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Practical Plone 3: A Beginner's Guide to Building Powerful Websites

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Practical Plone 3: A Beginner's Guide to Building Powerful Websites
 
Practical Plone 3: A Beginner's Guide to Building Powerful Websites
 
  • Get a Plone-based website up and running quickly without dealing with code
  • Beginner's guide with easy-to-follow instructions and screenshots
  • Learn how to make the best use of Plone's out-of-the-box features
  • Customize security, look-and-feel, and many other aspects of Plone 
 
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Sample Chapter 6 Structure Your Content [2.0 MB]
Table of Contents
Book Details
Language English
Paperback 592 pages [191mm x 235mm]
Release date February 2009
ISBN 1847191789
ISBN 13 978-1-847191-78-6
Author(s) Alex Clark, Clayton Parker, Darci Hanning, David Convent, John DeStefano, Jon Stahl, Martin Aspeli, Matt Bowen, Ricardo Newbery, Sam Knox, Steve McMahon, Tom Conklin, Veda Williams
Topics and Technologies Content Management, Open Source, Web Development

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The only Plone book aimed specifically at non-programmers, showing you how to build powerful Plone websites through its graphical web interface


In Detail
Plone is a highly extensible content management system built on Zope application server, which is written in Python. But, you need to have good programming skills to design and develop Plone web applications. Does that mean you can't have a Plone website if you don't have good programming skills? Of course not! You can develop your Plone websites through a graphical interface where you don't need to fiddle with code.

This book will give you clear understanding of how to use Plone 3 to meet your content management needs. Starting from the basics, this book will walk you through the easy-to-use features of Plone and help you create a feature-rich website through its point-and-click feature.

A variety of authors have contributed chapters to this book in the hope that you, the reader, will get a good understanding of Plone and be able to use it effectively. This beginners' guide will introduce the great CMS and its features and then take you further in web development. The book will introduce you to Plone's advanced UI features and show you how to create such a UI platform for your website. You will learn how to manage the contents like web pages, news items, and so on. Working with custom portlets will help you enhance the web components for your site. Each chapter will show you how to add features to your site and develop its functionality. Each chapter can be read independently; you need not go through the previous one to continue further. You can pick and choose the topics depending on your interest and requirement.

Read the full Table of Contents for Practical Plone 3: A Beginner's Guide to Building Powerful Websites


What you will learn from this book
  • Meet the fully featured CMS and dive into its latest features
  • Configure various parts of Plone's user interface and create an advanced UI platform for your website
  • Create and manage content on your website, such as web pages, files, news items, and more
  • Create users and groups; give them specific permissions to add, edit, and view content on your site
  • Create and customize portlets on your website to enhance the web components; expand Plone’s functionality with add-on components
  • Master Plone's powerful workflow and security system to have full control over the site's contents
  • Build a site that reacts intelligently when users create and modify content, by setting up the content rules
  • Customize your Plone template and get a new look and feel for your website
  • Create new content types to capture information unique to your organization
  • Deploy your site, configure caching, and connect to an LDAP/Active Directory repository

Part 1 – Background

1. Introduction
– Jon Stahl
What is a CMS? What is Plone, and where did it come from?

2. Installing Plone
– Steve McMahon
Learn how to get Plone up and running on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

3. A brief tour of Plone
– Tom Conklin
Get an overview of Plone's user interface and key features.

Part 2 – I want to...

4. Create Web Pages
– Sam Knox
Learn how to create and publish web pages with Plone's built-in visual editor.

5. Add News Items, Events, and Other Content
– Tom Conklin
Learn about the other standard content types, such as news items, events, and files.

6. Structure the Content in My Site
– Tom Conklin
Learn how to use folders and Collections to structure your content.

7. Safely Manage Different Versions of Content
– Darci Hanning
Understand Plone's built-in versioning features.

8. Delegate Content Management to Multiple Users
– Tom Conklin
Learn how to create users and groups and give them permissions over various parts of your site.

9. Manage Approvals and Other Workflow for My Content
– Matt Bowen
Customize your security model by creating workflow.

10. Show Additional Information to Users and Site Visitors
– Jon Stahl
Learn about Plone's Portlet features.

11. React to Changes in the Site Automatically
– Alex Clark
Build intelligence into your content management with Content Rules.

12. Control My Site's Configuration in Detail
– Alex Clark
Detailed explanations of the various Plone control panels.

Part 3 – Now that I've got the basics, I'd like to learn how to...

13. Set Up Repeatable Environments using Buildout
– Clayton Parker
Set up a development environment with various debugging tools.

14. Find and Install Add-ons That Expand Plone's Functionality
– Steve McMahon
Learn how to find and install add-on components that are freely available online.

15. Build Forms
– Jon Stahl (with Steve McMahon)
Create web forms quickly and easily.

16. Create New Content Types
– Matt Bowen
Create custom content types to capture and manage specific information.

17. Customize Aspects of Plone
– Veda Williams
Learn how to customize Plone's various UI components.

18. Change the Look-and-Feel
– David Convent
Create a custom theme for your site.

Part 4 – My boss wants me to...

19. Put My Site Live
– Steve McMahon
Learn how to configure a live Plone server.

20. Make It Go Faster
– Ricardo Newbery
Configure a web cache to make Plone faster.

21. Connect to our LDAP/Active Directory Repository
– John DeStefano
Let your users log in with their existing usernames and passwords by connecting to an existing LDAP/Active Directory server.

Approach
In the major part of the book, you will learn by pointing and clicking on the options available in front of you. It includes easy-to-follow instructions and screenshots that will guide you through creating a powerful website. You will then move to an advanced level, where you will customize your already built site.

Each chapter stands alone and you need not go through all the chapters. You can pick and choose depending upon your requirements.
Who this book is written for
If you want to get a Plone site up and running quickly and don't want to get involved in programming, this book is for you. This book is aimed at beginners, who want to configure and customize Plone to meet their content management needs.

The book doesn't expect programming skills, although some knowledge of fundamental web concepts such as HTML and HTTP may be helpful. Some basic programming skills will be beneficial for the advanced topics.

Author(s)
Alex Clark

Alex Clark is a Plone Consultant from Bethesda, MD, USA. He runs a thriving Plone consultancy along with his wife, Amy Clark. Together, they service a wide variety of government, corporate, and non-profit organizations in the greater Washington, D.C. area, and worldwide. For more information, please see http://aclark.net.This is his first book and he hopes that people enjoy the result and get inspired to use Plone.


Clayton Parker

Clayton Parker has been creating dynamic web sites using the Plone Content Management System since 2004. He started out at Six Feet Up, Inc. as a Systems Administrator, which gives him an interesting take on Plone deployment. In 2007, Clayton started using zc.buildout to manage and deploy their Plone sites. As a Senior Developer at Six Feet Up, he has created and contributed to buildout recipes in use by the Community.


Darci Hanning

Darci Hanning has a BSEE from Washington State University (Pullman) and received her MLIS from the University of Washington. She brings over 15 years of experience in software and web application development to her position as the Technology Development Consultant at the Oregon State Library. For the past three years, she has been using Plone, an Open source Software Content Management System, to create and deploy dynamic, easy-to-maintain web sites for small libraries in Oregon. Since Spring 2006, she has been providing technical leadership for the Plinkit Collaborative, a multi-state co-operative, to deploy Plinkit in Colorado, Illinois, and Texas. She has given presentations on both Plone and Plinkit at national and international conferences, has recently served as the President of the Plone Foundation Board, and was selected as a "2008 Mover and Shaker" by Library Journal.


David Convent

David contributed several times to the Plone documentation effort with tutorials and how-tos covering key theming techniques. He developed DIYPloneStyle, a product and a tool that helps theme developers start with the basic generated code. The effort started with DIYPloneStyle is now merged in the theming templates of ZopeSkel, which he maintains.

David is currently employed at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences. He's been working there for the MARS (Multimedia Archaeological Research System) project; a collaborative system based on Plone designed for Archaeologists and Anthropologists, and is now helping the web team at the institute.


John DeStefano

John DeStefano has accrued over 10 years' worth of experience in writing technical information and working with web-based technology. He has written documentation and technical training material for commercial and open source products, which include Adobe Dreamweaver and Flash, Microsoft Visual Studio and Windows Server; web programming languages, which include ASP.NET, SQL, and XML; and technical certifications, which include Network+ and Oracle Database.

John has been rolling out, administering, and hacking (his own) Plone sites since 2006, and has contributed information and technical edits to the vast store of documentation on Plone's web site.

John resides in Long Island, New York, with his wife, Jody, and their four children: Benjamin, Zachary, Sophia, and Jacob. He is currently a technical engineer in the Physics department at Brookhaven National Laboratory.


Jon Stahl
Jon Stahl is the Director of Web Solutions at ONE/Northwest, in Seattle, Washington, USA. He has over 13 years of experience in technology consulting for non-profit organizations, and leads a team of Plone consultants who have launched several hundred Plone-powered sites for environmental organizations. Jon serves on the Plone Foundation board of directors, and is an active leader in the Plone community. His blog can be visited at http://blogs.onenw.org/jon.


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.


Matt Bowen

Matt Bowen is a web developer for a Public Relations firm in Washington, D.C. Matt has shown a keen interest in helping non-technical people share their knowledge over the web, and uses Plone to empower them for the same.


Ricardo Newbery

Ricardo Newbery is a web applications developer and a consultant with over 15 years of experience with Internet technologies. A former physics researcher supporting the Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation Division of the U.S. Naval Command, Control, and Ocean Surveillance Center (NCOSC NRaD), Ricardo also taught Physics and Information Systems college courses for over ten years. He has recently chucked it all to move to beautiful Central Oregon, and focus on developing his own consultancy (http://digitalmarbles.com) while mule deer, and quail loiter outside his office window.

A member of the Plone community since 2004, much of Ricardo’s current consulting work involves customizing Plone installations and optimizing high-performance web applications. Ricardo is the current release manager for CacheFu, a Plone add-on product used to help accelerate Plone web sites.


Sam Knox

Sam Knox hails from Seattle, Washington where he works as the Support Manager for ONE/Northwest – a consulting group that focuses on helping environmental non-profits adopt and effectively use online technology. ONE/Northwest has served hundreds of organizations in the Pacific Northwest and beyond over the last 12 years. Sam regularly conducts Plone trainings and writes end user documentation for a wide variety of audiences and skill levels. He is also primarily responsible for the highly successful online Plone documentation web site, learnplone.org.


Steve McMahon

Steve McMahon lives in Davis, California, where he's a partner in Reid-McMahon, LLC; a web development partnership specializing in developing Plone-based web sites for non-profit organizations.

Steve is currently in-charge of the maintainance of the Plone Unified Installer and OS X installer. He's the developer of the popular PloneFormGen add-on, and is the current release manager for the Plone Help Center. He was elected to the Board of Directors of Plone Foundation in 2007 and in 2008, and served as its secretary.


Tom Conklin

Tom Conklin is an Information Technology manager for a manufacturing company in the Syracuse, New York metro area. Tom has a keen interest in building business solutions in a way that makes IT transparent to the end users.


Veda Williams

Veda Williams has worked in software development for 18 years, which includes her three-year stint as a Plone skinner. She currently works for ONE/Northwest in Seattle, Washington. Veda is an editor for the documentation section of plone.org, and in addition to this book, she is writing a book on theming for Plone, due for publication in Spring 2009.


   




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