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.

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.

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.

Professional Plone Development, Free Online Edition

This site is designed to give you more information about building robust, content-centric web applications with Plone, and about the book Professional Plone Development by Packt Publishing. This website will allow you to view content from the book and also allow you to read through summaries of each chapter from the book (see below), and read through one full chapter (Chapter 2).

Paperback: 420 pages
Author: Martin Aspeli
Publisher: Packt Publishing (September 17, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1847191983
ISBN-13: 978-1847191984

What This Book Covers:
Chapter 1 discusses Plone's history and community.
Chapter 2 introduces a case study, setting the scene for the rest of the book.
Chapter 3 teaches you how to set up a development environment, using zc.buildout to orchestrate various dependencies such as the Zope application server and Plone itself.
Chapter 4 looks at the various ways in which Plone can be customized and issues a few warnings about the perils of relying too much on persistent through the web settings that are difficult to reproduce across environments.
Chapter 5 concentrates on creating a policy product to manage site policy decisions and configuration settings related to the case study application. This is expanded with new policies in nearly every subsequent chapter. This chapter also emphasizes the importance of automated unit and integration tests.
Chapter 6 explores Plone's security model, and makes the case for using workflow as the primary tool for implementing a security policy by showing how to install a custom workflow using GenericSetup.
Chapter 7 demonstrates how to safely test, install, and customize Plone add-on products.
Chapter 8 deals with re-branding the growing case study application with a custom theme. It illustrates how to customize style sheets, templates, browser views, viewlets, and portlets—all without modifying the source code of Plone itself.
Chapter 9 delves deeper into the nine core concepts underpinning Zope and Plone development.

Some of you may find this chapter a little fast-paced at first, and you may want to go back to it when you have had more time to see the described techniques in practice in the subsequent chapters.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Martin Aspeli has been active in the Plone community since 2004. He has contributed a number of new features since then, including the Plone 3 Portlets infrastructure and the Content Rule engine. He served on the Framework Team for Plone 3.0, acting as the team's spokesperson.

Outside the Plone core, Martin is responsible for popular third-party products, such as Poi (an issue tracker), RichDocument (a document type with attachments and inline images), and b-org (a user and group management tool). He also looks after the PloneHelpCenter and PloneSoftwareCenter, which power the Documentation and Products sections on plone.org, respectively.

A frequent attendee at conferences and sprints, Martin has presented several well-received tutorials, such as "Rich Document—Creating Content Types the Plone 2.1 Way", "b-org— Creating Content Types the Plone 2.5 Way", and the "Testing in Plone" manual. Acting as the de facto head of the Plone documentation team for well over a year, he has witnessed an explosive growth in the documentation available for Plone. He frequently answers questions from new users and developers online, and is well aware of the more common stumbling blocks for new Plone developers.

Martin gained an MSc in Analysis, Design, and Management of Information Systems at the London School of Economics in 2005. His thesis was entitled: "Plone—a model of a mature open source project".

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