Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book for Plone, October 18, 2004
Earlier this year I was evaluating a couple of content management systems (e.g., Bricolage, Typo3, Plone) for a project. Every system had compelling features, but Plone provided the best overall feature set (e.g., search, templating, workflow, user management) in a single package. Plone runs on top of Zope, a popular Python-based open source web application server. Many consider Zope to be Python's killer-app, similarly Plone may be one of Zope's killer-apps. After my initial experimentation with Plone, I was really impressed with its ease of use and the power and flexibility of its page templating system. Strengths aside, Plone's online documentation did not adequately address advanced topics. I often found myself sifting through bits of online howtos and other people's examples to understand how to do certain things. Not only was this time consuming but also hit-or-miss.
Enter The Definitive Guide to Plone by Andy McKay. This book provides a series of task-driven chapters with practical information necessary for you to develop great web applications in Plone. The reader is assumed to be knowledgeable about HTML, CSS, the Web, and Python (for advanced features of Plone). Each chapter begins with an overview of what will be covered and uses examples to clarify concepts. A novice user can read cover to cover and come away with a working knowledge of Plone and be able to create relatively sophisticated web sites. A more advanced user can skim the chapter outline, pick and choose topics of interest and quickly find answers.
Who is the author? Andy McKay is a core developer of the Plone CMS project and an active contributor to a variety of Python-based open source projects. McKay also maintains ZopeZen.org, a web site dedicated to Zope applications and extensions. All the examples in this text were reviewed by well-known Zope authority Michel Pelletier, co-author of the Zope book.
McKay aims for the novice user in the first four chapters. Beginning with a high-level introduction to the benefits of content management, then on to installing Plone, and finally how to do basic content editing and customizations. Those of you getting started with Plone will find the chapter on customizations to be most helpful. It shows you everything from changing a folder's default page to altering navigational tabs, further demonstrating Plone's flexibility. You'll notice that some of the text in this section is fairly self-explanatory (i.e., form field descriptions). You should be able to get going with a moderate Plone site after reading this section.
The next six chapters (5-10) go under the hood of Plone, and aims for administrators and developers. Templating is one of the first stumbling blocks when learning to use Plone, remarks McKay. To that end, McKay provides an excellent introduction to the building blocks of Plone's templating machinery, Template Attribute Language (TAL) and Macro Expansion TAL (METAL). McKay goes on to show you how to develop Script (Python) objects and web forms. Next, McKay breaks down Plone's concept of "skins" - images and styles surrounding the content, using the NASA Mars Rover website as an example. McKay moves on to discuss content workflow, one of the more complex features in Plone. Although he manages to explain individual concepts (e.g., states, transitions) well, he could have used some tougher (more real-world) examples to help readers tie in these concepts. Finally, the last two chapters in this section explain how to setup site permissions and users, and also integrate Plone with other systems (e.g., Apache, LDAP). Users looking to customize an existing Plone site should pay special attention here. Be sure to try out the examples, they will help you understand the concepts faster.
The last four chapters tackle advanced topics such as developing custom content types with Python code and Archetypes, indexing, and scalability. McKay provides an in-depth comparison of two approaches for creating new content types. First, using Python code to define content attributes, and second using Archetypes - a schema-based framework. McKay points out that Archetypes is the preferred way for development of products and content types by the Plone team. You can even use UML tools to model your content type, then generate a schema using ArchGenXML. From caching policies to Zope Enterprise Objects, the final chapter presents several techniques for improving your Plone site's performance.
The Definitive Guide to Plone fills the gap between the inadequacy of online howtos and the need to read through someone's example to find out how a particular thing is done. Users of all experience levels will benefit from the authoritative knowledge of the author. The writing style is clear, to the point and neutral. If you want to improve your productivity with Plone, look no further.
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22 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Authoritative Guide to Plone 2, July 11, 2004
The Authoritative Guide to Plone 2I started using Zope almost 2 years ago, and I discovered Plone in its early stages when looking for something that worked out-of-the-box. It is easy to install a Plone site, but it is not so easy to customize or build around Plone without some fundamentals. Andy McKay solved this problem and others for me creating The Definitive Guide to Plone. I bought the book last week, and I have read all 13 chapters and skimmed through chapter 14. I had previously read a fair amount of documents and howtos about Plone and Zope, such as the Zope Book, Plone Book (covering version 1), or "Zope Web Application Development and Content Management." However, I could not understand fully how Plone 2 used different technologies, and I was somewhat confused. After reading "The Authoritative Guide to Plone" I feel confident about what is really going on behind the scenes or at least were to look for answers. As a consequence, I believe that I can experiment and develop new products on my own the right way. The book covers every aspect I was looking for with detail and even some extra aspects I did not know about, these provided the necessary structure to my perceptions about Plone. The content of the book is valuable taking into consideration both Windows and Unix-like users. The book's content, which includes practical connections between different subjects, flows with a thoughtful structure, and it moves to broader concepts after reviewing the fundamentals. McKay does a outstanding job exposing the material. There have been several "what-if" situations about which I had been wondering, but McKay covered successfully those scenarios a couple of pages after. I appreciate McKay's design considerations, such as "sometimes metadata can't contain everything, but it's worth considering in the design (p. 343)," pointers, such as "Overall, most of the Plone development team has adopted Archetypes as the way to develop products (p.388)," experiences, such as "I've stored more than 100,000 objects in BtreeFolder (p. 417)," or advices, such as "My advice is to put as much logic into Python as possible and keep page templates as simple and as clean as possible (p. 149.) Overall, this book is the source to find authoritative and consistent answers about Plone. I would recommend this book to any Plone user or anyone interested in implementing a Content Management System (CMS).
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A "Definitive" guide, for sure!, January 8, 2005
My Plone adventure started a couple of months ago when I decided that it's time to migrate our internal techie website powered by Movable Type, to some more powerful, CMS kind of platform. Looked into several open-source CMS products, among all of them the official Plone site alone impressed me enough to stop the quest. I liked clean user interface, features, an excellent Windows installer and nevertheless the fact that it's built on top of the Zope which means I can use Python, my preferred programming language, to extend out of the box Plone functionality in the future.
I started with Julie C. Meloni book "Plone Content Management Essentials" which is a great introduction type of the text, however it doesn't cover technical details or explain well what is really going on under the hood. Andy McKay's book is exactly what I needed to fill the gap in my understanding of Plone. I admit that I had some difficulties putting together all the technical pieces, mostly because Plone (Zope) is so different from web related packages that I dealt with them so far. Thanks to this book I learned a lot more than I really expected (maybe even wanted?) at the beginning. Plone is definitely much more powerful and sophisticated package than I thought. If you're interested into some serious development or customization of your Plone powered site, you'll definitely need this book at hand in addition to official Zope Book. It covers all important topics that I can think off, from simple to advance customizations, templating, scripting, workflow, security, administration...honestly I felt "lost" sometimes while trying to grasp the more advanced concepts, but this is more of the consequence of ignorance from my part on the subject than the author fault.
Therefore, if you're a hobbyist, ignorant or simply not interested about technical details of the Plone, then Julie's book is probably all you'll need, otherwise I'm sure you'll find this book indispensable resource. Thanks for reading this review!
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