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

by Martin Aspeli (Author)
Key Phrases: rich user interfaces, cheese shop, custom theme, Cinema Folder, Optilux Cinemas, Paste Script (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Building robust, content-centric web applications with Plone 3, an open source Content Management System.

• Plone development fundamentals
• Customizing Plone
• Developing new functionality
• Real-world deployments

In Detail

Plone is an open-source content management framework, built on the top of the Zope application server and written in Python. As a ready-to-use Content Management System with a focus on usability, Plone makes it easy for content authors to create and edit web content.

Plone is also used by developers, as a framework for building content-centric web applications such as dynamic websites and intranets. This book focuses primarily on the developer-oriented aspect of Plone.

What you will learn from this book?

You will gain an in-depth understanding of the concepts that underpin successful Plone development, including:

• How to set up a suitable development environment
• The importance of automated testing of any code you write
• How to perform Plone customizations in a manageable, re-usable fashion
• Techniques for branding Plone and changing its look and feel
• How to safely install and manage third-party add-on components
• How to create your own content types
• How to create new forms and templates
• Ways of interacting with external relational databases
• Techniques for managing users and custom user metadata
• Using Plone's new AJAX framework to build dynamic user interfaces
• How to set up Zope and Plone in a production environment
• How to connect to an LDAP/Active Directory repository for authentication
• How to configure a caching proxy to improve Plone's performance

Throughout the chapters, there is an emphasis on demonstrating key concepts with practical examples. The reader should be able to borrow from the examples to get up and running quickly, but refer to the explanations provided to fully appreciate what is going on under the hood.

Approach

The book takes a pragmatic approach, building a realistic example application based on a case study. The code for this application is included with the book, and should serve as a useful starting point and source of examples for the reader.

Who this book is written for?

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".

About the Author

Martin Aspeli

Martin Aspeli is an experienced Plone consultant and a 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, the "content rules" engine, and several R&D efforts relating to Plone 4.0. He is a former leader of the Plone Documentation Team and has written a number of well-received tutorials available on plone.org. He is also the author of Professional Plone Development and was recognized in 2008 by Packt Publishing as one of the "Most Valuable People" in Open source Content Management Systems.

Product Details

• Paperback: 420 pages
• Publisher: Packt Publishing (September 17, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1847191983
• ISBN-13: 978-1847191984
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #143,432 in Books (See Bestsellers 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 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.

3 of 3 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() possumpalace.org (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

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)

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.
[...]