Configuration and Set-Up

In This Section...

Backup

Backup Plone
There are several ways to backup all data related to Plone.
Backup and recover Data.fs in linux
bash scripts to backup linux and use repozo.py for backing up Data.fs Also includes a script to recover Data.fs to a specific point in time

Add-on Products

Add on product installation fails
This document explains steps how to pinpoint the reason why installing Plone add-on for your Plone site fails and how to proceed to solve the problem.
Add-on installation tutorial
Quick Plone add-on installation tutorial.
How to upload your package to Plone.org
This tutorial explains how to distribute your packages to Plone.org using the standard Distutils commands.
Installing Plone add-ons - quick instructions
These instructions cover add-on installation process for Plone 3.3.x and 4 installation.
Using Add-ons
There are many third-party add-on Products for Plone that can give you additional functionality, often at the click of a button. However, not all Products are created equal. Knowing how to install, test, evaluate and extend them is important. Read on.
Enable fancy zoom view for all content types embedding images
This How-to shows you in which way you have to customize view templates in order to allow a fancy zoom of its embedded images. This includes all "texts" which have images inserted by kupu (the plone wysiwyg-editor).
mailtoplone: Integrate emails with plone
Mailtoplone's main purpose is to create plone content from emails. The emails are delivered to plone as plaintext containing the entire email including the envelope. Mailtoplone makes heavy use of the zope 3 component architecture and plone's content rules. The tutorial explains the approach and shows an example usecase.
Manually Removing Local Persistent Utilities
This document explains how you can manually remove local persistent utilities that were not properly removed from a product while uninstalling.
Send Plone content to a Django web app via ContentMirror
Export basic Plone Archetype-based content to Django, using the ContentMirror Product and a postgresql database.

Other

Changing the Admin Password
How to change the password of the default administrator user.
Create a reviewer account
How do I create a reviewer account to publish pending documents?
Creating public websites with staging and custom skins
In this tutorial, Martin Aspeli plays investigative journalist, deciphering Alan's ramblings to find out exactly how Enfold deploy real sites with staging and different authoring and public skins.
Disable logins for a Plone site
Getting ExternalEditor (ZopeEditManager) working in Firefox on Mac OS X
How to get the External Editor feature of Plone to work using Firefox on Mac OS X. (Updated!)
How to hack your Zope 2 instance so that you can install Python packages using easy_install
This HOWTO guides you through the few steps required to make your Zope 2 instance on Unix/Linux/Mac OSX a full-blown Python environment where you can install Python packages without administrator rights, using the convenient EasyInstall tool.
How to manage portlets in Plone 3
This document shows how to manage portlets from within Plone 3
Kupu - one touch full screen (zoom) editing
Use this to open existing douments in zoom mode with one mouse click....and to save documents without "unzooming" and scrolling.
Mounting content from one ZEO storage into an existing Plone site
If you want to have your plone site segmented into different folders that use different filestorages this is what you need to know. Splitting up your page accross different filestorages is also useful if you want to prevent one storage of becoming too big, backup them separately or use different cache-sizes (eg for catalogs)
Mounting portal_catalog in a separate ZODB
This how-to explains how to have the portal_catalog stored in an separate ZODB.
Multiple Plone sites per zope instance - using separate Data.fs files for each one.
Using Zope's mount point facilities, distinct ZODB files under the main zope root can be created to host Plone sites.
One Month In - Getting Started from Ground Zero
Like many complex software systems Plone has it's fair share of things you are "expected" to know. From a begining developer's perspective there are some things they just don't tell you. This tutorial will hopefully help fill in the gaps and complement the wealth of more advanced information that is out there.
Setting Up Static AWStats Reports: lighttpd and virtual hosts
The following is a how-to describing how I set up AWStats reports on a Virtual Server hosted by Zettai.net, (1) creating static reports, (2) for different virtual hosts, and (3) with lighttpd. Hopefully these instructions can be made into a more generic how-to for others to use. This is adapted from the existing How To.
Simple /etc/rc.d/init.d script for Zeocluster
I tested this on Fedora Core 5 and the default "Universal" Linux installer for Plone 2.5.1. I think this is a useful script to start zeo/zope rather than using the startcluster etc command line scripts
Time and date format
How to set Plone time and date format.

Performance

Cache Content
How to change Plone's default cache settings so you can cache pages on your site.
Cache Content- Anonymous only
How to change Plone's default cache settings so you can cache pages on your site.(Anonymous only)
HA-Cluster with loadbalancing for Zope (and Plone)
This document describes an HA-Cluster solution for Zope and Plone with load-balancing over two physical machines, based on ZEO. We assume NO single point of failure, and use NO commercial software. Concepts discussed in this howto are applicable to more complex setups.
How to speed up Plone startup by disabling unused languages
You can speed up Plone's startup time and reduce RAM usage (slightly) by disabling languages you aren't using with a one-line change to your buildout. Here's how.
Optimizing Plone Performance
This tutorial will show you a simple and effective way to use caching to make your Plone site a production-worthy setup capable of delivering in excess of 100 pages per second given proper hardware. (In progress)
Plone behind Varnish using Pound for SSL
This how-to explains one possible configuration for configuring Plone to serve content from behind Varnish (which provides caching), with Varnish behind the Pound load balancer, where Pound is used as an SSL wrapper.
Plone Scaling and Performance
Thoughts and ideas about scaling plone (including performance), a collective project of Elizabeth Leddy and various contributors.
Running Plone on a system with limited memory
Gives some pointers and tools on how to run Plone on a system with little memory - typically 512MB or less.
Scaling Out Plone With RelStorage and Replicated MySQL
Want to scale out Plone? This tutorial shows how you can build a Plone site based on an asynchronously replicated MySQL database.
Simple "Squid on Windows" caching solution
How to implement "Zope + Squid" on Windows
Simple Plone Clustering with Squid and Pound
A simple Squid/Pound/Zope setup. Now you can do it without rewrite rules or redirector scripts and take advantage of squid acceleration and the scalability of ZEO.
Speed up Plone for iPhone and iPad delivery
How-to use Varnish to speed up delivery to your IProduct users. This Tutorial is based on http://rudd-o.com/en/linux-and-free-software/how-to-really-speed-up-plone-for-your-iphone-readers
Squid integration pointers
Some references to setting up Squid as a caching server in front of Zope.
Threads vs. Cache size
Understanding how the number of running Zope threads should influence your choice of ZODB cache size.
Tips on how to make a Plone site faster
Point to common and easy ways to make a Plone site faster.
Write your application with performance in mind
How to make sure your application is as fast as possible, some general tips and hints.

Plone With Other Web Servers

htaccess + proxy
How to password protect an entire site with apache's authentication and proxy rewrite.
Installing Plone with Apache
There are several ways of running Plone together with Apache, but this is the simple, idiot-proof way.
Managing your Plone Sites in Windows with Enfold Proxy
This article shows how a Microsoft administrator can manage and configure Plone sites from Windows (regardless of whether the Zope clients are are on Linux or Windows boxes). It also shows how to configure caching, load balancing and integration of non-Plone content with Plone content in the same domain.
Mixing Local Apache and Proxyed Content
Many people run Plone proxied behind Apache, but this will generally stop you from serving stuff, like images or PHP, from that Apache server. This howto will show you how to make certain URLs resolve to local Apache resources, even if Plone is proxied/rewritten to the root of the domain.
More WebDAV
Some up-to-date tips on how to access your Plone site via WebDAV.
Plone behind Varnish using Pound for SSL
This how-to explains one possible configuration for configuring Plone to serve content from behind Varnish (which provides caching), with Varnish behind the Pound load balancer, where Pound is used as an SSL wrapper.
Proxying
Some hints about the importance of running a caching proxy in front of Zope for performance reasons.
Running Plone and Zope behind an Apache 2 web server
How to set up an Apache 2 web server as proxy with disk caching and deflating.
Setting up Plone behind Apache with SSL
How to set up Plone on a secure server, with Apache serving over SSL.
Setting up Plone behind IIS (Reverse Proxy) (non-Enfold-Proxy solution)
How to set up Plone on a IIS server (Reverse Proxy). This method does NOT require Enfold Proxy.
simple SOAP client using Suds
This howto shows an easy way of creating a SOAP client for Plone, using the SOAP library Suds. The example is meant to provide a comparison with ZSI, as described in the howto "Importing a SOAP client object to be used by python scripts".
Speed up Plone for iPhone and iPad delivery
How-to use Varnish to speed up delivery to your IProduct users. This Tutorial is based on http://rudd-o.com/en/linux-and-free-software/how-to-really-speed-up-plone-for-your-iphone-readers

Relational Databases

Archetypes using mysql and postgresql
A short tutorial about how to make an archetype that stores data in and reads data from a mysql or a postgresql table. It works on plone-2.5.2 on zope-2.9.5.
Creating SQL content types with collective.tin
collective.tin is a library for creating RDBMS backed content types on top of SQLAlchemy. collective.lead is used for transaction integration. collective.mercury supports the autogeneration of interfaces, model and db files by introspecting the RDBMS schema. This approach does not require zodb stubs. Versioning is optional. Workflow status and history (if required) are stored in the database. (This tutorial is very much a work in progress, but I figured it may be useful to make it public now)
Extracting Data from Microsoft SQL using ZPT
The following should hopefully advise on how to extract data from MS SQL into a plone site.
Handle accented characters using utf8 encoding in MySQL
The goal of this tutorial is to show how to solve the problem of the correct display of the accented characters in a MySQL table using utf8 encoding.
How to add a File System Z SQL Method
How to move Z SQL Methods out of the ZODB and onto the file system.
How to connect with a MySQL database when Plone & Zope are running on a windows machine.
How can you connect to a MySQL database when Plone & Zope are running on windows? This tutorial will explain everything step by step and gives the solution to one of the most common problem : how can you register Python in the windows registry.
Let SQLDocument display your RDBMS-Data
This Howto explains you the usage of SQLDocument. You will learn how you can easy add/edit/display RDBMS Data in Plone through Plone.
Move your ZSQL methods to the filesystem
Make your Plone/Zope products more maintainable by storing ZSQL methods in your product's skins directory.
MySQL connectivity in Zope/Plone
Basics how to connect MySQL from Zope and Plone.
Plone and MariaDB
For all practical purposes, MariaDB is a binary drop in replacement of the same MySQL version (for example MySQL 5.1 -> MariaDB 5.1). What this means is that all MySQL connectors (PHP, Perl, Python, Java, MyODBC, Ruby, MySQL C connector etc) works unchanged with MariaDB.
Plone and MySQL
How to integrate and manage MySQL data within Plone using TAL, MySQL, Python and Zope Page Templates (TMPZ)
PostgreSQL support for Archetype Storage
How to add support for PostgreSQL storage to Archetype Storage fields in Zope and Plone using psycopg
Scaling Out Plone With RelStorage and Replicated MySQL
Want to scale out Plone? This tutorial shows how you can build a Plone site based on an asynchronously replicated MySQL database.
SQL backed content types
This document gives an example of creating a content type with data stored in an RDBMS (PostgreSQL).
Synchronizing Plone Content with an ODBC database using pyodbc
Describes how to synchronize via ODBC in Microsoft Windows systems. The library used for getting the data via ODBC is pyodbc.
Using MS SQL databases in Zope running Linux
Connect to Microsoft SQL Server databases from within Zope and Plone running on Linux without using the eGenix ODBC connector product.

Site-Wide Settings

Add a new MIME Type
This How-to will traverse the steps required in order to add a MIME type in Plone. By consequence, it is also a How-to get Plone to treat Microsoft Project files properly.
Allow Discussion on Content
How to enable a content type to be discussable across entire site.
Change Available Types for Events
How to change the types of events (e.g. "meeting" or "appointment") available to the standard Plone Event type.
Changing language negotiation strategy
Language negotiation strategy determines the language of the site when the visitor comes in for the first time. This document tells how to change language negotiation strategy for a Plone site.
Converting text with Portal Transforms and the MIME Types Registry
In this tutorial, you will learn how Plone and Archetypes keeps track of content MIME types, and how PortalTransforms enables you to convert between content of different MIME types. You will learn how to register a new MIME type, and how to create new transforms.
Enable Favorites in Plone 2.1
Read on to learn how to enable the "Add to Favorites" functionality as well as how to display the Favorites portlet.
Enable full-text indexing of Word documents and PDFs in Plone 3.0 (Windows)
How to install third-party command-line converters to enable full-text indexing of Word documents and PDFs in Plone 3.0 on Windows
Enable Markdown, Textile and ReStructured Text Support
Add the right eggs to buildout.cfg and set the right settings in Control Panel → Markup.
Full RSS in Plone 3
Plone built in RSS template shows only the description. This article explains a way to change this template to have the full content in the RSS.
Generate custom unique ids for new objects
When you create a new object in Plone, it is automatically given an id (short name) based on the object's type and the current date. This how-to shows you how to change the way in which this id is generated.
Grant Collection (ATTopic) permissions to contributors and editors
Out of the box, contributors and editors do not have the rights to manage Collections (topics, smart folders). This howto provides a genericsetup rolemap that makes Collections manageable just like other content.
Hiding authors' information pages site wide
This document explains briefly how to remove access to authors' information pages for anonymous visitors of a site.
How to Add New Class Styles to Kupu
This document explains how to add and define new custom class styles for use in kupu.
How To Customize Error Messages
A short how-to which explains how to customize error handling such as 404 errors in Plone.
How to Embed Flickr, YouTube, or MySpace Content
Normally, Plone will not allow you to paste the code necessary to embed videos, slideshows or music players from popular websites such as Flickr, YouTube and MySpace. Learn how to adjust the HTML filtering to allow this content.
How to force Plone to restrict the creation of short names with spaces, underscores, capital case, etc.
If you don’t know by now, Plone is case sensitive. For example, if you have a folder with a short name called “mike” it is completely different than “Mike”. This makes sense from a developers stand point because of the way Zope handles each object ID. However, from an end user standpoint they couldn’t care less.
HTML Filtering options
A discussion of the main way Plone filters HTML.
Integrating MS Office and PDF files into Plone 2
Allow users to upload MS Office files (i.e., Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDF files into Plone as objects such that they are automatically previewable, indexable, and searchable upon upload.
Working copy of office_wvware.py for Windows/Linux
There is a platform-dependent bug in the copy that accompanied the Plone 3.3.5 distribution. Here is the fixed copy