Plone is celebrating their fifth anniversary this week. Plone is an open source content management system (CMS) built on the Python based Zope application server. The two people that are probably celebrating the most about Plone's success are its project leaders and founders, Alan Runyan (a US Texan) and Alexander Limi (a Norwegian).

The following are some talking points straight from about the positive accomplishments of the Plone open source project during the past five years. The talking points are straight from their fifth year anniversary announcement with only a little editing on my part. I realize that there are other open source projects that may have accomplished just as much as Plone during the past five years. However, this is Plone's time to shine. Also, this is rare occasion I get to promote a non-PHP Web application to our visitors here at CMS Report.

It's enlightening to look back at what has been accomplished over the last five years:

• Plone is one of the world's leading Web Content Management Systems, and has received numerous awards and recognitions of excellence throughout the years, from general trade publications to specific content management magazines.
• The Plone project has been to the depths of Las Vegas with O'Reilly, and to the top of the Austrian mountains using a satellite uplink to check in our code and do our releases. Plone's developers arranged what was probably the first conference in post-Katrina New Orleans.
• The Plone Foundation was created in 2004, a non-profit organization to manage the Plone IP, code and trademarks, as well as a way to handle promotion and release announcements for Plone. It also secured the worldwide trademark rights last year.
• Plone is a well-established player in most sectors, all the way from small-scale NGOs and businesses to major educational institutions to major governments and corporations.
• Plone has grown from a two-man project to encompass over 100 contributors to the core application and over 500 developers for the third-party add-ons. Over 400 add-ons are available.
• Plone has become a global phenomenon, is published in more than 35 languages, and with more than 200 companies doing Plone development around the world.
• Five books about Plone have been published, in multiple languages.
• Plone helped Oxfam America raise $14 million dollars for the Tsunami disaster in Asia.
• There is an annual Plone Conference every year (join Plone this year in Seattle, Oct 25-27), which draws ~300 participants.