PART 2
Configuring Plone

In the first part of the book, you learned how to work with Plone's front-end user interface; you are now able to add and manage content and to administer a Plone site, performing simple customizations and managing users and groups. It is now time to put your hands on the back end of the system. You will learn how to configure Plone, its graphical design, and its authentication system.

Objectives

In this second part, you will see what lies behind Plone, and you will go through some basic concepts about the structure and logic of Plone. In addition, you will see how to get around the Zope Management Interface, the place where you can deeply customize your application, even if you are not a programmer; you will see how to manage and create new content types and how to search and index them. You will then learn how to change the look and feel of a Plone site; how to manage security and workflows; and how to integrate with other services, such as LDAP and relational databases, for user authentication.

References

If you need further information about how to configure Plone, here some of the most useful places you can find about Plone's back-end interface:

• The Zope Book (www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZopeBook)
• Zope Developer's Guide (www.zope.org/Documentation/Books/ZDG/current)
• Martin Aspeli's Professional Plone Development (Packt Publishing, 2007)
• www.w3schools.com
• http://plone.org/documentation