Content types

Plone is a content management system (CMS) built on top of the Zope Content Management Framework (CMF).

As such, one of the core features is the ability to add various types of content objects, such as:

• Folder
• Page
• Image
• File

Early implementations of content types in Plone were built exclusively with the Zope CMF. Since then, two other significant frameworks have come along to advance the state of the art: Archetypes and Dexterity.

This document aims to provide "top level" perspective for those not familiar with Plone technology. And what follows is a description of each technology along with information about the version of Plone it works with.

CMF

Used to build the orginal content types from Plone 0.1 to 2.0.

Archetypes

Used to build the content types from versions 2.1 to present (4.1 at the time of this writing).

Dexterity

Came along around the time of Plone 3 as an alternative to Archetypes. Will likely replace AT as the default content type technology in a future release of Plone (hard to say when, but if "Plone 6" means anything to you, then that is when it might happen.)