Professional Plone Development: Building robust, content-centric web applications with Plone 3, an open source Content Management System. [Paperback]

Martin Aspeli (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1847191983 | ISBN-13: 978-1847191984 | Publication Date: September 17, 2007

This book aims to teach best practices of Plone development, focusing on Plone 3.0. It covers setting up a suitable development environment, customizing Plone's look and feel, creating new content types and forms, connecting to external databases, and managing users and groups intelligently. It also shows how to configure a production-ready server, with LDAP authentication and caching. This book is aimed at developers who want to build content-centric web applications leveraging Plone's proven user interface and flexible infrastructure. Some familiarity with the Python programming language and basic web technologies such as HTML and CSS is assumed. Readers would also benefit from some prior experience with Zope or Plone, for example as site administrators or "power users".

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Martin Aspeli is an experienced Plone consultant and prolific Plone contributor. He served on the Framework Team for Plone 3.0, and is responsible for many new features, such as the improved portlets infrastructure and the "content rules" engine. He is also the current leader of the Plone Documentation Team, and has written a number of well-received tutorials available on plone.org.

Product Details

• Paperback: 420 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (September 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847191983
• ISBN-13: 978-1847191984
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.5 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.9 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,121,052 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Next Level, October 27, 2007

By 

Karl E. Horak (Albuquerque, NM USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Plone Development: Building robust, content-centric web applications with Plone 3, an open source Content Management System. (Paperback)

This is absolutely the book I had hoped it would be -- something to take me, an average Plone 2.5 administrator and developer, up to the next level of competency and into Plone 3.0. Our shop tends to be conservative and hangs back about 6 months before accepting a major new upgrade. This is the book that will keep me current and up-to-speed even though our production server is still back at 2.5.

Just a quick once-through has taught me a lot and suggests improvements for our existing Plone sites. The text provides a detailed case study and plenty of the examples. The sections on events, viewlets, and adapters have already been worth the price of the book.

Written primarily for a *NIX environment, it has enough Windows side notes for someone like me who operates Free BSD servers but develops on a Windows box. Definitely not for a Plone newbie, but not unapproachable for the intermediate level, this book will find a welcome place on developers' shelves. Aspeli has made a fine contribution and highlights the tremendously exciting Plone 3.0 features that are now available out of the box.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars As good as it gets for plone manuals, February 14, 2008

By 

Dan MacKinlay (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Professional Plone Development: Building robust, content-centric web applications with Plone 3, an open source Content Management System. (Paperback)

This well-written, lucid and very intelligent book is the perfect choice for those developers who must, for whatever reason, use plone. Far and away the best one out there. It is not comprehensive, by design, but rather concentrates on the 'best practice' elements of plone - zope 3 integration, elegant use of relational databases, well-structured deployments based on paste, integrating version control and so on.
Unfortunately, it is the elegance and clarity of this approach which really shines a light on the legacy inconsistencies, code-bloat, messiness and quirky multiples re-invention of the wheel that characterises Plone as it stands in 2008. By all means, if you are stuck with plone, use this book as a means of smoothing over your pain. But otherwise, it's perhaps most useful and some provocative ideas about how you could use Zope 3 to build new projects, as well as an elegant demonstration that despite plone moving towards coherence, there is a terrifying amount of nasty code out there in Plone that it takes a book this long and erudite to steer clear of. Maybe pick up Weitershausen's Web Component Development with Zope 3 for a similarly intelligent and eloquent, but far less terrifying, read.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you develop with Plone, read this book!, January 24, 2008

By 

Juan Pablo Gimenez (Rosario, Argentina) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Professional Plone Development: Building robust, content-centric web applications with Plone 3, an open source Content Management System. (Paperback)

Professional Plone Development, the right title for an excellent book.
Martin's book have the answers. Almost every aspect of Plone 3 pro-development is covered in this book,
- Creating instances with buildout
- Become familiar with the debugger
- Overriding Zope 3 components
- Using GenericSetup to create Extension Profiles
- Creating a Custom Theme
- Using the Archetypes Framework to create Custom Content Types
- Ajax in Plone, Rich User Interfaces with KSS
- Deployments in the real world

I'm still developing in Plone 2.5 but this book is always on my desk because a lot of stuff covered here could be used in 2.5 too.
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