Merge pull request plone#1373 from plone/overview_history

Update overview/history with a basic first version

Author: stevepiercy

docs/overview/history.md

@@ -9,64 +9,122 @@ myst:
 
 (overview-label)=
 
+
 # Overview
 
-````{todo}
-This page needs content.
-```{seealso}
-[Issue #1352](https://github.com/plone/documentation/issues/1352)
-```
-````
+Plone is a content management system (CMS) that is well-known for its user-friendly interface and robust security features. 
+With Plone, even non-technical users can easily create and manage the content for a public website or intranet using only a web browser. 
+Plone's intuitive interface and comprehensive set of features make it a popular choice for businesses, governments, universities, and any organization that needs a reliable and easy-to-use CMS.
+
+Plone has a long history and has been trusted by users around the world since its initial release on October 4, 2001. 
+Over the years, Plone has undergone many improvements and enhancements, making it a highly mature and stable CMS. 
+Additionally, Plone is supported by a strong community of users and developers who contribute to its ongoing success.
+
+Plone has the maturity, stability, and reliability of an application maintained by open source developers with decades of experience, while continually evolving and adapting to modern technology.
 
-(overview-2-label)=
+Lots of customizations can be made through-the-web, such as creating content types, themes, workflows, and much more.
+A full file system based development workflow is possible and recommended for team work and deployment, backed by source code repositories.
+Plone can be extended and used as a framework on which to build custom CMS-like solutions.
 
-## Key concepts of Plone
+Plone works as a:
 
+- Full-featured server-side rendered HTML CMS.
+- React-based frontend for editing and viewing content, backed by a server with a REST API.
+- Headless CMS server with a REST API, allowing a developer to build a custom frontend with their chosen technology.
 
 (overview-3-label)=
 
-### Web content management system
+## Key benefits
 
+Security is built into Plone's architecture from the ground up.
+Plone offers fine-grained permission control over content and actions.
 
-(overview-4-label)=
+Plone is easy to set up compared to other CMSs in its category, extremely flexible, and provides you with a system for managing web content that is ideal for project groups, communities, websites, extranets, and intranets.
 
-### Add-ons
+- **Plone empowers content editors and web application developers.**
+  The Plone Team includes usability experts who have made Plone easy and attractive for content managers to add, update, and maintain content.
 
+- **Plone is international.**
+  The Plone interface has more than 35 translations, and tools exist for managing multilingual content.
 
-(overview-5-label)=
+- **Plone follows standards and is inclusive.**
+  Plone carefully follows standards for usability and accessibility.
+  Plone is compliant with WCAG 2.1 level AA and aims for ATAG 2.0 level AA.
 
-### Traditional server side rendered HTML pages
+- **Plone is open source.**
+  Plone is licensed under the GNU General Public License, the same license used by Linux.
+  This gives you the right to use Plone without a license fee, and to improve upon the product.
 
+- **Plone is supported.**
+  There are over two hundred active developers in the Plone Development Team around the world, and a multitude of companies that specialize in Plone development and support.
 
-(overview-6-label)=
+- **Plone is extensible.**
+  There is a multitude of add-on products for Plone to add new features and content types.
+  In addition, Plone can be scripted using web standard solutions and open source languages.
 
-### Headless CMS with JavaScript frontend through a REST API
+- **Plone is technology neutral.**
+  Plone can interoperate with most relational database systems—both open source and commercial—and runs on many platforms, including Linux, Windows, macOS, and BSD.
 
 
-(overview-7-label)=
 
-### Explain frontend-backend terms
+(overview-4-label)=
 
+## High Level Overview for Developers
 
-(overview-8-label)=
+Plone is a content management platform with its backend written in Python.
+It is built on top of the open source Zope web application server and development system. 
+Plone makes use of the pluggable Zope Component Architecture (ZCA) to provide a highly modular and extensible system.
+Throughout its history, Plone has used server-side rendering to generate HTML-based content, with advanced resource management features for adding and bundling CSS and JavaScript. 
+Additionally, Plone's use of a component architecture makes it easy to extend and customize, allowing users to create unique, feature rich websites that are tailored to their specific needs.
 
-### Security
+With the release of Plone 6, you now have the option to choose from two different out-of-the-box supported configurations when setting up a new Plone website.
+The Python-based backend server in Plone can still be used alone to render content server-side and deliver HTML to the browser, a setup that is referred to in the Plone documentation as "Classic UI". 
+This configuration has been supported by Plone since its initial release and is still available in the latest version of the platform.
+For container-based deployment, only the `plone-backend` image is required.
+It may be used as a base image, adding customizations, to make a derivative image.
 
+The default and recommended configuration for new websites in Plone is the new React-based JavaScript frontend called "Volto".
+For this setup you still need to run the Python-based backend server, as well as enable the REST API, and update the configuration profile.
+These settings and profile are applied automatically when you select the {guilabel}`Create Plone Site` option in the Plone website creation form.
+In addition a separate NodeJS based frontend server will serve the JavaScript frontend resources and provide SSR with hydration.
+To deploy this setup using containers, you will need the `plone-frontend` image for the frontend server.
 
-(overview-9-label)=
+Beginning with Plone 6, we now support two programming language stacks, one each for Python and JavaScript.
+The documentation has been rewritten, but for this first release you will find some repetition of concepts in the documentation structure.
+See, for example, the development setup and information on deployment options.
+It will take some time until we find and can implement the best structure to explain these new possibilities and the expansion of Plone's capabilities.
+
+```{seealso}
+https://training.plone.org/mastering-plone/what_is_plone.html
+```
 
-### Accessibility (a11y)
 
+(overview-5-label)=
+## Deployment
 
-(overview-10-label)=
+To run a public Plone website in production, you will also need to configure and run a reverse proxy (or ingress), arrange for SSL certificates (either from Let's Encrypt or manually), guarantee persistence of the content database, and arrange backups.
+This is the domain of systems administrators and modern developer-operations professionals.
+Our documentation contains setup examples for these services, yet requires that the reader have some generic experience and knowledge of these domains.
 
-### Internationalization (i18n)
 
+(overview-6-label)=
+## Good to know / What to know
+
+One of the key benefits of the new React-based frontend for Plone 6 is that you can now customize and theme Plone extensively using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript using up-to-date frontend technologies without having to set up a local Python development environment.
+The Plone backend can be run on a local developer machine in a container.
+
+Basic familiarity with programming in Python and managing Python modules and packages using `virtualenv` and `pip` is required to work on the backend code.
+We use `virtualenv` and {term}`mxdev` to manage the source installation of packages in Plone 6.
+
+Similarly, to develop for the new React frontend, you need to have some experience with setting up NodeJS, using a tool like NVM (Node Version Manager) to isolate your setup, and familiarity with {term}`Yarn` and {term}`React`.
+
+If you are looking for more study material on these technologies beyond the documentation, see and follow one or more [Plone Trainings](https://training.plone.org).
+Our trainings are more verbose and contain extra clarification and examples.
 
 
 ```{toctree}
 :maxdepth: 2
 :hidden:
 
-history
+
 ```