This CMS has lots of multilingual features. Besides more than 25 user interface languages, it's one of the few to support right-to-left languages (such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian). I also admired the split-screen editor, which assisted in translations. Plus, an add-on handles standard XLIFF content export and import, which is important when working with translation agencies.

Underlying power
Beneath Plone 3.0 there's a catalog of features that check the integrity of your sites and deliver a pleasant publishing experience. Link checking automatically alerted me when I tried to delete a page that other sites referenced. Further, I employed the automatically generated table of contents, which created and linked to chapters based on the headers in a long document.

Rules and versioning don't quite match Alfresco but are nonetheless useful. For instance, I defined a rule to move a file from one location to another for archiving after a certain time. The workflow system alerted users when something was changed, such as document revisions that required approval. And I appreciated this application's automatic locking and unlocking, which ensures two people don't overwrite each other's changes.

Plone 3.0 doesn't have a wiki. The software, however, allows wiki markup in any type of content (including Word and PDF documents that are transformed into Web pages), which eliminated the need to manually create links to other content. Plus, you can apply access control to these documents, just as with any standard Plone page.

With this release, Plone 3.0 adds important CMS capabilities such as versioning, inline editing, workflows, and OpenID support. It's true that some of these features require add-on modules that might consume server resources. Still, with a caching proxy (the organization's CacheFu project ships with Plone) there's very little else to criticize.

Stepping back and looking ahead
After my intensive test schedule with these five products, there were a few surprises along with verification of what I generally suspected all along.

The lightweight Drupal has a decent following and special features, such as taxonomies, but comparatively weaker CMS functions (lacking rich-text editing, for example) and a somewhat unfriendly development environment mean Durpal is playing catch-up. Joomla, after breaking from Mambo, swept up many core developers and swayed community members to switch, too. Collectively, they've turned Joomla into a very relevant project. With improvements planned for Version 1.5, I'm optimistic about this CMS.

DotNetNuke (the .Net reincarnation of PHPnuke) wasn't originally on my short list, but I'm glad I reconsidered. Although it's Windows-only, this ASP.Net application proved scalable and has a real affinity for handling midrange commerce activities. Plone is a step above, combining multilingual features, workflow, and automated navigation.

With a strong organization behind it and a slew of features, Alfresco's Community Edition stood out in this comparison. That would be true solely considering its content management, but as these applications branch out into document and records management, Alfresco has already staked a claim in the extended ECM space.