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What is Plato?
Plato is user community & support software built upon ASP.NET core. Plato is the only fully integrated platform designed to help software teams connect & stay engaged with users to gather feedback, provide support & deliver better software. Plato offers a complete stack of integrated tools to help anyone offer a simple, branded community & support experience for end users or customers.
If you've not already guessed it your using Plato right now to learn more about Plato 😃
With Plato you can collaborate with your users through public or private discussions, Q&A, ideas & issues or support your users with a public or private knowledge base & beautiful consistent product documentation. You can of course also share files.
Plato is written in C# using Visual Studio 2019, ASP.NET Core 3.1, MVC6 & Bootstrap 4.
Who might use Plato?
We want Plato to be your hub for all user collaboration & support. If you develop products or offer services Plato can help you support & shape those products or services.
Plato can be used to...
- Collaborate with your users through fully featured public or private discussions
- Easily publish beautiful product or technical documentation to help your users
- Provide an online knowledge base of helpful support resources
- Support products through public or private Q&A features
- Shape products through public or private product ideation & voting
- Improve products through public or private issue tracking & voting
In the future we may increase the scope of Plato via our extensible module system based on user feedback but for now we are very focused on providing the tools you need to evolve & support your products. We welcome your suggestions.
Who maintains Plato?
Plato is developed & maintained by InstantASP. Plato is commercial software but we do offer free licenses to open source projects.
Why was Plato created?
Plato is the next evolution of our existing ASP.NET full framework products InstantForum & InstantKB. We've been developing both InstantForum & InstantKB for over a decade and wanted to combine the best of both these products and everything we've learnt over this decade into a integrated, extensible platform using the very latest technology stacks.
Plato In Action
You can see below some examples of Plato in action. Our own support site is of course also powered by Plato.
Homepage
The Plato homepage lets users easily search all your community & support content & access all key areas...
Plato.Discuss
Plato.Discuss adds a fully featured user community to Plato.
Plato.Docs
Plato.Docs adds beautiful product documentation all written in Markdown to Plato.
Plato.Articles
Plato.Articles adds a searchable online knowledgebase to Plato.
Plato.Questions
Plato.Questions adds public or private Q&A to Plato.
Plato.Ideas
Plato.Ideas adds public or private ideation to Plato.
Plato.Issues
Plato.Issues added public or private issues tracking to Plato.
Admin Dashboard
The Plato administrator dashboard offers insights & lets you manage every aspect of your Plato community & support site....
Dark Mode
Plato also comes with a beautiful Bootstrap 4 "dark" theme, a little easier on the eyes...
Modular Design
Plato is built upon modules. Modules are small independent NuGet packages or Visual Studio projects that fit together to make up all of the functionality offered within Plato. Modules will typically take advantage of several extensibility points exposed by Plato to introduce new features & functionality into Plato.
Plato comes with over 180+ official modules, and it's own module manager to easily easily enable, disable or upgrade modules with a single click.
The modular design allows you to custom-fit Plato to suit your specific needs, don't need a user community simply don't enable the Plato.Discuss module. Don't need product documentation, simply don't enable the Plato.Docs module. Plato lets you pick and choose the functionality you need and modules can be easily enabled or disabled at anytime via the administrator dashboard as shown below...
Modules are versioned separately from Plato and can be updated independently from the Plato core, modules are also great if you want to add your own functionality to Plato as you can develop this functionality as a standalone module with the confidence your module won't break when a major update for the Plato core is released.
Main Modules
Please offers hundreds of modules to add all types of functionality. The modules that introduce the most functionality are currently...
For further information on the main modules offered with Plato please see our Main Modules section.
Notable Modules
- Plato.Anchorific
- Plato.Markdown
- Plato.Files
- Plato.Mentions
- Plato.PrettyPrint
- Plato.References
- Plato.Theming
- Plato.Users.Notifications
- Plato.Features.Updates