Introduction

As a CMS, Plone needs to fit in with other information systems. Increasingly, the XML stack is the preferred way for semi-structured content to express itself between systems. Also, customers view XML as a future-proof storage.

Can Plone give XML representations of content types defined in Archetypes? This how-to gives a hands-on treatment of Marshall, a Collective add-on which provides XML saving and loading of your content.

As background, I'm really, really dense. This how-to is written for someone like me, that wants to be told exactly what to do to achieve some initial result.

Outcomes

In this first draft of the how-to, the goal is to get an XML representation of a Page in the fewest possible steps. We'll also show how to create a new Page from a file on disk.

Later installments will show a more flexible configuration, where you can define the kind of thing to be added via an XML element in your file. If Sidnei has enough patience with my questions, I'll add more to this how-to.