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

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. If you were waiting for a book that would teach you the basics of Plone web development with no programming involved and then make you go live, wait no further.

Martin Aspeli is an experienced Plone consultant and 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 and the "content rules" engine. He is also the current leader of the Plone Documentation Team, and has written a number of well-received tutorials available on plone.org.

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.

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.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.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.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.