JLP’s Blog

Yesterday I attended the fourth and the final part of a free Plone workshop that was organised by Kiberpipa (Cyberpipe) multimedia centre here in Ljubljana. My main motivation for taking part in this workshop was LUGOS. You see, the web page of our Slovenian Linux user group is running on Plone. So I thought it would be a good idea to learn Plone to also be able to help in this department.

Each part was about two hours long and during the entire workshop we’ve learned the basics about Plone. First about Zope application framework and server and how Plone is a product that uses it. Then we took a look at the main parts of a Plone-based portal. We also installed Plone on Linux machines there (it was very easy: unpack, run installation, start the server). After that we learned how to add various types of content and how to organise it. We also found out about packages that add functionality to default Plone, these packages are called Plone products. Portlets were introduced and techniques to modify the layout and looks of the Plone portal were presented. At the end even concepts like states, transitions, workflow, roles, groups and security couldn’t escape from us.

All in all it was a very nice workshop and I think I’ve learned a lot of useful stuff about Plone. It has also surprised me to see how many sites use Plone. I visit some of them (like Trolltech, The Free Software Foundation, Open4Business) more or less frequently and I didn’t even know that Plone is behind them. A special thanks to our mentor Rok Gerbas who has done a great job introducing us to the powerful Plone content management system.

Tags: plone, zope, cms, content management system, internet, web, web design, open source, free software, python, kiberpipa, cyberpipe