CMS Expo: Tour of Plone

For the final session of the day at CMS Expo I decided to sit in on the tour of Plone talk. Admittedly, before this session it had been a long time since I took a hard look at Plone. I love the Python computer language, but I've never came across a project that sent me to Plone. Don't let my inactive use of Plone give you a reason to not consider it for a project of your own...Plone has a lot going for it.

Plone is among the top 2% of all open source projects worldwide, with 340 core developers and more than 300 solution providers in 57 countries. The project has been actively developed since 2001, is available in more than 40 languages, and has the best security track record of any major CMS. It is owned by the Plone Foundation, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization, and is available for all major operating systems.

CMS Expo 2011 - Ken Wasetis at the Tour of Plone session

Ken Wasetis, President and CMS Solution Architect at Contextual, was the speaker for this session. After giving usual general background information for Plone, Ken quickly dives into what he believes to be one of Plone's biggest strengths: security. Due to the security strengths he also emphasizes to the crowd that Plone is larger than you think in government.

The Plone 4 CMS

The Plone community has raised the bar on their flagship content management system with the release of Plone 4. With the unveiling and release announcement of Plone 4, this is proving a busy week for fans of this CMS that runs on the Python-based Zope application server.

"Plone 4 is much faster, requires less memory, and performs well even when serving up massive files. ", says Plone co-founder and Firefox User Experience Lead Alexander Limi. “They [Plone users and developers] also didn't want us to sacrifice what we do well to get there — and we haven't. Plone 4 is not just more powerful — it continues to improve in areas Plone has always been known for: usability, security, and a CMS that is easy to install, upgrade, and looks great right out of the box.”

Some of the significant changes and improvements in Plone 4 include:

Notable performance improvements
New theme
Search and indexing improvements
Group Dashboards for a Customized User Experience
Massively improved handling of large files & media
New, faster folder implementation
Improved management of users and groups
Dynamic forms framework based on jQuery Tools
Improved first-run experience
Smooth upgrade experience
Reduced memory footprint
Upgraded infrastructure

Interestingly, the announcements and even the Plone 4 download page discuss the "under the hood" improvements available in the CMS in preparation for Plone 5. That's right, they're already talking about Plone's future with Plone 5.

For addttional details about the Plone CMS be sure to visit Plone.org.

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook is a new book on plone development from Packt publishing open source. After receiving it, I decided to take a quick glance to it. The book features 364 pages, which makes it quite a big book for its price, organized in a cookbook approach, making it a very useful book.

Though the book is not written in a clasical style, because of its cookbook approach, there's a progression in the recipes, as we can notice in the index:

Chapter 1, Getting Started
Chapter 2, Using Development Tools
Chapter 3, Creating Content Types with ArchGenXML
Chapter 4, Prevent Bugs through Testing
Chapter 5, Creating a Custom Content Type with Paster
Chapter 6, Creating Lightweight Content Types
Chapter 7, Improving Product Performance
Chapter 8, Internationalization
Chapter 9, Adding Security to your Products
Chapter 10, Improving User Interface with KSS
Chapter 11, Creating Portlets
Chapter 12, Extending Third-Party Products
Chapter 13, Interacting with other Systems: XML-RPC
Chapter 14, Getting our Products ready for Production

As you can notice from chapter titles there's a progression we can follow through the book.But thanks to the cookbook approach we can easily find the recipe we need and use it. Note that it's advisable to have knowledge on Plone, as the book doesn't stops on explaining the basic concepts.

Don't misunderstand this, the book is very thorough, it starts with the installation process, in Linux and Windows. The book is also very well explained, but basic knowledge is advisable so you can make the most from the book, as it's not a beginners book.

Mailbag: MediaCore

Last week, CMS Report received an email regarding a new CMS that focuses on managing multimedia content. The application is written in Python so naturally we're going to talk to let our readers know about this new platform.

I'm not sure if you guys have covered this yet, but as a regular reader of cmsreport.com I thought I would let you know.
Earlier this month my company launched a new Open Source python based CMS focused on video and podcasting.

http://getmediacore.com/

MediaCore is a free open source video cms and podcast platform. MediaCore can pull video or audio from any source, track statistics, enable commenting, and provide a high degree of control over the presentation and administration.

Let me know if you guys need any further information on the project. Right now we are just trying to get the word out about it.

Cheers,
Stuart

Easy and convenient approach to testing your powerful Python projects

Python Testing: A new book from Packt Publishing that will help Python developers write tests for their applications using convenient tools and techniques of automated testing and test-driven development. This book allows users to explore how to make testing easier and more accurate with Python's doctest module. In addition developers will also learn how to keep their units separate and discover a simple and easy way to integrate Mocker and unittest.

Create flexible, agile web applications using the power of Grok—a Python web framework

Grok 1.0 Web Development - A new book from Packt Publishing that will help Python developers design and develop a complete web application using Grok, based on a very advanced object-oriented web framework: Zope 3 . It offers users a comprehensive understanding of Grok and a look at its main features by way of developing and evolving new features a sample application from concept to deployment. This book enables web developers to tap into the power of Zope 3, thus giving a range of useful features for their applications with very little code.

Create an Interactive Educational Website with Plone using Packt's New Book

Packt is pleased to announce a new book on Plone that helps website creators maintain, manage and edit educational websites. Written by Erik Rose, a member of the Plone 4 and 5 Framework Teams, Plone 3 for Education will help website creators represent educational courses using Plone's various built-in content types such as news items, collections, and events.

Plone is a free open source Content Management System (CMS) that’s built on top of the Zope application server. Plone lets non-technical people create and maintain information for a public website or an intranet using only a web browser. It is because of its superior security and advanced back-end, that it holds a technological edge over many major CMSes.

Build Powerful Plone Websites with new book

Packt is pleased to announce Practical Plone 3 , a new book that will guide users in building powerful and robust websites using the Zope CMS platform. Written by a team of 13 Content Management experts, this book will give users a clear understanding on using Plone 3 to meet their content management needs.

Plone is a highly extensible Content Management System built on the Zope application server, which is written in Python. Plone makes it easy to build and maintain powerful, user-friendly websites with cutting-edge collaboration and content management features. Like Plone itself, this book is a community effort, with prominent leaders in the Plone community like Jon Stahl, who serves on the Plone Foundation board of directors, sharing their extensive knowledge of the subject to ensure users gain a deep and effective understanding.

Five IT books on my 2009 reading list

I seem to collect a number of books each year. A few of the books I receive from publishers with intent to review or as appreciation for my involvement with events related to content management systems. Other books just peak my interest so I can't help but buy them for my personal library. The following are five books I plan to read in 2009 and are available in CMS Report's Amazon Store.

Drupal Multimedia by Aaron Windborn

Users loading Drupal for the first time usually have two surprises. The first surprise is that Drupal's core lacks a rich text editor (no WYSIWYG). Although you can use a RTE via a contributed module...it is still a surprise to most new users. The second surprise is that the core also doesn't provide much support for images and other forms of multimedia. This book will help the reader navigate through many of the contributed media modules available at Drupal.org and pick the right one for the right project. I'm only half way through the book and finding myself trying out modules I likely would never have used without this book.

Expert Python Programming by Tarek Ziadé

I haven't bought a new Python book since 2001 and felt it was time to try another. I'm more of a dabbler than a programmer, but it is always good to have reference books like these nearby.

Designing, Coding, and Distributing Python Software

Expert Python Programming, a new book from Packt Publishing, aims to help developers build better applications in Python with the help of best practices and new development techniques.

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