Plone Content Management Essentials

Rating:
Summary: Good introductory book
Review: A good introduction to Plone. But, there are a few typographical errors in code samples that will send you on minor troubleshooting trips. The author also covers some add-ins that cause errors when you try to remove them, again, causing you to do some troubleshooting. Not all bad. A little troubleshooting helps you learn the system.

Rating:
Summary: Make wikis and blogs
Review: A popular open source Content Management System. Meloni suggests here in her book why it has proved so useful. If you read her book and have some familiarity with Microsoft's Office suite, then you can see what Plone offers. The various Microsoft applications, like MSWord, have very rich toolkits. But each application essentially handles single documents. Meloni shows that Plone's remit is at a higher level of organisation. More to do with workflow between several users.

Plus, these users need not be in one physical location. Plone lets a group distributed over the Internet work together. Plone can help enable new types of dispersed "multinationals" of just a few people.

The book also has merit in showing how to use Plone to construct wikis and blogs. Two topical subjects. And very closely related. So both are described in the same chapter. Daresay that some of you will find this the most useful section of the book.

Rating:
Summary: "Getting started..." kind of a book
Review: I bought this book together with McKay "The Definitive Guide to Plone" and all I can say is that they fit together nicely.
In the old days when software was delivered to you in a nice box with accompanying manuals, one of them was hopefully titled as "Getting started...", "Introduction to..." or "Quick guide to...". Julie's "Plone Content Management Essentials" is by all means *that* kind of the book in a 'missing box' for Plone.

As a complete Plone (Zope) newbie on my way to migrate some stuff from Movable Type intranet site, I needed quick, concise guide to get the general feeling about Plone features and the level of complexity involved (I already knew that Zope behind the Plone is a "beast" in it's own if compared to simple packages like MT) . With just 200+ pages this book helped me grasp the basic concepts behind the Plone CMS in a way, that I could build my prototype site in a few days. The chapters that I liked the most are chapter "4. Additional Plone Elements" describing Plone add-ons of immediate interest to me (CMFBoard, CMFPhotoAlbum and CMFWeblog) and chapter's 5 and 6 on customizing plone and implementing custom skin. The only objection that I have about the book is Appendix A., imho it's completely useless attempt on introduction to python language (it would make more sense to just publish the links to python online resources).

Book is geared towards complete Plone newbie's, even non-techies will not be easily lost, thanks to step-by-step approach and numerous screenshots. Nevertheless, I would strongly recommend that you also consider McKay "The Definitive Guide to Plone" which is in my opinion the most complete book about Plone on the market (but you'll certainly need more than a few days to digest it). Thank you for reading this review!

Rating:
Summary: Excellent book for an excellent CMS
Review: This book is extremely readable. Concise and to the point. It gave me only the information I needed to do what I wanted to do. Perfect. All the other documentation I've found on Plone has been mostly geared towards coders and developers. I've found it a headache wading through it all. This book explained how to do exactly what I wanted to do with plone - get my website up and running, with the content I wanted and the look I wanted.
A lifesaver, and an end to the headaches.