Professional Plone Development

Building robust, content-centric web applications with Plone 3, an open source Content Management System.

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 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.