The Plone 4 CMS

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Submitted by Bryan on

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.

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

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Submitted by GeetaS on

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.

Plone 3.0 Released

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Submitted by Bryan on
Last week, Plone 3.0 was released.  Plone is the infamous content management system that runs on the Python-based Zope application server.   The install of Plone is known to be very easy with Plone, Python, and Zope already packaged together in the installer.

Highlights to the new features/improvements in Plone 3.0 that the Plone team would like to stress via their announcement are listed below.   I provided links to further details on those features I thought needed a better explanation or were just too exciting to leave alone.
  • Full version support, history and reverting to older revisions
  • Improved performance
  • Inline (Ajax) editing

Third beta of Plone 3 released

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Submitted by Bryan on
Plone 3 beta 3 was released on Wednesday of this week.  The announcement posted at Plone.org also invited users, administrators, and developers to help test the new software.  Plone 3, built on the Zope application server, is nearing a year of development .  By the time the final version of Plone 3 is released you should see the following new features included in the content management system.
  • Full versioning, roll-back capabilities, in-place staging (ie. working copy support) and locking for all content.
  • Inline editing of content using Ajax.
  • Link integrity checking and automatic handling of moved or renamed content.

Plone 2.5.2 released

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Submitted by Bryan on

I almost missed this one. Plone 2.5.2 was released a few days ago. Plone is a CMS written in Python (something I know a lot about) that is built on the Zope application server (something I know very little about). The Plone 2.5.2 release is a bug fixer for the following:

  • LiveSearch
  • Unicode handling
  • External Editor
  • IE7 rendering

The original announcement from Plone.org can be read here and you can download the latest version of Plone on their download page.

Fifth Anniversary for Plone Content Management System

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Submitted by Bryan on

Plone is celebrating their fifth anniversary this week. Plone is an open source content management system (CMS) built on the Python based Zope application server. The two people that are probably celebrating the most about Plone's success are its project leaders and founders, Alan Runyan (a US Texan) and Alexander Limi (a Norwegian).

The following are some talking points straight from about the positive accomplishments of the Plone open source project during the past five years. The talking points are straight from their fifth year anniversary announcement with only a little editing on my part. I realize that there are other open source projects that may have accomplished just as much as Plone during the past five years. However, this is Plone's time to shine. Also, this is rare occasion I get to promote a non-PHP Web application to our visitors here at CMS Report.