Plone Content Management Essentials is a practical and thorough hands-on guide to using the powerful open-source content website publishing system, Plone. With this book as your guide, you will thoroughly understand how and when to utilize Plone, as well as how to install, configure and maintain a Plone-based website. You'll also be able to download the latest Plone installation from our website so that you can apply what you learn in the book. No prior knowledge of Plone is required to learn from this book, but it will enhance what you takeaway.
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About the Author
Julie C. Meloni is the technical director for i2i Interactive, a multimedia company located in Los Altos, California. She has been developing web-based applications since the web first saw the light of day and remembers the excitement surrounding the first GUI web browser. She has authored several books and articles on web-based programming languages and database topics, most notably PHP, MySQL and Apache. You can find translations of her work in several languages, including Chinese, Danish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish and even Serbian. Although Julie can't read these languages, she thinks that's very cool. Julie is also a course developer and instructor at Sessions.edu Online School of Design, where she teaches students the wonders of dynamic websites.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Introduction
Welcome to Plone Fast Track! This book serves as a guide for working with Plone 2.0, from installation (or upgrading) to ongoing administration and customization. You'll learn about the underlying reasons for using a content-management system (CMS) through examples and practical application. You'll also learn how to work with the core feature set of Plone, and you'll see examples of third-party add-ons, including how to install and integrate them within your Plone site. Additionally, a basic Python primer is included at the end of the book, if you want to get your feet wet with the language used to extend Plone even further by writing modules and implementing custom code.
Who Should Read This Book?
Just as Plone is a fully administrable application geared toward "the masses," this book is aimed at users who do not possess an in-depth knowledge of Python programming and Zope/Plone administration. If you have any sort of working knowledge in these areas, all the more power to you, and you can probably skip the appendixes and skim certain portions of other chapters. However, before you begin, you must be familiar with installing software on your operating system of choice, either via the command line or by following wizard-based installers. You must already have, or have access to obtaining, the proper permissions on your operating system for installing server software. Finally, you must be familiar enough with installation processes to understand how to troubleshoot installation and configuration issues as they are explained in the book or as they come up on their own because of the esoteric nature of various operating systems.
By the end of this book, you will thoroughly understand how and when to utilize a content-management system—specifically, how to install, configure, and maintain a Plone-based web site. Although this is by no means a comprehensive, technically oriented book on the inner workings of Plone and the Zope application server, it serves its intended purpose: to introduce new users to the features of Plone and guide them through the creation and maintenance of their first Plone-based websites.
How This Book Is Organized
This book contains eight chapters and two appendixes. Although the chapters are meant to be read linearly—that is, you'll find installation instructions at the beginning of the book, not at the end—you can skip around when you get a feel for how to operate within Plone and Zope.
Chapter 1, "Introduction to Plone and Content Management," discusses the underlying architecture of Plone and the basics of using a content-management system. Then it dissects the anatomy of a standard Plone site (for example, the elements found in the standard Plone template).
Chapter 2, "Installing Plone," goes through the installation process for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux/Unix users. It also covers the upgrade process, if you are coming to Plone 2.0 from Plone 1.0.
Chapter 3, "Using Your New Plone Site," walks you through how to join a Plone site and what you gain by doing so—your own home page, folder, and presence in the content-publishing workflow. This chapter also shows you how to add and modify the various types of content within Plone, such as documents, new items, and events. Other content-related topics are explained, including the discussion feature and how to search through content stored in your Plone site.
Chapter 4, "Additional Plone Elements," describes how to obtain, install, and configure the freely available third-party add-ons for Plone, such as wikis, photo album software, blogging tools, and so forth.
Chapter 5, "Customizing Plone," details how to add, modify, or remove elements of the standard Plone template, including side slots, navigation tabs, and custom graphics. Internationalization and localization of your Plone template is also discussed, with examples.
Chapter 6, "Creating and Implementing a Custom Skin," discusses the files used to create a Plone "look and feel," how to modify these files, and the process behind creating and implementing a skin—that is, a set of thematic display elements—for your Plone site.
Chapter 7, "Additional Content-Related Techniques," discusses how to work with page templates and the Zope Template Language, how to syndicate your content (and the reasons for doing so), and how to create new content types beyond the standard set found in Plone.
Chapter 8, "Technical Administration," discusses the process of ongoing maintenance for your Plone site, as well as how to accomplish other technical tasks, such as running Plone with web servers other than the built-in Zope web server.
Appendix A, "Using Python for Greater Customization," introduces you to the Python language. Here you create scripts and work with the Python interpreter.
Appendix B, "Introduction to Zope and the ZMI," provides a very basic overview of the Zope application server, as well as a quickstart guide (of sorts) to working with the Zope Management Interface.
At the end of each chapter, you will find general troubleshooting information for the items discussed, including pointers for where to look for more information or additional help.
Conventions Used in This Book
This book uses different typefaces to differentiate between code and plain English, and also to help you identify important concepts. Throughout the lessons, code, commands, and text that you type or see onscreen appear in a computer typeface. New terms appear in italics at the point in the text where they are defined. Additionally, icons accompany special blocks of information:
Note - A Note presents an interesting piece of information related to the current topic.
Tip - A Tip offers advice or teaches an easier method for performing a task.
Caution - A Caution warns you about potential pitfalls and explains how to avoid them.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
35 of 35 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"Getting started..." kind of a book,
By Ales Kavsek (Ljubljana, Slovenia) - See all my reviews
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Plone Content Management Essentials (Paperback)
I bought this book together with McKay "The Definitive Guide to Plone" and all I can say is that they fit together nicely.
In the old days when software was delivered to you in a nice box with accompanying manuals, one of them was hopefully titled as "Getting started...", "Introduction to..." or "Quick guide to...". Julie's "Plone Content Management Essentials" is by all means *that* kind of the book in a 'missing box' for Plone. As a complete Plone (Zope) newbie on my way to migrate some stuff from Movable Type intranet site, I needed quick, concise guide to get the general feeling about Plone features and the level of complexity involved (I already knew that Zope behind the Plone is a "beast" in it's own if compared to simple packages like MT) . With just 200+ pages this book helped me grasp the basic concepts behind the Plone CMS in a way, that I could build my prototype site in a few days. The chapters that I liked the most are chapter "4. Additional Plone Elements" describing Plone add-ons of immediate interest to me (CMFBoard, CMFPhotoAlbum and CMFWeblog) and chapter's 5 and 6 on customizing plone and implementing custom skin. The only objection that I have about the book is Appendix A., imho it's completely useless attempt on introduction to python language (it would make more sense to just publish the links to python online resources). Book is geared towards complete Plone newbie's, even non-techies will not be easily lost, thanks to step-by-step approach and numerous screenshots. Nevertheless, I would strongly recommend that you also consider McKay "The Definitive Guide to Plone" which is in my opinion the most complete book about Plone on the market (but you'll certainly need more than a few days to digest it). Thank you for reading this review!
12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Make wikis and blogs,
By
This review is from: Plone Content Management Essentials (Paperback)
A popular open source Content Management System. Meloni suggests here in her book why it has proved so useful. If you read her book and have some familiarity with Microsoft's Office suite, then you can see what Plone offers. The various Microsoft applications, like MSWord, have very rich toolkits. But each application essentially handles single documents. Meloni shows that Plone's remit is at a higher level of organisation. More to do with workflow between several users.
Plus, these users need not be in one physical location. Plone lets a group distributed over the Internet work together. Plone can help enable new types of dispersed "multinationals" of just a few people. The book also has merit in showing how to use Plone to construct wikis and blogs. Two topical subjects. And very closely related. So both are described in the same chapter. Daresay that some of you will find this the most useful section of the book.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good introductory book,
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This review is from: Plone Content Management Essentials (Paperback)
A good introduction to Plone. But, there are a few typographical errors in code samples that will send you on minor troubleshooting trips. The author also covers some add-ins that cause errors when you try to remove them, again, causing you to do some troubleshooting. Not all bad. A little troubleshooting helps you learn the system.
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