Setting up Plone

The public webiste to which content is deployed from the staging environment is conventionally called public_website. EnSimpleStaging will use this as its deployment target, and the public "retail view" theme will only be applied to this folder.

• To create the public_website folder, simply add a Folder in the Plone root from the Plone UI (not in the ZMI!).

You may give it whatever title you want. However, since Plone by default does not enable direct editing of "short names" (aka ids), you may want to use the actions drop-down to rename the folder to public_website afterwards (this is mostly for consistency, it doesn't really matter what the folder is called).

NOTE: In versions of Plone prior to 2.1.2, the actions menu did not provide rename functionality, so you would have to go to the contents tab in the Plone root to rename the folder instead.

We then need a bit of magic to ensure the "retail view" theme is applied:

• In the ZMI, go to the root of your Plone site, create a Script (Python) with the id 'applyRetailView':

      request = context.REQUEST
      if request.get('URL').startswith('http://public'):
          context.portal_url.getPortalObject().changeSkin('Retail View')
  

• Still in the ZMI at the root of your Plone site, select Set Access Rule from the add menu, and enter applyRetailView as the id.

There are several things to note here. First of all, we have created an access rule from the little applyRetailView script (notice how the icon for the script has changed). This means that the script will be called when the folder is visited. When invoked, the script checks the URL in the request, and if it starts with http://public, it changes to the Retail View skin (theme). This assumes that the public URL of your web site starts with http://public and that your "retail view" skin is called Retail View. You can of course change these strings if your theme is called something else, or if your public URL is different. All that is required is that the URL does not match the one through which you will access the authoring and staging environment.

For example, if you are running http://mysite.net, which is also accessible via http://www.mysite.net, and you will do your authoring via http://admin.mysite.net (we will set up the difference between the public and authoring url's in the next section), you could do:

    request = context.REQUEST
    url = request.get('URL')
    if url.startswith('http://mysite.net') or url.startswith('http://www.mysite.net'):
        context.portal_url.getPortalObject().changeSkin('Retail View')

Coupled with the Apache or IIS configuration we will cover in the next section, that will make sure your visitors see the public "retail view" skin. However, Zope will not be much wiser.

Let's say a portlet on the public website does a catalog search for all recent news items. Zope would use the portal_catalog tool from the Plone root, which would find all news items regardless of whether they were in the public_website folder or in the stage. The simplest solution is to make sure that such queries include a path query like path = "/Plone/public_website. You can achieve this customising the relevant portlets in your skin, for example.

For other tools, such as reference_catalog or uid_catalog, it is actually necessary that the authoring/staging versions and the public_website versions are separate. We can achieve this by setting up custom versions of these tools inside the public_website folder, which will be acquired before the ones at the portal root. EnSimpleStaging ships with an External Method to do just this.

• In the root of your plone create a External method with id, setup_local_tools
  • id: setup_local_tools
  • module: EnSimpleStaging.Install
  • function: setup_local_tools
• Create a Script (Python) with id, 'do_setup':

      from StringIO import StringIO
      context.setup_local_tools(StringIO())
      return 'Done'
  

Save this script and click test. It should return Done when it is finished.

Finally, you must set up your workspace. This is where the content production and staging occurs. Content created inside a workspace can be deployed to the public website, either incrementally or all at once. It is also possible to set up different workspaces, perhaps with different workflows or permissions for different groups of users, deploying to different subfolders of public_website (or to the same target, but then you may get conflicts).

• In the Plone interface, create a Folder called workspaces
• In the workspaces folder, add a Staging Area, and call it e.g "Authoring Space"
• Set the deployment path for the staging area to be public_website
• If you want only published content to be deployed, enter published in the "Deploy states" field. This ensures that the standard Plone visible-pending-published workflow cycle applies to staged content as well. You can enter other deployable states too, one per line.