Conclusion

So that's how I did it, folks. To be honest, there are some missing pieces. The two that I can think of are:

1. ZEO — for live debugging, maintenance, and scalability

2. caching — for performance and scalability

Both are technologies that I look forward to learning in the coming months. Regarding caching in particular, I am able to report that Apple has a "Web Performance Cache" which sits as a separate process in front of Apache. I was reluctant to use it without first understanding caching in general. And in reality, I don't anticipate that this client will be getting cache-worthy amounts of traffic.

Another issue to consider is the choice of filesystem. I used the default, Mac OS X Extended w/ Journaling (abbreviated HFS+). Apparently, "older versions of HFS+ had performance issues":http://www.gocept.com/Members/zagy/HFS-vs-UFS versus the traditional UFS.[10] I have not noticed this problem.

With that said, I'd like to invite your feedback. Here are a few questions to prime the pumps, bearing in mind that we are talking about issues specific to production installations of Plone on OS X:

- Do you install software from source, from Darwin Ports, or from some other packaging system?

- In particular, do you use Apple's Apache or do you install that from source as well?

- Do you use Apple's Web Performance Cache, or a different mechanism?

- What public Plone sites do you have in production on OS X? Let's start a list! The one discussed here is: "www.svsd.net":http://www.svsd.net.

Feedback on this doc should either be directed to the "mailing list":/documentation/lists#documentation, or it should be posted here using the commenting feature on the appropriate page. I'll periodically factor these discussions back into the main document. Thanks!

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Notes

[10] Thanks to Nate Aune for this link.