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

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

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.