Professional Plone Development 98
Michael J. Ross writes "Among the hundreds of content management systems (CMSs) available for building Web sites, Plone may not be the most popular; but for the majority of experienced Python developers, it is without equal. This is partly due to Plone being one of the few major CMSs written in Python, and partly due to its powerful extensibility. Customizing and extending Plone, however, are not for the faint of heart. Fortunately, help is at hand, in Professional Plone Development, a book written by seasoned Plone developer Martin Aspeli." Read below for the rest Of Michael's review.
Professional Plone Development was put out by Packt Publishing, on 26 September 2007, under the ISBNs 1847191983 and 978-1847191984. On the book's Web page, visitors can order a copy of the book (more on this later), download the sample source code found in the book, submit feedback, ask questions of the publisher, and download a sample chapter — specifically, Chapter 2, which presents the case study used by the author. For anyone who wants to get the most out of this book, downloading and working through the sample code would be extremely valuable.
| Professional Plone Development | |
| author | Martin Aspeli |
| pages | 420 |
| publisher | Packt Publishing |
| rating | 7/10 |
| reviewer | Michael J. Ross |
| ISBN | 1847191983 |
| summary | A practical exploration of how to extend the CMS Plone. |
The book's material is organized into 19 chapters, spanning 420 pages — despite what is reported on the publisher's Web page, which as of this writing indicates that the book comprises 300 pages. The book's chapters are grouped into four parts. The first one, the briefest, sets the stage for what follows, by presenting a context for Plone development, including the CMS's history, its competition, its use as a stand-alone application versus use as a framework, and other foundational matters. It also introduces the case study — a cinema chain's Web site — used throughout the book to illustrate the concepts being taught. Lastly, the first part of the book covers the development environment needed by the reader to follow along, including discussion of Zope, which is an open source application server designed for creating CMSs and other Web-based applications.
The second part of the book covers Plone customization: basic concepts, laying out a site's strategy, security and workflow issues, add-on products, and creating a new theme. The book's third part, the longest, covers how to extend Plone with new functionality: Zope programming essentials, custom content types, standalone views and forms, working with a relational databases, user management, creating user interfaces with KSS, and more. The fourth and last part of the book addresses real world deployment of one's extensions, including Zope server management, production server setup, LDAP authentication, and possibilities for the future. Unlike most technical books, the author provides at the end a brief yet worthwhile section on where the reader can go next to learn more along the same lines as the book. The brevity of the section is certainly not from a lack of knowledge or helpfulness on the part of the author, but rather the dearth of information available to developers interested in learning about how to extend Plone.
There's a great deal to like about this book. The author clearly possesses the expertise and experience needed for providing instruction on a challenging topic such as this. His explanations are not abbreviated, as seen in so many other technical monographs. Furthermore, most programmers learn best by viewing and mentally dissecting sample code. For such people, Martin Aspeli's practical approach — focusing on a substantial sample application — will prove more engaging and instructive than the made-up and oftentimes overly simplistic examples found in many computer programming books — including the increasingly popular cookbook titles. On the other hand, by placing almost all of the discussion within the framework of a single sample application, the author diminishes the potential of the book for reference purposes. To benefit the most from this book, the reader definitely would want to work through all of the chapters, in detail, and in the order presented.
In presenting the many steps of creating the case study application, the author provides a generous amount of information on what he considers to be best practices, to make the Plone development process more reliable, and the resulting code easier to maintain and further extend in the future. The confident authority with which the author covers these principles, and the validity of the examples provided, demonstrates his knowledge of the subject matter, and reassures the reader that the author has the experience to provide reliable technical guidance.
In terms of prerequisites, readers should have a solid familiarity with Python and Plone. The book covers Plone version 3.0, but still would be of value to developers who have not yet upgraded from an earlier 2.x release.
Professional Plone Development is definitely best suited for Plone developers and administrators from the intermediate to advanced levels. However, even someone fairly new to Plone, would benefit from what it offers. In fact, carefully working through all of the material, and taking the time to really understand it, could take a developer from the beginner to the intermediate level. With further experience, subsequent rereadings of the book would likely yield further insights. It's that kind of book — meaty and in-depth, and not in any way a shallow "dummies" book.
However, there are some criticisms that should be leveled against this book, although none of them have anything to do with the writing of the author or the sample code. Rather, these are recommendations for future improvement directed to the publisher. First and foremost, the book's print on the page, is quite shiny — and not in the sense of a "Firefly" compliment. Rather, it reflects light as if the ink were extremely glossy. As a result, depending upon the placement of one's reading light, the page being viewed invariably has a large shiny spot, forcing the reader to keep rocking the book back and forth, relative to the light source, in order to shift the glare away from the section on the page that is currently being viewed. Of the hundreds if not thousands of technical books I have read, this is the only one with this type of printing, and I hope it is the last. This problem is not seen with the largest text of all, such as "Part N" at the beginning of each of the book's four major parts.
The images in the book, of which there are few, have a high degree of pixelation, which makes them look cheap, though it certainly does not make them impossible to read. As with the book's text, the pictures suffer from the same annoying shininess.
Earlier it was mentioned that the prospective reader can order a copy of the book from the publisher's Web site. However, I would not recommend this until the publisher improves the way that they package their books for shipping. Rather than enclosing the book in a plastic bag or a piece of clean wrapping paper, to protect it, the book is placed bare inside of the shipping box, in which it bounces around during transit, as it makes its way to the purchaser from the shipping/distribution facility. Consequently, the corners and edges of the book are easily curled, and the outside surfaces of the book's cover are scratched from the imperfections found in the shipping box's interior. This shows what can happen with books that are mailed with no internal protection. Publishers should not assume that what the shipping department sees when they place the book in the box, is what the customer sees days later when they receive it. Fortunately, this book is available from all major online booksellers, including the 11 firms listed on the publisher's Web page, for various countries. While this might not guarantee better protection of the book's cover, I have had far fewer similar problems with Amazon.com, for instance.
Despite these production flaws — all of which can be corrected — Professional Plone Development is a worthy addition to the library of any Plone administrator interested in making the most of their Plone installation, any Python developer who wants to create Web sites without reinventing the wheel, and any professional programmer interested in taking advantage of the growing demand for Plone developers.
Michael J. Ross is a Web developer, writer, and freelance editor.
You can purchase Professional Plone Development from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
ZOPE (Score:5, Informative)
In any event, when we looked at Plone we ditched it immediately. It was too much. We lost all the abilities to control the minutia of any given piece that we wanted and the bubble up ability of Zope was more or less lost.
I'm NOT saying don't use Plone. It has a lot going for it... but don't forget to look under the hood and see if straight Zope will do what you need first.
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He never said that. He said straight Zope as opposed to working with the higher-level Plone layer.
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I guess I would call Zope a "window manager" and Plone a "Desktop Environment". Does that sound about right? Or wou
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So:
Zope: Framework
Plone: Application on top of Zope.
What is the Zope? (Score:2, Informative)
Zope has been around for almost 10 years now, so when people say "Zope" they can mean very different things. Zope 2 was originally used as a content management systems and a through-the-web development environment using the Zope Management Interface (ZMI). This was way back in 1998-2000 when web sites were simpler and mixing these UI of these two application
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I just wish I could find decent documentation on Zope3. The greatest fear of the Zope 3 development community seems to be that someone might someday actually be able to use it.
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Use the right tool for the job (Score:5, Informative)
Writing a gambling application in Plone is absolutely not what it's built for, in those cases you should use something that fits the use case better -- Zope 3, Django, TurboGears or Pylons come to mind if Python is your language of choice. They are all excellent frameworks, Plone is much closer to an application than a framework.
-- Alexander Limi, Plone co-founder
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I'll write a gambling application in Plone because I get to rapidly model the app with ArgoUML, generate my skeleton code and fill in the missing code and templates.
Plone has excellent UI which I can just re-use. It is quite easy to strip away what I don't want, or conversely to build a minimal design from scratch. In fact, in many cases I use Plone as a "thin" layer over Zope.
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I've used Zope as the backend for everything from an online dating site to a simple online game store. It's easy to extend and unless you want to copy Plone.org you should look at the wide variety of already available Zope products before installing an extra layer of abstaction.
I looked at Plone a few times over the years but it just appeared too crufty and since Zope supports Python scripts it's easy enough for a competent programmer (of which even I'm not!) to roll their own solution.
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Wha? The description says:
"Plone is a content management framework"
What else do you need to know. Unless, of course, you don't know what a CMS is, in which case you shouldn't be bothering with this article in the first place.
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Whatever happened to the old idea of learning something new? Whatever happened to being a friendly neighbor?
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I bet "America's Funniest Home Videos" has you in stitches, doesn't it?
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Plone is a content management framework
A simpler way to describe it is as a content management system. But that's actually kind of a limited definition of it. Think of it as features on top of Zope.
What's Zope? Zope in this simple example is the guts of the content management system. The big advantage the entire system has is the design is more robust and scalable (ex. clustering) and has far better developer interface than your average PHP cms. (Drupal I'm looking at y
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That should give you more than a clue as to what Plone is.
Right below it, under "What is Plone?" is a link: "What is A CMS?"
I think you should click that and read it.
It's your ignorance, not someone else's design/usability flaw.
I can't believe this got a 5 rating - sheesh.
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You mean, other than the obtusely-titled "What is Plone?" section on the home page?
I think you should get your Braille reader checked out.
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What? Right on the start page on plone.net, directly beneath the headline, I can read the following description:
"Plone is a leading open source Content Management System, and people use it to run their web sites, intranets and extranets."
It's a CMS.
If you want to know what it can be used for, I suggest you read the case studies. They shouldn't be difficult t
Re:eeh whaaa? (Score:4, Informative)
Let me make this short and sweet:
Zope is kind of like Cold Fusion. It defines a lot of components that you can link together to build a website. For example, you have page template objects that contain all of the HTML you will be sending to visitors. Those templates have fill-in-the-blanks parts that you can populate with the output of a Python (or Perl) script or with the results of a database query. It also includes all the authentication software pre-written so that you don't have to cobble together your own, and a security system that gives you fine-grained control over which visitors can access which objects. With us so far? OK...
Plone is an application written in Zope, more or less. It's a "content management system", meaning that it's designed to let users upload data to it and make changes. There's an almost infinite number of ways to say which users can perform which actions. For example, say you're running a newspaper website. You can say that users in the "reporter" group can access to upload content, but not to actually make that content available to random visitors off the Internet. People in another group, "editor", don't have permission to upload new content but they can make changes to what "reporter" users have added and then mark the content as "ready for publishing". Then people in the "section editor" group can look at content that has the "ready for publishing" flag set, and if it's truly ready for the world to read, they can set it to "published". Otherwise, they can send it back to the junior editors.
Maybe in your organization, you only have "reporters" and "section editors". A good CMS would let you remove the "editor" role so that it's no longer used. Also, Bob Smith may be a "section editor" for the Sports section, but a "reporter" in the local news section. Again, a good CMS will let you set this up.
But that's only one example. Blogging software is another kind of special-purpose CMS, often giving the blogger permission to allow comments to his posts and edit or delete them. My company uses an internal CMS for blogs, a message board, and a vacation board. Only certain users can add "vacation" events to the calendar. Other users can write blog entries. Everyone can comment on the message board.
Basically, a CMS does exactly what it says: it allows you to manage (typically user-generated) content. If you find yourself writing a site that allows visitors to upload data for other people to see, you're probably better off installing a CMS and letting it handle all the details you're likely to forget.
So there, Zope and Plone explained. Does that clarify matters?
Plone vs. everything else (Score:5, Informative)
I love Python. In fact, I wrote a short magazine article [freesoftwaremagazine.com] about how much I like it (although I admit that the promised sequel never materialized; sorry Tony). Having said that, working with Plone was like pulling teeth. It's obviously a nice system with huge potential and excellent customization options, but the learning curve is enormously steep.
We ended up abandoning our Plone intentions and moving toward Drupal for pre-made CMS stuff; even if I don't like hacking in PHP, hundreds of other people have already done most of the work [drupal.org] for just about anything we might conceivably want to do. For true web application development beyond content management, we switched to Django and haven't looked back. If you already know Python, Django's learning curve is exceedingly shallow.
I don't hate Plone. It's just that it didn't seem to offer anything more than its competition, and that's from someone who already built a large web application in Zope (which is the platform Plone is built upon). Having said that, this book and others like it can hopefully make it a lot easier to get started with Plone development. It has great possibilities if you can get past the startup cost.
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Every time I've had a question the online forums have answered them fantastically quickly (better than any Cisco TAC case I've ever opened), and the answer has always seemed obvious and intuitive once
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Zope and Plone have notoriously steep learning curves... in fact, my former boss said they were more like cliffs or mountains than curves.
For me, the key to success was to take a bit of time to learn Python. If you can "think in Python" suddenly Zope and Plone make a lot more sense. The Zope Object DataBase (ZODB) is essentially just a big collection of Python objects, so using Python can give you a lot more precise control over just
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Plone has this with some software from Enfold Systems. The general idea is to have an ultra quick and easy way for content managers to browse to files, open them, save their work back to the CMS and retain version history along the way.
The Enfold solution is almost there. It does everything except retain version history with the saving of files.
Plone with the Enfold Systems add-in is everythi
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If Drupal has that, I'd love to be able to evaluate it. If it doesn't have the desktop (yes, Windows) integration piece to easily open and save files, I'm not interested as this is an essential piece.
Well, you bring up an interesting point: everyone has different requirements. Desktop integration is completely unneeded in my company, so its (apparent) lack in Drupal doesn't matter to us. Similarly, I'm sure there are Drupal modules that don't have Plone equivalents that somebody depends on every day. I have nothing at all against Plone - if anything, being a Zope shop I'd like to see it come out of hiding and build a big developer community.
It just doesn't meet our needs today, that's all. If it
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Perhaps you were trying to deploy on Solaris? I've heard Zope runs not-so-good on that OS.
Plone's focus is on being a CMS. It is also often used as a content deployment system, but it doesn't have to be. Products such as Entransit let you manage content in Plone, and then push it out into a relational database/XML formats if you
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These platforms all need to spell out what language they are based on a lot better than they do.
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These platforms all need to spell out what language they are based on a lot better than they do.
From the download page [drupal.org]:
Beyond that, why would you care? Either it has the features you're looking for or it doesn't. It's expected that the majority of users of such a thing will just want to install and use it, not hack on it. Put another way, off the top of my head I don't know whether Firefox is written in C or C++ and don't really care. As
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Firefox also doesn't require me to have C++ installed on my machine. Drupal does need php to be installed on my machine.
They are very different things.
Whats yer poison with python then (Score:2)
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nay (Score:2)
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Sure, for the end user with their CMS it doens't matter what the CMS is written in. But me, who writes it, I care.
there are many fantastic things on the world (Score:2)
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A more reasonable comment from you would have been to ask what makes it fantastic. But you didn't ask that, so now you may never know.
well (Score:2)
Moreover, even if that word was fit to use in that fashion, the simple fact that it is not in widespread use would mean that it wasnt that 'fantastic'. Volkswagen beetle would be in 'fantastic' category then, likewise "ibm compatible personal computers". but not python.
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"the simple fact that it is not in widespread use would mean that it wasnt that 'fantastic'."
Eh... no.
I said that if a programming language is fantastic, that justifies widespread use. Notice the words "justifies".
First of all, you just did the most basic and fundamental of all stupid logical errors. The statement "If A then B" does NOT mean that the statement "If B then A" automatically is true.
Secondly, I
Sites running Plone (Score:5, Informative)
http://plone.net/sites [plone.net]
Novell, Trolltech, CIA, Akamai, Discovery Magazine, Oxfam -- these are hardly small sites.
If you're going to troll, please at least troll on something that is close to the truth.
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You use a CMS on the back-end that feeds into something that is capable of handling enormous amounts of traffic, normally caching proxies like Squid or Varnish.
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Flexibility is the hallmark of python/zope/plone....
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T-Mobile uses Plone internally Europe-wide (11 nations, 10 languages) enabling centralized managing and local printing of sales material at the PoS on demand.
I'll have a case study for plone.net ready soon, but in the meantime feel free to mail me if you have further questions.
Best Regards,
Vidar Andersen, Co-Founder of the Plone
Plone is pretty neat, but... (Score:1)
http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/98576 [heise-security.co.uk]
Plone is awesome (Score:2)
http://plone.org/about/movies [plone.org]
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Plone is great if it is a good fit between the requirements and developing custom document types within a CMS framework. The architecture is highly layered. The low level way of developing under plone has a non-trivial learning curve to it. The high level way is to use what is known as plone archetypes [plone.org] which makes it really easy to create custom document types. The skinning of the custom types becomes very easy using Zope's METAL [zope.org] technology which is a very cool page templating system.
I have discussed pl
Wub and Flizmo are interoperable (Score:1, Troll)
Besides which, I heard somewhere that PL/ONE has a syntax worse than JOSS...
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You know you're old when you get the joke... PL/I haha
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Plone! (Score:1)
Plone handles large-traffic websites (Score:1)
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switched from plone to ruby on rails (Score:1)
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I won't get into a language-or-framework argument - I am big believe in "right tools for the right job", and it sounds like Plone wasn't the right tool for you. If you didn't need a CMS, in particular, it was almost certainly the wrong tool.
However, I take some issue with the use of the word "obsolete". May
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"Beyond this the python notation is terrible; verbose, clumsy, the white-space requirements are completely ridiculous and impositional". The Python syntax excels at creating maintainable software, yes some people take offense that Python is trying to take away their creative control of white-space and other common language styles, but this is only a boon when you have software that has to be maintained by more than a single developer. I would certainly raise the red flag to any team taking adv
@parent.points.each{|point| puts point.to_summary} (Score:2)
* Plone conventions in database management and templating were difficult to understand, even if you had a deep understanding of databases and web content creation, due to implementation idiosyncracies.
* I really dislike Python's syntax.
I think syntax is a "You say tomato, I say tomato" sort of point, but the first two points should
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Thanks for recommending my book. Although I am being paid royalties, the main motivation was precisely what you identified: we need more, and better documentation. I think this is a problem that affects quite a few open source projects, though.
I won't claim that Plone (or Zope) is small and lightweight (I do quite like Pylons, though). I do, however, find it to be one of the most productive tools I've ever used for delivering a certain type of solution - what I call "content-centric" systems. The book
Thank you! (Score:1)
No go on Plone (Score:2)
My 2 cents.
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My conclusion was, that once the codebase grew out of "basic stuff" and went into OOP, the dime a dozen coders couldn't keep up and the salary for a guy who can do decent OOP in PHP is the same for decent Python coder.
It really doesn't pay off.
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On the other hand, you don't need a "really good" Python developer, because Python (unlike PHP) doesn't make it exceedingly easy to write buggy code that looks like good code.
Plone is fantastic (Score:2)
There is an incredibly steep learning curve and sub-par documentation, but once you get your head around it the speed and ease of development amazes everyone I develop for (And myself).
Having started using Java/Tomcat again for a project, It feels like taking several steps backwards. Apart from the the (imho) superiority of Python over Java*, The entire developmen
Are ther any good cms? (Score:1)
Then again, I've only ever used DotNetNuke, which is a complete joke of an application.
A name like plone... (Score:1)