Introduction

Plone is probably the best Python CMS (Content Management System). This means that it’s a piece of software that provides all the necessary tools for people to publish content.

Why do we say that Plone is the CMS? For several reasons:

These two last are, no doubt, its most important features: Plone is extendible, because it’s also a framework, and that is what we’ll mostly cover in this book—the components that are part of the framework and how to use them to build our extensions.

In Plone, the extension facility is provided via the installation of products. Think of them as plugins, add-ons, extensions, or whatever name you want. In Plone literature, they are called products, though.

As a matter of fact, Plone itself is a whole set of products, and some of its current basic features were born initially as additional characteristics, like Archetypes (more of this in the Chapter 3). With a little luck and a lot of work, one of your products may be included in a future release.

In this chapter, we are going to install Plone (in both Linux and Windows). Plone is not an isolated software application, it needs Zope and other associated products to be installed as well. To understand this process and all these components, let’s define a not-too-comprehensive, but sufficient glossary:

In the following sections, we’ll mainly look at a method named buildout for a proper Zope instance set up. However, we won’t cover all of its possibilities. Throughout the whole book, after adding products to the project we are developing, we will add recipes or parameters to the buildout file, which we will create in this chapter.