In their article, Web CMS Kudos and Shortcomings, Circa 2007, CMSwatch summarises their vendor-neutral Web CMS report. This analysis in turn gets interpreted by Scott Paley at BrandInteractivism.com:

While there are certainly many fine CMS's, I was pretty excited to see that Plone was the most highly acclaimed CMS of the major platforms in an article published today at CMS Watch by Tony Byrne.

Byrne listed 30 different categories ranging from performance to access control to user generated content. For each category, he named the best CMS, gave several honorable mentions, and pointed out the products that are lagging.

So, I went ahead and gave scores for each category. If a CMS was listed as the best in a category, I gave it 2 points. If it got an honorable mention I gave it 1 point. And if it was found to be lagging in a category I subtracted 2 points.

The results?

Plone was the ONLY CMS in the entire list with a positive score! It came in WAY ahead of the big commercial CMS platforms (Interwoven, Vignette, Documentum, etc.), and handily beat all the other open source ones as well (Drupal, Typo3, Joomla!, etc.).

Best:

• Adherence to web standards

• Access control

Honorable Mention:

• Internationalization (ability to create multi-lingual websites)

• Aggregation

• User-generated content

• Micro-applications

• Active user groups (the wonderful Plone community)

• Best overall value

Plone was not specifically called out as lagging in any category, although for a few categories the article lists "all other CMS's" as lagging (including Plone in 3 cases). Actually, Plone had the fewest categories in which is was considered lagging of all the CMS's in the report.

Presumably Plone would have done even better if this was done a month or so from now when Plone 3.0 comes out.