extremely simple and usable for the average user.

As with most open source projects, Plone is not without its own incredible community of developers and downloads to add-on. There are almost 4,000 add-ons available in the online repository to extend the functionality of your installation – including blogging, mapping, workflows, media streaming and social tools.

As I write blog posts, there always seems to be some kind of Indiana connection. Plone is no different. Calvin Hendryx-Parker is a board member of the Plone Foundation and is right here in Fortville, Indiana. Calvin’s wife, Gabrielle Hendryx-Parker founded the firm, Six Feet Up, in 1999 in San Francisco and they moved the International consulting firm here in Indiana. Gabrielle also holds an MBA in Marketing and Leadership from EM Lyon, France.

Six Feet Up

I visited Six Feet Up last month and was impressed. Their renovated office space in downtown Fortville is an amazing spot. They even have their own mini-data center with backup generators and fiber installation to accompany their clients’ core installations at

Lifeline Data Centers. They provide hosting, custom development, integration services, and build out Plone installations for companies in Life Sciences, Higher Learning and nearly every other industry worldwide.

Six Feet Up recently unveiled SolrIndex 1.0, a product for Plone/Zope that provides enhanced searching capabilities by leveraging Solr, the popular open source enterprise search platform from the Apache Lucene project. SolrIndex comes with blazing fast and highly scalable search capabilities. SolrIndex is extensible by design, which means it has the ability to integrate with other indexes and catalogs. This is good news for sites that need to provide search capabilities across multiple repositories.

Six Feet Up now has over 20 employees and has continued a record double-digit growth year-over-year since launching. It’s a tribute to the expertise and support they provide their clients. Six Feet Up also administers Plone Tune-Up Day… a monthly, all-day, virtual event for helping the Plone community.

Douglas Karr

Douglas Karr is CMO of OpenINSIGHTS and the founder of the Martech Zone. Douglas has helped dozens of successful MarTech startups, has assisted in the due diligence of over $5 bil in Martech acquisitions and investments, and continues to assist companies in implementing and automating their sales and marketing strategies. Douglas is an internationally recognized digital transformation and MarTech expert and speaker. Douglas is also a published author of a Dummie's guide and a business leadership book.

Related Articles

Back to top button
Close

Adblock Detected

Martech Zone is able to provide you this content at no cost because we monetize our site through ad revenue, affiliate links, and sponsorships. We would appreciate if you would remove your ad blocker as you view our site.