The main objective of Plomino is to provide the ability to build business-specific applications in Plone without requiring development of Plone extension products.
Plomino allows you to create forms, to use those forms to view or edit structured contents, to filter and list those contents, to perform search requests, to add business-specific features and to automate complex processing -- all entirely through the Plone web interface.
Note
Plomino is widely inspired by the IBM Lotus Domino (tm) commercial product, it reproduces its main concepts and features, and it uses its terminology (which sometimes overlaps with the Plone terminology).
Plomino is used in deployments with over 50 000 documents. Users include the UN, European banks and local government organizations.
Most Plomino users are Plone users who are not Plone developers (sometime just beginners, and sometimes experienced integrators), who, once they have built a nice website with Plone, find that specific features are not available using the standard Plone modules.
A smaller number are actual Plone developers who appreciate Plomino because it is extremely flexible or because they want their customers to be more autonomous once they have delivered their work.
Plomino derives various benefits from existing as a Plone add-on.
In the first place, Plone provides a wonderful framework, including key
components for Plomino (ZCatalog, Zope security, PythonScripts, ...),
and Plone also provides very useful features (CMS features, user management,
skinning, etc.).
But the main advantage is the pluggability of Plone. Plone is the only major framework which provides real pluggability. This is a wonderful advantage because it allows Plomino to benefit from excellent Plone products very easily.
Pluggability vs. extensibility
For more on this topic, see this excellent post by Chris McDonough on Pyramid's extensibility, along with Paul Everitt's commentary. Eric Bréhault (in French) provides a wider perspective.