GenericSetup is a major step forward in managing Plone site configuration, and is a core part of how Plone handles its own site creation process. It is easy to get GenericSetup conflicts because it is sometimes unintuitive (unless XML is your first language), but it is also very powerful. It's also important to use care to protect yourself against settings that might have been made through the web.
Within the ZMI for your site, click on portal_setup
, which is the control panel for managing your GenericSetup. There are three tabs that are important to point out here: Import, Export, and Snapshot. We'll look at each of these in turn, but first, let's get a sense of what GenericSetup is.
GenericSetup introduces the idea of the configuration profile. A profile is essentially a set of steps defined using XML. Each .xml
file defines what happens in one of those steps. Note the fundamental difference between a profile and an install method: install methods define a set of steps...