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”.
This is absolutely the book I had hoped it would be — something to take me, an average Plone 2.5 administrator and developer, up to the next level of competency and into Plone 3.0. Our shop tends to be conservative and hangs back about 6 months before accepting a major new upgrade. This is the book that will keep me current and up-to-speed even though our production server is still back at 2.5.
Just a quick once-through has taught me a lot and suggests improvements for our existing Plone sites. The text provides a detailed case study and plenty of the examples. The sections on events, viewlets, and adapters have already been worth the price of the book.
Written primarily for a *NIX environment, it has enough Windows side notes for someone like me who operates Free BSD servers but develops on a Windows box. Definitely not for a Plone newbie, but not unapproachable for the intermediate level, this book will find a welcome place on developers’ shelves. Aspeli has made a fine contribution and highlights the tremendously exciting Plone 3.0 features that are now available out of the box.
Rating: 5 / 5
This well-written, lucid and very intelligent book is the perfect choice for those developers who must, for whatever reason, use plone. Far and away the best one out there. It is not comprehensive, by design, but rather concentrates on the ‘best practice’ elements of plone – zope 3 integration, elegant use of relational databases, well-structured deployments based on paste, integrating version control and so on.
Unfortunately, it is the elegance and clarity of this approach which really shines a light on the legacy inconsistencies, code-bloat, messiness and quirky multiples re-invention of the wheel that characterises Plone as it stands in 2008. By all means, if you are stuck with plone, use this book as a means of smoothing over your pain. But otherwise, it’s perhaps most useful and some provocative ideas about how you could use Zope 3 to build new projects, as well as an elegant demonstration that despite plone moving towards coherence, there is a terrifying amount of nasty code out there in Plone that it takes a book this long and erudite to steer clear of. Maybe pick up Weitershausen’s Web Component Development with Zope 3 for a similarly intelligent and eloquent, but far less terrifying, read.
Rating: 4 / 5
Professional Plone Development, the right title for an excellent book.
Martin’s book have the answers. Almost every aspect of Plone 3 pro-development is covered in this book,
– Creating instances with buildout
– Become familiar with the debugger
– Overriding Zope 3 components
– Using GenericSetup to create Extension Profiles
– Creating a Custom Theme
– Using the Archetypes Framework to create Custom Content Types
– Ajax in Plone, Rich User Interfaces with KSS
– Deployments in the real world
I’m still developing in Plone 2.5 but this book is always on my desk because a lot of stuff covered here could be used in 2.5 too.
[...]
Rating: 5 / 5
This book is required reading if you want to start developing with Plone. It covers all the important concepts and true to its name does it the professional way by showing you how to model, build, test, deploy, optimize, etc. The example application developed step-by-step in the book is very good because it covers most of the things you’ll need to know when starting out.
Although the book explains many plone/zope concepts well, there is no discussion of the Plone’s architecture or API layout. Therefore, you’ll spend a lot of time reading Plone’s source code both while reading the book and after finishing it. Another drawback is that the level of detail is sparse and you’ll need to refer to online sources quite frequently.
As for the price, $40 is a bit high and the cheap production quality doesn’t help it much. They should have used a better designer.
Some would say this book deserves 5 stars because there isn’t another book that is so authoritative. However, Plone’s documentation is sub-par compared to the Plone itself so I won’t give them extra credit for something that’s long overdue.
All in all, a pretty good book. They have a PDF version that is $10 cheaper and I would recommend buying that instead.
Rating: 4 / 5
I have always enjoyed reading Martin Aspeli’s contributions to Plone documentation at plone.org and have found his articles clearly written and extremely helpful. His book, Professional Plone Development, continues in the same tradition with straight-forward explanations. This book is aptly titled. It’s not a first book to read for Plone, but is for people already familiar with the Plone framework. The intended audience is definitely web site developers.
This book tells you how to do things you’d never be able to figure out on your own. It’s a cookbook for how to get things done and really gets down to the nitty gritty. Plone 3 is complex, but here it is carefully explained with a clear presentation of ideas. So many things are new & different in Plone 3 that it’s hard to wrap your mind around it. With this book at least you’ll be speaking the language. There are many overviews of Plone 3 functionality and it seems to have touched on every subject related to Plone 3. It’s very comprehensive.
Lots of practical ideas and great tips are included – like using a code management system even for small or single-developer projects. Aspeli highly encourages testing and shows how to implement unit tests. At the beginning of the book the reader is presented with the history of Plone. It is a worthwhile background and will make you feel comfortable about the Plone community. The chapter explaining Zope clears up a lot of confusion about the internals of how Plone works. Since Plone is an *application* for Zope 2, sometimes it is difficult to remember what part is Zope and what is unique to Plone.
A case study/sample project is used to present examples and make the details easier to follow. This book is loaded with sample code and even includes an online resource for the code examples in the book. Aspeli gives friendly syntax examples for Windows as well as Unix. Lots of resources for learning more are included, giving locations of the original documentation for further reading.
Overall you’ll find clearly written instructions for developing your own site that will bring you up to speed on Plone 3.
Rating: 5 / 5