Book Image

Plone 3.3 Site Administration

Book Image

Plone 3.3 Site Administration

Overview of this book

In the past few years, we have seen some dramatic changes in the way Plone sites are being developed, deployed, and maintained. As a result, developing and deploying sites, changing their default settings, and performing day to day maintenance tasks can be a challenge. This book covers site administration tasks, from setting up a development instance, to optimizing a deployed production site, and more. It demonstrates how-to perform these tasks in a comprehensive way, and walks the user through the necessary steps to achieve results.We have divided the subject of Plone site administration into three categories: development, deployment, and maintenance. We begin by explaining how a Plone site is built, and how to start using it through the web. Next, we add features by installing add-on products, focusing on themes, blogging, and other common enhancements. After the basics of developing and deploying a Plone site are covered, the book covers the basics of maintaining it.Further, throughout the book we preview some new technologies related to Plone site administration, available now as add-ons to the current Plone release. Finally, we will cover a variety of techniques to help you optimize your site's performance.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Plone 3.3 Site Administration
Credits
Foreword
About the Author
About the Reviewer
Preface
Index

Examining themes with Omelette and Python


Simply put, a theme is a collection of templates, images, CSS, JavaScript, and other files (such as Python scripts) that control the appearance of your site.

Typically these files are packaged into a Python package, installed in your Plone site with the help of Buildout, and installed in Plone via the Add/Remove Products configlet in Site Setup.

Once installed, certain elements of the theme can be edited through the Web using the ZMI. However, these changes only exist in the site's database. Currently there is no easy way to transfer changes made through the Web from the database to the filesystem; so there is a trade-off for performing such customizations through the Web. If you lose your database, you lose your customizations.

Depending on your goals, it may not be entirely undesirable to store customizations in your database. But nowadays, most folks choose to separate their site's logical elements (for example themes, add-on functionality, and...