Why we still build on Plone in 2026

Every couple of years someone writes the "is Plone dead" post. We've been getting that question since 2010. Plone isn't dead. It isn't even shrinking. It's just gone where the noisy market doesn't look — into governments, regulators, and organisations whose content needs to be auditable in 2035.

We're a Plone shop. We've shipped Plone Volto for the NSW Digital Design System, HM Land Registry, NSW Crime Commission, Justice Health NSW, Marine Stewardship Council, and a long list of UK and AU councils. So this is going to read as biased. It is biased — but biased from production experience, not the marketing site.

What Plone has that the cool CMSes don't

Workflow that works. Plone has had multi-step content workflow, role-based permissions, and audit trails since 2003. Not as plugins. Not as a paid tier. Built in. For a regulator publishing investigation summaries that go through legal review, two-stage approval and a public release window, that's the entire product.

Multi-language as a first-class citizen. Plone's language management understands fallback chains, stale-translation flags, and per-language URL structure. Sanity, Strapi, Contentful all have multilingual stories, all of which are demonstrably worse for the actual workflow editors have to live with.

Accessibility built in, not bolted on. Plone's editor enforces semantic content structure (headings, list markup, image alt text) at authoring time. WCAG 2.1 AA compliance is the default state, not the project we run six months after launch.

Open source, MIT-style licence, owned by a foundation. No vendor whose pricing might triple in 2027. No closed-source dependency you discover only when migration time comes.

What Volto added in 2020

Plone's traditional weakness was the editing UI, which looked like 2008 until Volto landed. Volto is the React frontend that turns Plone into a headless CMS with a modern visual editor. Blocks-based editing, live preview, drag-and-drop layout. The Volto editor is now genuinely good — better, frankly, than most paid headless CMS editors we've tried.

The headless half also means a single Plone instance can serve a website, an internal portal, a mobile app, and feed an AI search index from the same content store. Same governance, same workflow, multiple frontends.

Where we've gone deep on Volto

Building the NSW Digital Design System in Plone 6 / Volto took us deeper into the framework than we'd been before. The full kit ended up with 16 theme components shadowed, 25 manage components shadowed, and 14 addon shadows including custom work in volto-form-block (nine PRs and counting upstream), volto-grid-block, and the section-variation pattern. The reference implementation is open source on GitHub.

That work is its own argument: if Plone Volto can host a strict government design system with editor-driven branding controls and full accessibility, it can host most of what an organisation needs.

When it's not the right choice

Plone is a heavy platform. For a five-page marketing site that needs to ship next month, it's overkill. For a startup wanting to A/B test landing pages weekly, the developer cycle is wrong. For a high-churn editorial newsroom with hundreds of contributors and aggressive deadline pressure, Plone's deliberate workflow gets in the way rather than helping.

Where Plone wins is the opposite axis: governance-sensitive content, long-lived sites, content that has to be defensible at audit. That's a shrinking slice of the consumer-internet, but it's the central case for governments and regulators — and for that case Plone has no real competitor in open source.

The honest 2026 take

We're not zealots. We've built and recommended Sanity, Strapi, Contentful, Drupal and Wagtail when the brief was right for them. But for the work we do most — software for organisations that can't afford to get it wrong — Plone Volto remains the right call. That's not nostalgia; it's the result of repeatedly trying alternatives and coming back.