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

Chapter 4. Administration

If you have read any of the online Plone documentation or Plone books, you will notice that most of the topics covered in this book are not new. What is new is the Buildout-driven approach to site management. Buildout has been covered before, but only as an aside. A modern Plone site is comprised of many parts that may be tedious to assemble by hand. Fortunately, Buildout lends itself to the task.

Another tool, Make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make/), is perhaps equally well-suited to the task. If you are familiar with Make, Buildout should feel somewhat familiar. The first difference between them is the configuration file syntax. Another difference is that Make is written in C, and is typically used to compile C code, whereas Buildout is written in Python, and is typically used to assemble Python packages. Although they are different in many ways, both the tools share similar concepts:

  • Building targets or parts

  • Controlling the build process with configuration files...