Plone Content Management Essentials
November 13, 2009 · Posted in Plone
Product Description
Plone Content Management Essentials is a practical and thorough hands-on guide to using the powerful open-source content website publishing system, Plone. With this book as your guide, you will thoroughly understand how and when to utilize Plone, as well as how to install, configure and maintain a Plone-based website. You’ll also be able to download the latest Plone installation from our website so that you can apply what you learn in the book. No prior knowledge of Plone is required to learn from this book, but it will enhance what you takeaway.
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5 Responses to “Plone Content Management Essentials”
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The premise of the book is very good. The book gets you up and running on Plone if you’re a beginner, and explains concepts and features well. That until you hit one of the many snags. There are several parts where the instructions are missing, vague, or utterly contradictory. It will definitely send you on a “troubleshooting trip” or you might just have to skip the section altogether. Just a warning.
Rating: 3 / 5
If you are a designer who wants to know how to customize Plone’s look beyond changing colors and fonts, you’ll be disappointed in this book. Sure, the introduction is still good, but chapter 6 (for example), which instructs you to work with the Plone Base Properties file is giving you an outdated method, not well suited to upgrades and maintenance. I believe that stylesheets are the way to go, now…but I’m still trying to figure it out, no thanks to this book. The instructions for adding slots in Chapter 5 were just impossible to follow and did not even vaguely work. Yes, the text is in English, but the descriptions bear little resemblence to the Plone 2.1+ experience.
This book will, however, give a somewhat glossy overview of the entire application. I would get a recent version of Andy McKay’s book, and look elsewhere for customization help.
Rating: 2 / 5
This book has maybe six pages of useful info. It tells how to make a custom portlet.
Much of what it describes is obvious from looking at the Plone interface. Moreover, I suspect that the author may not know Plone or Zope very well.
Save your money. The other Plone books are better.
Rating: 1 / 5
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.
Rating: 5 / 5
The book starts out promising, with the first chapter being a very good quick intro to CMS and Plone and the types of things that CMS can do for you. However, once you start getting into the specifics, it quickly become clear that this book is now outdated. Many of the examples are hard to follow because the current version of Plone has different options or features. Also, the examples cover only the “low hanging fruit” – the easiest of tasks, many of which you can figure out on your own just by sitting in front of a browser and navigating Plone using common sense. (Which I ended up having to do, since the examples in the book are outdated.) You won’t find the real-world answers you need in this book. Need to authenticate the users based on some authentication you already have, such as LDAP? This isn’t the book for you. Only 1 page is dedicated to user and group admin, and that is basically a rehash of what you see on the screen in that admin panel. Want to know how to allow users to publish their own work rather than wait for the admin to approve it? Not in the book, you have to just figure it out by experimenting.
This book does have its moments but a large portion of it is easy to learn just by playing with Plone on your own.
Rating: 2 / 5