The logo on a Plone site is consistent on all pages, and always links back to the home page if you click on it. The chapter on theming explains how you can change the Plone logo to your own logo, if desired. What's important to point out is that even with your own logo, a user clicking on it will still be taken to the top level of the home page, no matter where they are within the structure of the site.

The Site map link takes you to a page that lists all of the pages that you have permission to view.

The Accessibility link takes you to a page that describes how to navigate though Plone using only the keyboard.

The Contact link takes you to a page that lets you provide feedback to the site administrator.

The Search function gives you the ability to search either the entire site, or just within the section that you are in. The amazingly-quick LiveSearch dynamically displays results as you are typing your search term. The more specific you are, the more precise your results will be:

The User (logged-in user) link takes you to a page that lets you configure your own personal dashboard. Within this area, you can configure your own portlets, which contain hyperlinks to areas within the Plone site, as well as links to external sites that offer RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds.

The next section will focus on how you can make changes to your dashboard after clicking on your name.

The following screenshot shows the Dashboard view. This view is your own personal page that you can configure to contain items of interest. For example,if you have a Manager or Reviewer role, you will be able to see links to all of the items on the site that are waiting for you to review and/or publish via a configured portlet. The Manager and Reviewer roles will be covered in Chapter 8.

When you are in the Dashboard view, you have several additional links: Profile, Change Password, and Personal Preferences. We will cover each of these in the following sections.

Profile

The Profile link has placeholders for your Location, Portrait, Biography, and a link to a personal page (covered later), as well as a section that lists all of the content that you have created or edited recently.

While in the Profile section, you can select the Edit tab and then make various changes to:

• Your name
• Email
• Location (Optional)
• Language (Optional—Defaults to site default)
• Biography (Optional)
• Home page (Link to an external web site if desired)
• Content Editor when making web pages (Advanced topic covered later)
• Enable external editing (Advanced topic covered later)
• 'Listed in searches' checkbox
• Allow editing of Short Names (Advanced topic covered later)
• Portrait (Optional—you can upload an image here)

The Edit tab within the Profile section is a link to your Personal Preferences page, and the View tab within Personal Preferences is a link to your Profile view page.

Going back to your Dashboard page, you can click on Edit, and change the portlets that will be displayed when you view this page. By default, Plone is set up to show up to four columns. Initially, you have News, Events, Recent Items, and Review List set up. You can define and arrange the portlets that are important to you using the drop-down lists above each column, as shown in the following screenshot:

As displayed above, you can even define your own RSS portlet from an external site. In the third column from the left in the preceding screenshot, a RSS Feed from Plone has been assigned to a portlet via the drop-down selection:

The following portlets are enabled for the profile:

The Home page shows the initial page that everyone sees, and it's the same default Home page that you would see when clicking on the logo, as described previously.

As additional sections of the site are created, the administrator can enable additional top level folders to be displayed as a tab. The tabs can also be controlled more explicitly, as explained later in Chapter 6.

The Users tab allows you to search for other users on the Plone site, based on various criteria such as login Name, E-mail, Full Name, Group, and Role(s) as shown in the following screenshot:

Items that have been created as News Items in the site will be displayed when you click the News tab.

All Events, which includes future as well as past entries that have been created in the site, will show up on this page. News and Events will be covered in depth in Chapter 5.

Breadcrumbs is the term that is used to describe the links shown above the content as you navigate though the site. Getting back to a previous page higher in the navigation, even if you are many pages deep within a site, can by accomplished by clicking the desired hyperlink.

Depending on how your site is configured, you may have an additional link called My Folder. By default, this feature is not enabled.

This folder is created when the user account is created, and is typically only used in an Intranet environment. It is not advisable to enable this on external sites where users can register themselves, as the risk of spambots increases.

The My Folder section is well-suited for allowing new users to practice making web pages, uploading files, and so on, in order for them to get comfortable with the system. Content created in these sections can easily be moved to another section using Plone's cut and paste functionality, which can be found on the Contents tab.

The section that appears at the bottom of all the pages is called a colophon.

In a web site, a colophon is a description of the tools, systems and resources used to create the web site and keep it operational. The colophon serves to acknowledge and give credit to all of the resources that are combined to produce the site. In Plone, the colophon usually appears at the bottom of the page, under the footer (which usually contains contact information), and typically has the 'Powered by Plone' button, the accessibility button, web standards, and other buttons.