Book Image

Professional Plone 4 Development

Book Image

Professional Plone 4 Development

Overview of this book

A years of experience in Plone development and project management are combined with an approachable writing style to create an engaging and highly-informative guide to working with Plone. Professional Plone 4 Development stands as an excellent resource for developers of all levels. - Eric Steele, Plone Release Manager Plone is a web content management system that features among the top 2% of open source projects and is used by more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. Its powerful workflow system, outstanding security track record, friendly user interface, elegant development model and vibrant community makes Plone a popular choice for building content-centric applications. By customising and extending the base platform, integrators can build unique solutions tailored to specific projects quickly and easily.If you want to create your own web applications and advanced websites using Plone 4, Professional Plone 4 Development is the book you need.The https://www.packtpub.com/Professional-Plone-web-applications-CMS/book first edition of this book remains one of the most widely read and recommended Plone books. This second edition is completely revised and up-to-date for Plone 4.1, covering new topics such as Dexterity, Diazo, jQuery and z3c.form, as well as improved ways of working with existing technologies such as Buildout, SQLAlchemy and the Pluggable Authentication Service. It retains the writing style and comprehensive approach that made the first edition so popular. Built around a realistic case study, Professional Plone 4 Development will take you from an understanding of Plone’s central concepts, through basic customization, theming, and custom development, to deployment and optimization. The book is divided into four sections: First, you will be introduced to Plone and the case study, and learn how to set up a development environment. The second section covers basic customization, including theming a Plone site using Diazo. The third section focuses on custom development – building new content types and user interfaces, customizing security and integrating with external databases. The final chapters cover deployment and performance optimization.
Table of Contents (6 chapters)

Chapter 4. Basics of Customization

To a certain extent, all we ever do when we use Plone-the-platform is to customize Plone-the-product. Sometimes, that means building a system that barely resembles "out-of-the-box" Plone; other times, it simply means adding a few bells and removing a few unnecessary whistles.

In this chapter, we will cover the main types of customization that Plone supports, including:

  • Persistent settings in the ZODB
  • GenericSetup configuration
  • CMF Skin layers
  • The Zope Component Architecture

Starting with the next chapter, these techniques will be explained more fully and put into practice in the context of the Optilux Cinemas case study.

Persistent settings and the ZODB

The first type of customization most developers come across is in the form of settings exposed by various Zope Management Interface screens and Plone control panels. Sometimes, they may also build applications that depend on particular content items or site structure. In both cases, part of...