Plone Books

$39.20

Product Description

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.
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

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.

About the Author

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

$29.69

Product Description

The Definitive Guide to Plone, Second Edition has been completely updated to cover the latest version of Plone and its newest features. This book provides a complete and detailed overview of Plone. It is divided into three parts, which cover using, configuring, and developing and customizing Plone. After the coverage of Plone’s features, the case studies in the final part of the book reveal the true power of Plone. These case studies demonstrate Plone’s ability to handle all kinds of requirements, while retaining an easy–to–use interface for users. As when you’re working with Plone itself, you can choose where to start in this book and how best to apply it to your own needs.

With Plone, anyone can manage a website or work with an efficient intranet. Start reading The Definitive Guide to Plone, Second Edition right away, and the World Wide Web will be yours!

• Fully covers content management with Plone in Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux
• Shows how to configure, administer, and maintain Plone
• Details the development of custom applications with Plone
• Includes case studies that show how Plone is already being deployed across networks and businesses

What you’ll learn

In this book you will learn:

• Plone development fundamentals
• How to customize Plone to develop new functionality
• About the design and architecture of Plone
• How to use relational databases with Plone
• How to integrate Plone with other applications
• How to optimize and improve the performance of Plone websites
• How to secure Plone websites
• How to internationalize/localize Plone websites
• How to create and use the publication work flow

Who is this book for?

This book serves as both an introduction to those who have never used this powerful CMS and as a reference for those wishing to expand and deepen their knowledge of Plone–in short, all Plone users and all those who want to use an open source CMS.

About the Author

Redomino is an Italian company founded by a group of software consultants who truly believe in the Open Source culture and work with Plone since this software was born, participating in the community as developers and supporters. Translating their passion in a business, they had the opportunity to bring Plone to many major Italian companies.

Redomino is a content management solutions provider, its team specializes in the production of competitive, innovative and practical e–Business solutions, professional web sites, intranets, e–commerce solutions and other Web applications, in consulting, design and hosting services and has developed in years specific training skills and experience, above all on Plone, Zope, Python and Linux.

Andy McKay is a principal of Enfold Systems and an active contributor to a variety of Python-based open source projects. He is also a core developer of the Plone content management system. McKay maintains ZopeZen.org, a website dedicated to Zope-based applications and Zope extensions.

$31.57

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.

$31.57

Product Description

Create flexible, powerful, and professional themes for your web site with Plone and basic CSS

• Best practices for creating a flexible and powerful Plone themes
• Build new templates and refactor existing ones by using Plone’s templating system, Zope Page Templates (ZPT) system, Template Attribute Language (TAL) tricks and tips for skinning your Plone site
• Create a fully functional theme to ensure proper understanding of all the concepts
• A step-by- step approach to ensure proper understanding of all the concepts

In Detail

Themes are among the most powerful features that can be used to customize a web site, especially in Plone. Using custom themes can help you brand your site for a particular corporate image; it ensures standards compliance and creates easily navigable layouts. But most Plone users still continue to use default themes as developing and deploying themes that are flexible and easily maintainable is not always straightforward.

This book teaches best practices of Plone theme development, focusing on Plone 3. It provides you with all the information useful for creating a robust and flexible Plone theme. It also provides a sneak peek into the future of Plone’s theming system.

In this book you will learn how to create flexible, powerful, and professional Plone themes. It is a step-by-step tutorial on how to work with Plone themes. It also provides a more holistic look at how a real-world theme is constructed. We look at the tools required for theming a web site. The book covers major topics such as configuring the development environment, creating a basic theme product, add-on tools and skinning tricks, integrating multimedia with Plone, and configuring your site’s look and feel through the Zope Management Interface (ZMI). Finally, the book takes a close look at the thrilling and greatly simplified future of theming Plone sites.

What you will learn from this book?

• Create attractive themes using Plone 3 programming concepts
• Customize your Plone theme and get a new look and feel for your web site
• Set up a productive development environment for building a quality theme product
• Use graphic design, Subversion, and other helpful tools that make theming easier and more efficient
• Use Zope 3 components for building powerful Plone themes
• Create an actual theme product using the Plone 3 theming concepts
• Embed multimedia in a Plone template to make your theme more attractive and useful
• Deploy and test your theme by following best practices

Approach

This book provides a holistic look at theming Plone sites as well as step-by-step instructions on how to create Plone themes. The book first briefly introduces the concepts and necessary tools and then moves on to describing the concepts needed for customizing templates in Plone. It also provides handy tips and tricks along the way to simplify the theming process.

Who this book is written for?

This book is targeted at professional web designers working with Plone who want to create their own unique look and feel for a Plone web site.

About the Author

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.

$31.57

Product Description

Break the webmaster bottleneck by empowering instructors and staff

• Enable instructors and staff to represent courses using Plone’s built-in content types–news items, collections, and events–without writing a single line of code
• Embed sound and video into your course materials, news feeds, or anywhere on your Plone site
• Written by Erik Rose–member of the Plone 4 and 5 Framework Teams
• Expert guidance on using the best plug-ins so that you can get the best out of your site right from the beginning

In Detail

Plone enables your faculty and staff to manage their own web sites, but some assembly is still required. How do you represent courses online? What about assignment schedules, lecture podcasts, and collaborative spaces? That’s where this book comes in–it takes the burden of routine updates off your web team by harnessing the world’s most advanced free content management system.

This is the school web team’s missing manual. Through step-by-step examples covering 11 common educational use cases, you’ll learn how to take the box of parts provided by Plone, combine them with best-of-breed third-party plug-ins, and turn out a dynamic web environment that will be a joy to use for faculty, enhance staff productivity, and engage the student body.

Plone is powerful but complex. Its ease of use for end users belies a wealth of under-the-hood features and third-party add-ons that are time-consuming for back-end web teams to sort through. The book guides you on proven paths through the forest of potential that you encounter during design and deployment, starting you with reasonable choices for each of 11 common education-domain use cases. Each one enumerates the value it brings to your site and guides you step-by-step through an implementation suitable for the vast majority of cases, meaning you can spend your time addressing the unique needs of your institution–not reinventing the wheel.

What you will learn from this book

• Build common e-learning tasks in Plone: assignment schedules, course materials, online turn-in forms, and class interaction using podcasts and forums
• Build school-wide and department-wise directories collecting contact info, biographies, and more
• Take care of necessities, like customizing the look of your site, setting up a production server, and running incremental backups
• Integrate audio and video with Plone: weaving it into pages, populating portlets, and podcasting it to the world
• Harness Plone4Artists Calendar product to improve the display of event listings
• Find tips on information architecture and usability, learning from the successes and mistakes of several sites

Each chapter will guide you through solving a common education-domain use case. Most chapters stand on their own so you can use this as a reference book without having to “eat the whole elephant.”

Chapter 1: Creating Courses. Represent a bare-bones course in Plone, for optional embellishment in later chapters. Post syllabi, course materials, and due dates, and distribute assignments online. Collect feedback from students throughout the semester to drive continuous improvements.

Chapter 2: Calendaring. Due dates, athletic schedules, concerts, lectures–track them all using Plone’s built-in event support. Bring in the third-party Plone4Artists Calendar product to add wall-calendar-like views and support for repeating events, and explore some best-of-breed organizational schemes based on real-time filtering with collections.

Chapter 3: Showcasing Personnel with Faculty/Staff Directory. The Faculty/Staff Directory product is practically a departmental website in a box. Showcase your instructors, staff, and students; highlight their areas of expertise; and publish their biographies and contact details. Group people into committees and departments, and use those groupings for display and access control. Finally, get a sneak peek into the future of the Faculty/Staff Directory product, which I help develop.

Chapter 4: Extending Faculty/Staff Directory. Faculty/Staff Directory does a lot, but every school has some custom requirements. Toward this, the product supports an extensibility framework for adding fields to its data types. In this chapter, take this framework for a test drive. Add fields to keep track of a fax number and a list of scholarly publications. Just as you need them, you’ll find plenty of sidebars explaining portions of Plone infrastructure, from Archetypes to adapters.

Chapter 5: Blogs & Forums. In a university, large class sizes limit class discussions and individual attention, while travel budgets limit the number of professional conferences where faculty can present. In this chapter, set up blogs and forums to counter both problems–giving students more class interaction and helping faculty build professional prominence. We’ll find the best Plone blog products and explore practical suggestions of how to use blogs in the classroom. We’ll also take the undisputedly top forum product for a spin and see how to use it to let students support each other, saving office hours and after-school help for those who need them most.

Chapter 6: Audio & Video. Some instructors worry that publishing audio or video of lectures will hurt class attendance, but higher-ed institutions who have experimented with services like iTunes U have found just the opposite. In this chapter, learn how to publish audio and video in Plone and create podcasts so students can retrieve the latest materials automatically. Also learn how to bootstrap an iTunes U presence for your school, offering your materials on the iTunes Store and tripling your traffic.

Chapter 7: Creating Forms Fast. Creating one-off forms–staff surveys, information forms for field trips, informal quizzes–doesn’t have to be the webmaster’s job. In this chapter, deputize your power users with PloneFormGen, a flexible form-building tool. Make self-validating forms without any coding. Configure them to email their submissions or store them in access-controlled areas of the site for easy group access.

Chapter 8: Styling Your Site. For a fast site launch, nothing beats pulling a ready-made look off the shelf and slapping your logo on it. However, if time permits, a custom look greatly increases your site’s cachet. This chapter is a crash course in Plone 3 theme creation. After untangling Plone’s confusing theming situation, we walk you through the development of a skeletal theme, giving you everything you need to customize any of Plone’s default CSS or images. For more advanced theming, we point you to the best online and print resources.

Chapter 9: Going Live. The quality of your deployment configuration can be the difference between unusably slow and refreshingly brisk. In this chapter, set up a Plone installation that can serve hundreds of anonymous requests per second using one-size-fits-almost-all sample configurations. Configure ZEO clustering to make use of multiple processors. Turn the knobs in CacheFu to achieve the ideal balance between speed and freshness. Use the included Squid configuration to set up the industry-leading caching proxy in minutes. End with a sample Apache virtual host configuration that ties it all together.

Chapter 10: Maintenance, Backups, and Upgrades. Keep Plone running smoothly by automating database maintenance and backups. Ensure pain-free upgrades by learning how much to trust Plone’s releases, and test third-party products to avoid unpleasant surprises.

Approach

This book is written especially for time-constrained web teams. Every chapter is hands-on from start to finish, focusing on getting a value-adding site up fast. Necessary theory and tips on best practices are interspersed with the step-by-step instructions, broken out into sidebars so it informs your progress without impeding it. Also, every chapter is independent, dealing with a specific use case–for example, publishing video, creating forms, or representing assignment schedules and syllabi–so you can skip straight to what you need.

Most chapters require no programming at all. The few where we dig deeper (for example, to build our own plug-in products) are replete with working code samples and explanations of what’s going on. A rudimentary knowledge of the Python programming language is helpful in these but is not essential.

Who this book is written for

Plone 3 for Education is for the makers of school web sites, from primary to university, from e-learning to public-facing, from tech-savvy teachers to seasoned software developers. A user-level familiarity with Plone is the only prerequisite; everything else is baked in.

About the Author

Erik Rose

Erik Rose has consulted on the launch of dozens of successful departmental and college sites at Penn State University. He does on-site Plone and Python training, has written several popular Plone products–including FacultyStaffDirectory, WebServerAuth, and CustomNav–and speaks at world and regional Plone conferences about security, software architecture, and collaboration practices. He’s also a member of the Plone 4 Framework Team and spokesman for the Plone 5 Framework Team.

Erik Rose

Erik Rose has consulted on the launch of dozens of successful departmental and college sites at Penn State University. He does on-site Plone and Python training, has written several popular Plone products-including FacultyStaffDirectory, WebServerAuth, and CustomNav-and speaks at world and regional Plone conferences about security, software architecture, and collaboration practices. He’s also a member of the Plone 4 Framework Team and spokesman for the Plone 5 Framework Team.

$25.00

Product Description

“A user’s guide to Plone” is directed at helping people who want to maintain, manage, or edit websites or portals using Plone. The tutorials in the first part of the book are as well-suited for self-study as they are for use as a teaching aid in courses and seminars led by a trainer. The reference section in the second part of the book encompasses a comprehensive overview of the functions offered by Plone 3, providing both beginners and experienced users with a valuable guide.

With how to operate Plone systematically and comprehensively described, this book is also helpful to users of websites incorporating custom design and technical enhancement. Among the contents: – Comprehensive tutorials for beginners – The basics of Plone – A description of all content types – A detailed explanation of the workflows – Documentation for the Kupu visual editor.

The authors have worked for many years as both users and developers of Plone and have contributed a great deal to the German translation of the user interface. Thomas Lotze works as a software developer for gocept gmbh & co. kg, and Jan Ulrich Hasecke is a free-lance public-relations consultant, a member of the Plone Foundation, and sits on the board of directors at DZUG e.V. (German Language Zope User Group).

$39.20

Product Description

An in-depth and comprehensive guide to the Plone content management system.

• A comprehensive guide for Plone website administrators and developers
• Design, build, and manage content rich websites using Plone
• Extend Plone’s skins and content types
• Customize, secure, and optimize Plone websites

In Detail

Built on the powerful and popular Zope application server, Plone is widely believed to be the best and most powerful open source content management system. Many regard it as the equal of, or superior to, commercially available CMS.

Plone
Plone is an open source content management system built on the powerful object-oriented Zope application server. Easy to use, powerful, extensible, and well-supported by an extensive team of developers and contributors, Plone has quickly become one of the most popular open source content management servers.

Plone has support for internationalization, complies with accessibility and usability standards, can run on various platforms, and is highly extensible. Plone is ideal as an intranet and extranet server, document publishing system, portal server, and a groupware tool for collaboration between separately located entities.

Like any feature-rich, complex system, Plone can have a steep initial learning curve. This makes good documentation essential for both the beginner and expert alike. For users new to Plone, this book provides a structured pathway through set up and initial customization. Experienced Plone developers will learn how to leverage the full capability of this powerful application.

What you will learn from this book? Requiring only a working knowledge of Python and Zope, this book will help you gain a deep understanding of Plone.

The book covers all aspects of understanding, implementing, and extending Plone:

• Installing, running and managing Plone
• The design and architecture of Plone
• Managing users and permissions
• Managing and publishing content
• Using, extending, and writing Plone tools
• Customizing the layout of Plone websites
• Writing Plone products
• Using relational databases with Plone
• Integrating Plone websites with other websites and systems
• Optimizing, securing, and improving the performance of Plone websites
• Plone internationalization features
• Plone real world case studies.

This book gives you all the skills you need to become an accomplished Plone developer.

Approach

This book is a practical guide to Plone. It is written in a tutorial style, using examples and case studies to take you from the basics thorough to advanced Plone implementations.

Who this book is written for?

Requiring only a basic knowledge of Zope and Python, this book is valuable for both beginners and experienced Plone developers.

From the Publisher

This comprehensive guide is for Plone website administrators and developers. Whether you are new to Plone, are already running Plone websites, or would like to be able to build custom Plone solutions, this is the book for you. With something for everyone, from complete beginners, to those with a working knowledge of Python and Zope, to seasoned experts, this book will help you gain a deep understanding of Plone.

$29.69

Product Description

“Enjoyable to read—it has plenty of cautionary notes, hints, and other bits of advice that keep the reader awake and interested.” — Samuel Sotillo, ZopeMag.com

This unique guide to Plone covers everything from installing Plone (on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux) to writing code for the system. As part of the Apress library of Python programming and content management tools, The Definitive Guide to Plone is authored by a member of Plone’s core development team, Andy McKay.

He emphasizes the customization of Plone and shows how to fully integrate Plone into an existing website and application. If you want to adopt Plone for some or all of its features, pick up this invaluable reference and start learning right away!

About the Author

Andy McKay

Andy McKay is a principal of Enfold Systems and an active contributor to a variety of Python-based open source projects. He is also a core developer of the Plone content management system. McKay maintains ZopeZen.org, a website dedicated to Zope-based applications and Zope extensions.

$44.99

Product Description

70 simple but incredibly effective recipes for creating your own feature rich, modern Plone add-on products by diving into its development framework

• Create custom content types, add utilities, and internationalize your applications using Plone products
• Manage site installation, configuration, and customization with code instead of manual actions that are likely to be forgotten
• Guarantee your code operation and performance by including automatic testing and caching techniques
• Part of Packt’s Cookbook series: Each recipe is a carefully organized sequence of instructions to complete the task as efficiently as possible.

In Detail

The Plone Content Management System is one of the best open source CMS, because by using Plone’s development framework you can extend its functionality according to the specific requirements of your website. The Plone framework has lots of components that can be used to create add-ons or extensions called Plone Products. You can optimize your site for improved usability, accessibility, and security by creating custom Plone products.

This book covers recipes that will help you create custom Plone Products and implement them on your website. Every topic covered in this book is accompanied by essential fundamentals and step-by-step explanation that will help you understand it better. With the help of this book you will be able to create custom Plone products that are well suited for your website.

You can read the whole book or just pick recipes relevant for you; cross references help you understand the recipes even if you do not read them in order.

If you work through the book in order, you will start by setting up an example project of a news website that will be developed throughout the book. You will learn about all of the necessary tools a Plone developer must have before starting any project. You will develop the website further by detecting problems and debugging them. You will be able to modify code on-the-fly or get help on how to do some tasks by installing and using special tools such as IPython, ipdb, and PDBDebugMode. You will then create a new content type, based on an existing one, and wrap the final product into a Python egg.

You will set up automated testing to prevent errors in code that have evolved in the development stage. You will use paster to automatically create a new custom content type from scratch. You will improve the performance of your application by creating lightweight content types and following other recipes covered in this book. Key features such as usability, internationalization, accessibility and security are covered to make sure that your development and customizations will be at the level of Plone core and its most remarkable add-on products.

You will improve your user interface by creating simple client-side visual changes and server-side manipulation of objects. You will learn to create and manage portlets by using Portlet manager and customize your website by modifying third-party products. Finally you will learn to communicate with an external non-Python-based system and make your products available for future use.

What you will learn from this book

Approach

The examples in this book follow a sample project creating a digital newspaper website to meet the requirements of a fictional customer who wants to place commercial advertisements all over the site. The whole book is a comprehensive collection of recipes that elaborate a series of well known use cases. You will find an organized step-by-step procedure to accomplish each task followed by detailed explanations to better understand how and why each topic was undertaken, and many links to online references and other related sections in the book that can supplement the subject in question. You can read the whole book or just pick the recipes that are relevant for you; where necessary, cross references will help you understand the recipes even if you do not read them in sequential order.

Who this book is written for

This book is for programmers who have some knowledge of Python, Plone, and Zope. If you want to develop feature-rich add-on products in Plone, this book is for you. It is aimed at the development of backend features, so you need not have other web-related skills such as HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

About the Author

Juan Pablo Giménez

Juan Pablo Giménez is a programmer with more than 10 years of expertise in the FOSS field. He started as a C programmer and Linux sysadmin but quickly turned to web development, founding and directing Rcom, an IT firm based in Rosario, Argentina. Five years ago he started working with Plone, his last and true love.

Marcos F. Romero

Marcos F. Romero has been a software developer since 1997. Since 1999 he has worked on numerous projects of sites and web applications. In 2007 he started to participate in Plone projects. For over 10 years he has been interested in Usability as a discipline applicable to everyday activities, which he can luckily actively employ in Inter-Cultura, a company that specializes in this discipline, where he has been working for several years.

$27.57

Product Description

Plone Content Management Essentials is a practical and thorough hands-on guide to using the powerful open-source content website publishing system, Plone. With this book as your guide, you will thoroughly understand how and when to utilize Plone, as well as how to install, configure and maintain a Plone-based website. You’ll also be able to download the latest Plone installation from our website so that you can apply what you learn in the book. No prior knowledge of Plone is required to learn from this book, but it will enhance what you takeaway.

About the Author

Julie C. Meloni is the technical director for i2i Interactive, a multimedia company located in Los Altos, California. She has been developing web-based applications since the web first saw the light of day and remembers the excitement surrounding the first GUI web browser. She has authored several books and articles on web-based programming languages and database topics, most notably PHP, MySQL and Apache. You can find translations of her work in several languages, including Chinese, Danish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish and even Serbian. Although Julie can’t read these languages, she thinks that’s very cool. Julie is also a course developer and instructor at Sessions.edu Online School of Design, where she teaches students the wonders of dynamic websites.

$44.99

Product Description

Embed, display, and manage multimedia content in your Plone website

• Build a modern full-featured multimedia CMS with Plone and add-on products
• Use and extend specialized multimedia content-types for images, audio, video, and Flash
• Set up a custom multimedia CMS by collaborating with external resources such as YouTube, Google videos, and so on
• Follow a step-by-step tutorial to create a feature-packed media-rich Plone site

In Detail

Plone is a free and open source content management system built on top of the Zope application server. Multimedia provides us with stunning interactive user experiences and many design options, but it requires discipline and knowledge to utilize it effectively so that we do not alienate our audiences. By providing an overview of multimedia content together with a practical focus on how to process it in the web context, this book will be your ideal partner when turning your Plone site into a full-featured multimedia Internet presence.

From watermarked images, integrated Silverlight-applications over geotagged content and rich podcasts to protected video-on-demand solutions this book provides a rich repository of tools and techniques to add full multimedia power to Plone. This step-by-step guide will show you how to collaborate with many external web resources to build a powerful interactive Plone site that perfectly meet your needs.

Multimedia data is a very important part of the Internet, considering the amount of storage and bandwidth taken. This book will show you how to turn your multimedia data in valuable multimedia content by using the mature and extensible open source CMS Plone.

With its content-centric approach Plone allows specialized use-case scenarios for image, audio, video, Flash and Silverlight applications. The initial chapters focus on managing image, audio, video, and flash content for your Plone website. We then plunge into content control and syndication.

The book will show you how to structure your content by tagging, rating, and geolocating. It will give you insights on how to upload, store, and serve your multimedia content in an effective way.

What you will learn from this book

• Include photos, movies, audio, and Flash-applications into your Plone site to make it more interactive and user-friendly
• Create a podcast with multimedia content stored in Plone for broadcasting news
• Geolocate the real-world geographic location of an Internet-connected computer or mobile device
• Rate and license your content with Plone
• Upload your content to Plone with the help of easy-to-use drag and drop options
• Provide video-on-demand with Plone and Red5 to allow users to select and watch video content
• Create an engaging and interactive user experience by including powerful Silverlight web and mobile applications into Plone
• Get to grips with categorization, syndication, upload, storage, and serving of multimedia content
• Set up a professional photo site with watermarked images and develop an interactive gallery
• Integrate videos and images from external providers such as Youtube, Yahoo video, Picasa, flickr, and so on
• Learn about the video and audio formats best suited for web publishing

Approach

This book is written in a tutorial style where you work through examples that describe how you can create multimedia applications using Plone and integrate your existing multimedia resources into your website. It also tells you how to use multimedia effectively giving many ideas and best practices.

Who this book is written for

This book is for Plone integrators who want to extend the core of Plone with multimedia features. It gives no introduction to Plone and readers should know how to set up a Plone site using a buildout. The book can be read and understood well without being a Python developer, though some examples have Python code included.

About the Author

Tom Gross

Tom Gross is a long-time Zope and Plone user and developer. Since Plone 4.0 he has been a core-contributor and he took responsibility for the rewrite of the reference browser widget. Besides his development and consultant work in Australia, Germany, and Switzerland he writes technical and philosophical (audio)books.

$25.00

Product Description

Content Management with Plone: Handbook for Authors and Editors is the first guide specifically for Plone users. While other Plone books target developers and system administrators, Content Management with Plone is the only guide to put content creators and editors first, providing what they need to get started with one of the world’s most popular and powerful open-source content management systems.

The book also is a support tool for trainers. The tutorial section can serve as workshop material, while the reference section can complete trainers’ own knowledge of Plone’s functions.

Content Management with Plone has been updated to cover Plone 2.1 and is useful even with customized installations. Contents include:

• A comprehensive tutorial
• The basics of Plone
• Explanation of standard content types
• Understanding members, roles and groups
• Working with content
• Using the publication workflow
• Using the visual editor

Authors Thomas Lotze and Christian Theune develop Zope and Plone applications for gocept, a software engineering firm in Halle, Saxony-Anhalt, Germany. Theune also is a core developer of Zope and chair of the board of the German Language Zope User Group. Content Management with Plone: Handbook for Authors and Editors is the English translation of their German book, Content Management mit Plone: Handbuch für Autoren und Redakteure. It is published in the United States by Enfold Systems, a firm led by Plone cofounder Alan Runyan and specializing in products and services that make Plone easier to adopt.