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The Basics

Things everyone should know.

Joel Burton

Based on the talk given by Joel Burton at the Plone Conference in Vienna, this Tutorial discusses some of the best practices for Plone development. If you are doing site development with Plone and want to keep your sanity, this is a must-read. Requires some familiarity with Zope and Plone.
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Build products for each major feature

For every feature of the site that might be re-used in another site, build a product for this. For example, I recently wanted a Plone site that allowed Plone to use the "sent to friend" feature for any page, based on URL, not just based on Plone content. This only required changing 3 skins from CMFPlone, and could have been customized for this site. Instead, I chose to separate it out to the product SendToURL, allowing me to add this to any site instantly. And, if I want to customize these skins further for another site, I can do so.

Build a site product for site customization

For the site itself, build a "site product" to hold, at the very least, the setup scripts, graphics, skins, etc. Keep this information, which is very site-specific, from the features.

Avoid disconnected External Methods, scripts, etc.

External Methods or other kinds of page templates or scripts that are hanging out in your ZODB end up being disconnected and hard to maintain. Make them part of your feature products, or if they're only for the site itself, part of your site product.

 
by Joel Burton last modified December 10, 2005 - 21:43 All content is copyright Plone Foundation and the individual contributors.

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