Plone the easy way

Creating a site with Plone is easy, but developing with Plone might seem daunting.

In fact it can be easy, and it does not necessarily involve learning a lot about various complex frameworks.

Here are the basics of easy developing with Plone.

Install it

Installing Plone is very easy (see the installation documentation).

Theme it

Diazo is the Plone theming engine. Diazo has a brilliant approach to theming: it applies on top of Plone, not inside.

Indeed, Plone produces content pages and Diazo can apply any theme on-the-fly to those pages. So we do not need to know anything about Plone’s internal mechanisms to theme it.

Diazo only requires a regular static theme (HTML files, CSS, JS, etc.) and some mapping rules (specified in rules.xml) which allows to specify where each part of our Plone content pages must fit into our static design.

The Diazo theme can be built directly from the Plone interface in the Theming editor. The Plone 5 default theme (named Barceloneta) can be copied and we can modify whatever we want in this copy.

The copy can also be exported as a .zip file, and imported back into the same site (to restore a previous version), or on another site (for instance to deploy a new theme from development to production).

If we are not comfortable with managing our theme implementation in a web-based interface, we might also store it on our server in the Plone installation folder:

$INSTALL_FOLDER/resources/theme/my-theme

Extend it

Plone can be extended in two ways.

We can install add-ons developed by the Plone community.

And we can also create our own specific content types using Dexterity.

Dexterity is the Plone content-type framework and it allows to create new content-types through the Plone web interface.

Like with Diazo, we are able to export what has been created online, so we can import it again later or import it on another server.

Customize it

Once we have changed the design with Diazo, we might want to re-organize or enrich the content layout themselves.

Mosaic is the perfect solution to manipulate the content layout: we can move existing elements (like the title, description, etc.), but also add new ones.

Once a layout is created, it can be exported and copied in our Diazo manifest.cfg file so it can be available as a new layout for our users.

Diazo and Mosaic allows us to entirely control how information is displayed in our web site, but they do not allow changing the behavior of Plone, like adding new features, new dynamically computed information, etc.

It can be achieved with Rapido (as explained in Tutorial), with a very basic knowledge of HTML and Python (so, still, no need to learn about the different Plone frameworks).

Our Rapido developments are managed in our existing theme folder, so here again we can work online in the Plone theming editor, or in /resources/theme folder.

Rapido provides easy access to the Plone API. The Plone API gathers in one unique module many different Plone tools allowing to search for contents, create contents, access user profiles information, etc. It makes Plone internal features much more approachable, and developing with Rapido might be a good opportunity to discover Plone through its API.

And if we want…

It might be sufficient to cover almost anything we might need to implement in our Plone site.

But if at some point we feel comfortable enough with the Plone technical environment, and if we want to learn more, then we might consider creating our own Plone add-on.

Our add-on will handle our Diazo theme (including our Rapido developments), our Dexterity content-type definitions, and all our configuration settings.

It is properly documented in the Plone documentation, and the Plone training might also be very helpful.