Plone is a free and open source content management system built in top of the Zope application server while Drupal is a free and open source content management system (CMS) and content management framework (CMF) written in PHP and distributed under the GNU general public license. In principle, Plone can be used in any kind of websites including blogs, internet sites, web shops and internal websites. It is also well positioned to be used as a document publishing system and groupware collaboration tool, while Drupal is used as a backup system for at least 1.5% of all websites worldwide ranging from personal blogs to corporate, political and government sites including whitehouse.gov and data.gov.pk. It is also used for knowledge management and business collaboration.
Plone is released under the GNU general public license and designed to be extensible. Major development is conducted periodically during special meetings called plone sprints. Additional functionality is added to Plone with products. These can be distributed through plone website or otherwise. The plone foundation holds and enforces all copyrights and trademarks. Plone has also legal banking from the council of the software freedom law centre. The standard release of drupal is known as drupal core. It contains basic features common to content management systems. These include user account registration and maintenance, menu management, RSS feeds, page layout customization and system administration. The drupal core installation can be used as a brochure ware website, a single or multi user blog, an internet forum or a community website providing for user generated content.
The plone project was begun in 1999, by Alexander Limi, Alan Runyan and Vidar Andersen. It was made as a usability layer on the top the Zope Content Management Framework. The first version was released in 2001. The project quickly grew in to the community, receiving plenty of new add on products from its users. The increase in community leads to the creation of annual Plone conference in 2003, which is still running today. In addition, sprints are held, where groups of developers meet to work on Plone, ranging from a couple of days to a week. In March 2004, Plone 2.0 was released. This release brought more customizable features to Plone and enhanced the add-on functions.
Drupal became an open source project in 2001. Drupal is an English rendering of the Dutch word druppel means drop (as in a water droplet). The name was taken from the now-defunct Drop.org website, whose code slowly evolved in to drupal. Buytaert wanted to call the site drop for its community aspects, but mistyped it when checking the domain name and the thought the error signed better. A community now helps develop Drupal and Drupal’s popularity is growing rapidly in the community. From May 2007 to April 2008, Drupal was downloaded Drupal.org website more than 1.4 million times, an increase of approximately 125% from the previous year.
Since the release of Plone, many of the Plone’s updates and add-ons have come from its community. Events called Plone sprints consist of members of the community coming together from a week and helping improve Plone.
Drupal.org has a large number of communities of users and developers numbering from 615000 user accounts and more than 9000 developers accounts.