Of course, when we edit an item of content, the item already exists. Click the edit tab for an item and you will see the data entry panel for the item, along with the existing values of the item's data.

For an example of something really simple, where editing looks the same as adding, we can review how to edit a folder.

The edit panel for a folder simply shows the title and description input areas. Often a description is not provided for a folder, so the only thing to change is the title.  If you do wish to give a description, which is a good idea for distinguishing folders in a list, the description can be text only -- there is no opportunity for setting styling of text, such as bold, italics, or other formatting.  This keeps the descriptions of Plone content items as simple as possible.

Here is the edit panel for a folder, in this case, one called "Butterflies":

 

That's it. Change what you want and save, and the content item will be updated in Plone's storage system. You can repeatedly edit content items, just as you can repeatedly edit files on your local computer.  By now you have appreciated that Plone stores discrete content items as separate entities, akin to "files" on a local computer, but you really don't have to think about it that way. Plone is a content management system, where the content comes in the form of numerous discrete content items that may be individually edited. Edit away at your heart's content.

For an example of editing a content item that is a bit different than adding in the first place, we can examine editing an image. Editing an Image can be done by navigating to an individual image and clicking the edit tab. Clicking the edit tab for the image, you will see the following edit panel:

Here, an image called Butterfly-small.jpg is being edited.  You can change the title and description, as usual, in which case you would usually keep the setting to "Keep existing image."  You can also change the image itself by checking the "Replace with new image" choice. Or, clicking the "Delete current image" choice will simply delete the image entirely.  The "Related Item(s)" setting at the bottom is the same one always present for Plone content.

So, editing an image is a bit different than adding one in the first place, but not by much.

Editing panels for other content items are straightforward.

For most content items, if you want to change how it looks, you edit the content directly.  But folders are a different animal. As containers of other items, folders are "where the action is" in Plone, so we will treat folder management in this and the following section.

Consider a scenario where a butterfly enthusiast, John Smith, has logged in to his web site to work on the part devoted to Skipper butterflies.  He navigates to the "Skippers" folder by clicking the navigation menu, which is on the left in his default Plone web site design. When he clicks the "Skippers" folder in the navigation menu, the view tab panel, or just "the view," for the folder is shown:

The view tab panel will show the view of any content item. The view is always how a content item would show for anonymous web site visitors. Click the view tab when you want to see what something looks like after you have changed something.  For folders, you will see a listing of contained content items, in one of several list presentations, selected via the display pull-down menu. The default view is called standard view:

And, here is summary view:

 

And, tabular view:

 

And, thumbnail view, which is mainly useful for photographs, but still works for normal content:

 

 

Making a photo album is easy. Just add the photographs (images, or image files, the most common being .jpg files) to a folder and set the display view for the folder as thumbnail view.  Thumbnail view will automatically handle the display as images are added to the folder, presenting a multi-page division into sets of images, as needed, as the number of images grows. If you are uploading photographic images from a digital camera or scanner, you will most likely want to resize them on your local computer before uploading them, because they are too large. This is described in a later section of this manual.

Setting an Individual Content Item as the View for a Folder

The basic list view functionality described above for folders fits the normal way we think of folders -- as containers of items -- but Plone adds a nice facility to set the view of a folder to be that of any single item contained within the folder. This takes advantage of the way the navigation system gets automatically wired up in a Plone web site as folders are created (As folders are created and published, they automatically show up in the navigation menu). Consider several scenarios where the custom display setting feature for a folder is very useful:

• Let's say you are setting up a hierarchy of web pages, with customized text on the pages and links to other pages. This is a case where you as the web page designer would like to control what the pages look like, how the links to other pages appear, perhaps as links in a table or as icons in a graphic design.  For a custom web page that will contain links to "sub web pages," you would add the page to a folder and then set the default display view for the folder to be the contained page. The display menu is one of the basic menus available for a folder (Look at any of the screen capture images above). The basic folder views described above will be overridden, and when the folder is clicked in the navigation menu, the web page with the customized links to "sub web pages" will show. This may seem a bit daunting, but people who have created fairly complicated web page hierarchies and menu systems appreciate this functionality, because of the intimate way folders form the navigation system of Plone web sites. A custom web page for a folder can be an elaborate graphical design, or it can be a simple textual description with instructions to use the navigation menu, as the following video illustrates:
  

  Watch a video about setting the page display view.

• For another situation where this functionality is useful, consider a folder as a container of a document that gets updated periodically. There could be twenty versions of the document in the folder, but only one is current.  The display of the folder would have been set to show the view of the first version of the document, when it was first created.  As new documents were uploaded, the display of the folder was reset each time to show the current document, and the defunct documents were kept around for posterity, but set as private, so they won't appear.
• This dual nature of Plone folders, acting as generic containers or as navigation-wired "nodes" in a hierarchy, allows a kind of put-stuff-where-you-need-it approach. As the site is developed, folders get naturally created as work progresses.  Pre-existing files, images, web pages get uploaded or newly created in folders throughout the web site.  By "naturally" here, we mean that storage of content just falls out in the normal course of doing the work, just as you would add and organize files on your personal computer without thinking about it too hard.  Before you know it, you have a large system of folders in a hierarchy, with some folders containing all sorts of files.  Plone web sites get like that too, but this is a good thing -- it is a content management system, after all.  An individual folder might contain all sorts of old pages, supporting data files and documents, original graphics files, etc., but if the display view for the folder is set to a single page amongst the crowd, the other documents will not be seen when the web site is surfed. But they will be there next year when you ask, "Now where did I put the original Adobe Illustrator version of that graphic?," and answer "Oh, yes, it is in the folder along with all the other stuff on that project." This way of doing things -- taking advantage of the storage system aspect of Plone -- is very important when several people share web site folder access and work collaboratively, but it happens even for web sites managed by a single person.
  

These examples illustrate that the flexibility of Plone folders is a central feature in the content management system. 

Next, we move to the contents tab to see important functions for managing content.

The contents tab for folders is like "File Manager" or "My Computer" system utilities in Windows and Linux desktops and the "Finder" in Mac OS X, with similar functionality.

Clicking the contents tab for a folder, such as the "Skippers" folder below, shows the contents tab panel:

The contents tab panel is immediately recognized by observing the check boxes beside the items in the contents list.  Click these check boxes to select multiple items for performing copy, cut, rename, delete, or change state operations.

Plone has a clipboard for copy and cut operations.  If you check one or more items, and click cut or copy, a paste button will be added to the row of buttons along the bottom of the panel. If you then click another folder, you'll be able to paste the items there.  For a cut operation, the items will remain in the source folder -- they won't disappear -- until they are pasted somewhere.

Renaming items will show a panel for entering a new name for the short name (or id) of the item, as well as the title.  The distinction between short name and title is one that becomes apparent only when you rename, because Plone automatically creates the short name from the title in most Plone web sites.  But the renaming operation must show you the short name as well as the title, because usually would want to change both, if changing either. Consider the following example:

If you were to change the title to "Long-tailed Skippers," you would also change the short name to "long-tailed-skippers." This keeps things tidy -- it keeps them correct, so that the URL for the item, the web address, is kept up-to-date with the actual content item. Note that the short name should contain no blanks. Use dashes for any blanks in the title, and otherwise make it a carbon copy of the title. Also, use lowercase for the short name. See also the page "What's in a Web Name?" for a description of how Plone handles web addressing and the short name. The following video also includes in illustration of renaming:

Watch a video that includes renaming an item.

The delete operation is straightforward. Click to select one or more items, and then the delete button, and the items will be deleted.

The change state operation offers a great way to change the publication state of a selection of folders, and their subfolders if you select this option. In the following example, the publication state for a folder called "Long-tailed Skippers" is being modified. Checking the "Include Folder Items" will make the state change affect all contained content.  Don't forget that you can do this to, say, three folders at a time, and all of their subfolders and contained content, so that in one fell swoop you can quickly publish, unpublish, etc.

In addition to these individual action operations, reordering is a natural mouse-driven manipulation, as described in the next section. 

Consider the following folder, called "Skippers," for holding information about this type of butterfly.  Often, when we add content items, we don't initially get them in the order we want.  The desired ordering is not always alphabetical, but in this example we can assume so. Below you see the Skipper butterfly subfolders are not in alphabetical order:

One way to move the top item, "Spread-winged Skippers," to the bottom of the list would be to click the small down arrow icon on the right, and keep working it down to the bottom.  This is useful for small changes, but for such a multi-row move, it is better to click the top row and drag it to the bottom and drop it there (a so-called "drag and drop" action).  Take care to click in an area of the row to be moved where the cursor is not over any text (click in the open space between the words), and simply drag and drop (hold the mouse button down as you move the item), as the following little animation illustrates:

 

The item that is being moved turns yellow as it is being moved. When the mouse button is released, the item stays where it was dragged. Click the view tab to see the reordered listing.

 

Cut/Paste

Moving items from one area to another on a website is a common task.  Often this need arises with placement of content in the wrong folder.  For example, if the author of the following content about Skipper butterflies realizes that a Swallowtail butterfly was mistakenly included -- the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder shown below -- the folder can simply be moved with a cut/paste operation:

Note that the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder has been checked, and that the cut button is about to be clicked.  After clicking the cut button, the screen will show a new paste button. The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder and all of its contents are now in the web site's "memory."  The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder does not immediately disappear, however, awaiting the actual paste operation:

 

The paste button is now active. The next step is to navigate to the destination folder, in this case the Swallowtails folder:

 

After clicking the Swallowtails folder, the paste button will continue to show, because the paste operation has not yet been completed:

 

 And last, clicking the paste button for the destination folder adds the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder to its proper place in the Swallowtails folder, and cuts it from the original location, the Skippers folder, and the cut/paste operation is complete.

Copy/Paste

A copy/paste operation is identical to the cut/paste operation, except that there is no removal of content from the original folder. It works as you would expect it to work.

 Watch a video about performing these operations.

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Sometimes it is necessary to delete a content item, often to replace it with an updated version.  For example, perhaps you uploaded a photograph, only to realize that you picked the wrong one to upload from your local computer.  Simply go to the contents tab and find the uploaded photograph, click to check it, then click the delete button:

In the example shown above, PhotographThree.jpg is about to be deleted.

Entire folders may be deleted, so care must be taken with the delete operation, but this is true for computer use in general, and we all have learned to do a last minute self-check to make sure the delete operation is intended.

As you will see in the next section, an undo operation is available, which offers some measure of protection against inadvertent deletion and major editing operations.

The undo operation is available for undoing one or several recent changes. To undo, click the undo link to the right of your name at the top of the edit area:

After clicking undo, you will see a list of recent changes to the web site, in the order of most recent on top of the list. Click to check the actions you would like to undo, and then click the undo button at the bottom of the list:

Using undo on a Plone web site, as with using undo on computers in general, should be considered as a luxury not to be abused by overuse, as it adds a level of complexity to behind-the-scenes database storage. However, use it when you need it.