Introduction

I recently had the pleasure of putting the world's foremost open source Content Management System into production on a nice shiny Xserve.[1] I thought I would share my experience here both to provide some pointers and to gather some feedback.[2]

Now, as we all know, Mac OS X is BSD with a thick candy coating, and is therefore reputed to have something for everyone. I usually host on FreeBSD, and I have to admit that I was skeptical coming into this project. However, I ended up having a great experience with OS X; it really is the best of both worlds. I especially recommend it if you will be handing things over to someone for whom piloting a web server is only a small part of their job.[3]

I am going to address four specific issues in this tutorial:

1. "whether to install from the Plone for Mac installer or from source":install

2. "how to start Zope automatically on bootup":autostart

3. "whether to use Apple's Apache or install httpd from source":apache

4. "how to lay out the filesystem":filesystem

First, however, let's look at the resources available for "learning OS X":learning.


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Notes

[1] For the record, the box is a 1.0 GHz G4 with 1 GB of RAM running Mac OS X Server 10.3.7.

[2] Note that this doc is intended for those with an intermediate or greater knowledge of Plone hosting on BSD/Linux.

[3] Interestingly, I was concurrently installing Plone on Windows 2003 Server for another client. I also hope to write a document about that experience, which was much less positive.