The Definitive Guide to Plone

Rating:
Summary: A great book for Plone
Review: Earlier this year I was evaluating a couple of content management systems (e.g., Bricolage, Typo3, Plone) for a project. Every system had compelling features, but Plone provided the best overall feature set (e.g., search, templating, workflow, user management) in a single package. Plone runs on top of Zope, a popular Python-based open source web application server. Many consider Zope to be Python's killer-app, similarly Plone may be one of Zope's killer-apps. After my initial experimentation with Plone, I was really impressed with its ease of use and the power and flexibility of its page templating system. Strengths aside, Plone's online documentation did not adequately address advanced topics. I often found myself sifting through bits of online howtos and other people's examples to understand how to do certain things. Not only was this time consuming but also hit-or-miss.

Enter The Definitive Guide to Plone by Andy McKay. This book provides a series of task-driven chapters with practical information necessary for you to develop great web applications in Plone. The reader is assumed to be knowledgeable about HTML, CSS, the Web, and Python (for advanced features of Plone). Each chapter begins with an overview of what will be covered and uses examples to clarify concepts. A novice user can read cover to cover and come away with a working knowledge of Plone and be able to create relatively sophisticated web sites. A more advanced user can skim the chapter outline, pick and choose topics of interest and quickly find answers.

Who is the author? Andy McKay is a core developer of the Plone CMS project and an active contributor to a variety of Python-based open source projects. McKay also maintains ZopeZen.org, a web site dedicated to Zope applications and extensions. All the examples in this text were reviewed by well-known Zope authority Michel Pelletier, co-author of the Zope book.

McKay aims for the novice user in the first four chapters. Beginning with a high-level introduction to the benefits of content management, then on to installing Plone, and finally how to do basic content editing and customizations. Those of you getting started with Plone will find the chapter on customizations to be most helpful. It shows you everything from changing a folder's default page to altering navigational tabs, further demonstrating Plone's flexibility. You'll notice that some of the text in this section is fairly self-explanatory (i.e., form field descriptions). You should be able to get going with a moderate Plone site after reading this section.

The next six chapters (5-10) go under the hood of Plone, and aims for administrators and developers. Templating is one of the first stumbling blocks when learning to use Plone, remarks McKay. To that end, McKay provides an excellent introduction to the building blocks of Plone's templating machinery, Template Attribute Language (TAL) and Macro Expansion TAL (METAL). McKay goes on to show you how to develop Script (Python) objects and web forms. Next, McKay breaks down Plone's concept of "skins" - images and styles surrounding the content, using the NASA Mars Rover website as an example. McKay moves on to discuss content workflow, one of the more complex features in Plone. Although he manages to explain individual concepts (e.g., states, transitions) well, he could have used some tougher (more real-world) examples to help readers tie in these concepts. Finally, the last two chapters in this section explain how to setup site permissions and users, and also integrate Plone with other systems (e.g., Apache, LDAP). Users looking to customize an existing Plone site should pay special attention here. Be sure to try out the examples, they will help you understand the concepts faster.

The last four chapters tackle advanced topics such as developing custom content types with Python code and Archetypes, indexing, and scalability. McKay provides an in-depth comparison of two approaches for creating new content types. First, using Python code to define content attributes, and second using Archetypes - a schema-based framework. McKay points out that Archetypes is the preferred way for development of products and content types by the Plone team. You can even use UML tools to model your content type, then generate a schema using ArchGenXML. From caching policies to Zope Enterprise Objects, the final chapter presents several techniques for improving your Plone site's performance.

The Definitive Guide to Plone fills the gap between the inadequacy of online howtos and the need to read through someone's example to find out how a particular thing is done. Users of all experience levels will benefit from the authoritative knowledge of the author. The writing style is clear, to the point and neutral. If you want to improve your productivity with Plone, look no further.

Rating:
Summary: Useful book for Beginners and Experienced Programmers
Review: I have been working on Zope based projects for 3 years and started using Plone almost a year ago. When you download and start using Plone, you might have noticed that many things are happening behind the scenes. You would like to customize, enhance, maintain and control your Plone based website. Many of the programmers might have read "The Zope Book" (http://www.Zope.org) and "The Plone Book" (http://www.plone.org). Andy's book "The definitive Guide to Plone" will give you complete details and fills up lot of gaps you find in online documentation.

I met Andy at Plone Conference (New Orleans - 2003), where he presented an interesting topic "Profiling, Benchmarking and Caching in Plone". You could see his knowledge on Plone and the subject, while you are reading this book. All the Chapters in this book are good and I like one chapter a lot, which is "Chapter 14. Administering and Scaling Plone". This chapter has very useful information to the people once they build the site and start using it.

Overall, this book is useful not only to the beginners but also to the experienced Zope, CMF and Plone programmers.


Rating:
Summary: Finally a book on Plone
Review: I just recently started working with Plone and found the documentation online of relatively poor quality. So I was quite happy to see a book was released on Plone recently. Overall the book covers all of the major topics quite well and offers quite a few good examples and explanations. However, I have had some difficulty implementing some of these examples, particularly with the use of Archetypes. The explanations are often ambiguous and somewhat leave one wanting more description on how exactly to implement them. Also, I feel that the book is more of a "read from one end to the other" type of book, rather than one for use as a reference. The book is more of a cursory walk through Plone, rather than a "Definitive Guide." Plone is such a massive subject in itself, it probably deserves to have more than one book written on it. Hopefully this is just the beginning to have more authors right on this product that has such a great potential.

Rating:
Summary: Too thorough for beginners
Review: If you're a beginner to CMSs and have decided to use Plone, I recommend Julie C. Meloni's book instead of this one.
Andy McKay obviously knows a lot about his subject, and he takes pains to give a good background and context to the things he does, but to be honest, I chose Plone because I didn't want to know the background. I just wanted to get my site up and running.
I'm finding this book very heavy going, although I have no doubt it will be useful in the long term.

Rating:
Summary: A "Definitive" guide, for sure!
Review: My Plone adventure started a couple of months ago when I decided that it's time to migrate our internal techie website powered by Movable Type, to some more powerful, CMS kind of platform. Looked into several open-source CMS products, among all of them the official Plone site alone impressed me enough to stop the quest. I liked clean user interface, features, an excellent Windows installer and nevertheless the fact that it's built on top of the Zope which means I can use Python, my preferred programming language, to extend out of the box Plone functionality in the future.

I started with Julie C. Meloni book "Plone Content Management Essentials" which is a great introduction type of the text, however it doesn't cover technical details or explain well what is really going on under the hood. Andy McKay's book is exactly what I needed to fill the gap in my understanding of Plone. I admit that I had some difficulties putting together all the technical pieces, mostly because Plone (Zope) is so different from web related packages that I dealt with them so far. Thanks to this book I learned a lot more than I really expected (maybe even wanted?) at the beginning. Plone is definitely much more powerful and sophisticated package than I thought. If you're interested into some serious development or customization of your Plone powered site, you'll definitely need this book at hand in addition to official Zope Book. It covers all important topics that I can think off, from simple to advance customizations, templating, scripting, workflow, security, administration...honestly I felt "lost" sometimes while trying to grasp the more advanced concepts, but this is more of the consequence of ignorance from my part on the subject than the author fault.

Therefore, if you're a hobbyist, ignorant or simply not interested about technical details of the Plone, then Julie's book is probably all you'll need, otherwise I'm sure you'll find this book indispensable resource. Thanks for reading this review!

Rating:
Summary: A good guide to the guts of Plone
Review: Plone is a very powerful content manager- but it can be very difficult to understand. There are multiple layers, with Plone built on top of Zope and running (typically) under Apache. Finding the right level to install or modify a particular feature can be puzzling.

McKay's book is still the definitive guide to the guts of Plone- what happens at what level, where to make changes, how to add functionality and so forth. For that, it's indespensible.

What it is not, however, is an introduction to PLone, or a guide to creating and managing Plone content. The prospective reader of this book should have a good familiarity with the basics of Plone and creating and managing content. It wouldn't hurt to be familiar with object-oriented methodology, and at least one object-oriented language, be it C++, java, or whatever.

For the experienced web developer, though, McKay's book is the ideal guide to the complexities of Plone.

Rating:
Summary: The Authoritative Guide to Plone 2
Review: The Authoritative Guide to Plone 2

I started using Zope almost 2 years ago, and I discovered Plone in its early stages when looking for something that worked out-of-the-box. It is easy to install a Plone site, but it is not so easy to customize or build around Plone without some fundamentals. Andy McKay solved this problem and others for me creating The Definitive Guide to Plone.

I bought the book last week, and I have read all 13 chapters and skimmed through chapter 14. I had previously read a fair amount of documents and howtos about Plone and Zope, such as the Zope Book, Plone Book (covering version 1), or "Zope Web Application Development and Content Management." However, I could not understand fully how Plone 2 used different technologies, and I was somewhat confused. After reading "The Authoritative Guide to Plone" I feel confident about what is really going on behind the scenes or at least were to look for answers. As a consequence, I believe that I can experiment and develop new products on my own the right way. The book covers every aspect I was looking for with detail and even some extra aspects I did not know about, these provided the necessary structure to my perceptions about Plone.

The content of the book is valuable taking into consideration both Windows and Unix-like users. The book's content, which includes practical connections between different subjects, flows with a thoughtful structure, and it moves to broader concepts after reviewing the fundamentals. McKay does a outstanding job exposing the material. There have been several "what-if" situations about which I had been wondering, but McKay covered successfully those scenarios a couple of pages after. I appreciate McKay's design considerations, such as "sometimes metadata can't contain everything, but it's worth considering in the design (p. 343)," pointers, such as "Overall, most of the Plone development team has adopted Archetypes as the way to develop products (p.388)," experiences, such as "I've stored more than 100,000 objects in BtreeFolder (p. 417)," or advices, such as "My advice is to put as much logic into Python as possible and keep page templates as simple and as clean as possible (p. 149.)

Overall, this book is the source to find authoritative and consistent answers about Plone. I would recommend this book to any Plone user or anyone interested in implementing a Content Management System (CMS).

Rating:
Summary: An all-in-one guide to understanding and using Plone
Review: The Definitive Guide To Plone is an all-in-one guide to understanding and using Plone, the leading open-source content management system. Written specifically for professionals, The Definitive Guide To Plone presumes basic familiarity with HTML, CSS, and the Web; knowledge of Python will be helpful in utilizing Plone's advanced features. Chapters address how to install Plone, basic customization and templating, integrating with other systems, setting up security, administering and scaling Plone, writing a product in Python, and much more. Sample code, thorough instructions, and polished technical accuracy make The Definitive Guide To Plone a "must-have" resource for anyone interested in taking advantage of Plone to develop top-of-the-line Web applications.


Rating:
Summary: Powerful Content Management System
Review: The list of open source projects grows steadily. Amongst these is one that has gained wide appeal in just a short time. Plone. It is a Content Management System geared towards the managing and presentation of content on a web browser. McKay furnishes here a comprehensive guide to its virtues.

To any of you who have dealt with a proprietary CMS that eschews the Web, or predates it, and who have paid the typically hefty licensing fees, this book may be a pleasant surprise. McKay shows how Plone draws upon well tested ideas like separating content from presentation; the enabling of internationalisation so that it can be used in any language; the creation of user accounts for those who can modify the data; a framework for the inclusion of metadata. The last item is especially useful, given all the recent todo about Google. The problem that a general purpose search engine like the latter faces is that often metadata about Web documents is rudimentary, lacking or inconsistently filled out. By contrast, Plone gives you a means for your CMS to have consistent and detailed metadata. This can be used to return more accurate and relevant search results. A vital competitive advantage for a commercial website.

Plone gives you all these abilities for free. Raises the bar for any competitive CMS, open source or proprietary.

Rating:
Summary: Solid introduction to Plone
Review: Though not without it's flaws this book is a very well organized and written walkthrough on using Plone from installation, to development and through to installation. It's clear the author knows a great deal about Plone and he knows how to convey it in a clear and concise manner.

I find fault in the structure of a book for covering the how of a topic almost exclusively with no time given to talking about why we should be doing something. But few tech readers hold authors to that standard, so i really can't mark the book down for that. On a specific note I would have preferred if some of the graphics had been scaled down and overall normalized across the entire book, it's not something that detracts from the value of the book as a resource. So I can't mark it down for that.

All of the core concepts are covered, page design, session management, security, customizations, even writing your own products.

A singular resource for anyone developing on, or deploying Plone. Highly recommended.