Customer Reviews

A User's Guide to Plone: Updated for Plone 3

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Even though there are over 300 open source content management systems (CMS), A User's Guide to Plone is the only end user manual for an open source CMS in existence. As such, any manual would be a good manual. But the User's Guide to Plone would be an excellent end user manual even if every content management system had one. Ideal for training users or even marketing Plone, A User's Guide to Plone walks the reader through the different types of content items in Plone; the Plone user interface; managing users, metadata, and content; customizing workflow; search; security; syndication; the portal engine; the WYSIWIG editor, and some basic administration tasks. Illustrations throughout the book create a tell me and show me approach to making the explanations foolproof. Using Plone as a CMS is a fairly intuitive process. However, many users will insist on the written documentation which A User's Guide to Plone provides. The book is also available as a free PDF for non-commercial use. The LaTeX source of the book is available at reasonable rates for commercial use.

A year ago when one of the major Plone developers told me he had switched to Django I took a look at it and now I'm sold. I just recently unloaded this title among others on Amazon Marketplace as used books. Plone is just way too over-engineered. I spent a few years hacking at it and it never clicked. Now I regret not having moved to Django sooner. Sure, Django is a framework and Plone a full blown CMS but I already know enough of Django to implement the parts of Plone I needed. I never got further than making one trivial Archetype work in Plone and even that took WAY more boilerplate code than it should have.