Entries For: January 2007
28-01-2007
Back In The Plone Saddle
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Some essential Plone tips for anyone developing in Plone 2.5
After a brief interlude, I'm back developing in Plone again. I think, like myself, most Plone developers have found that Plone has increased in popularity and that they are finding themselves inundated with work. It's no wonder that this has happened, as Plone has progressed from being just a visual style for the Zope CMF (as when I started developing in Plone back in November 2003 when it was at version 1.0.5) to a fully fledged Enterprise CMS. Some of the more recent features introduced in Plone 2.5 being:
My recent work for some of my clients has also given me an opportunity to catch up on some of the more recent Plone development tools. Following are some of the development tools I see as necessary for any Plone developer developing in Plone 2.5:
- the Pluggable Authentication Service (PAS)
- Placeful workflow support
- GenericSetup support to allow site structure/settings to be defined in XML profiles
- a much improved administrative engine for portlets
- AJAX-ifying the administrative interface
- ensuring link integrity
- prevent concurrent through-the-web editing via locking
- support for indexing Word, PDF and other common types
- in-place content staging
My recent work for some of my clients has also given me an opportunity to catch up on some of the more recent Plone development tools. Following are some of the development tools I see as necessary for any Plone developer developing in Plone 2.5:
- Clouseau - this tool works with Plone 2.1.x and Plone 2.5.x (though it won't display the properties on objects in Plone 2.1.x) and enables you to do live debugging of your Plone site via a web browser. I've lost count of the number of times I have recommended Clouseau to newbie Plone developers on #plone recently. And thanks a lot Andy for your efforts in developing this invaluable tool! (+ those who aided you in its development).
- ArchGenXML - there is an excellent tutorial by Jens W. Klein on plone.org regarding this essential Plone development tool.
- ArgoUML - an open source UML editor that can be loaded with a default model that contains many of the data types, stereotypes and tagged value definitions for ArchGenXML.
- Eclipse - Mikko Ohtamaa wrote a tutorial on plone.org regarding using this IDE to develop in Plone.
- Instance manager - a great tool by Zest Software that simplifies the process of creating Zope instances, product installation, restarting, and quick-reinstalling.
- Firebug - if you skin Plone websites this is a "must-have".
- Some other links that may prove useful.
