Plone Book

PloneBook is a very specific special purpose Plone product. Its only intent is to provide support for local copies of Andy McKay's 'Definitive Guide to Plone' (Apress 2004) embedded into a Plone site. It supports live updating of the content from the 'plone-docs' project at SourceForge.

Project Description

Why does it exist? To serve the community and to improve Plone's standing with respect to documentation.

What else is needed? PloneBook needs Plone (2.0.x or 2.1.x) and Archetypes (1.3.1+). To support live CVS updates, you need some CVS client but there is a fallback option to support cases where no CVS client is available or where the server is offline.

Installation

Get PloneBook from http://docs.neuroinf.de/products

PloneBook installs like any other Plone product. Unpack the archive into Zope's Products folder, restart the server and then use the QuickInstaller to install it into your Plone site.

As PloneBook's intention is to support site administrators and Plone developers it should be most useful to enhance development sites. It is not meant to provide anything generic enough to be useful to end users directly so it might not make much sense to put it on production sites.

How does it work?

PloneBook provides two new content types: PloneBook and 'Chapter': PloneBook is a custom Archetypes-based folder with support for uploading and updating the book's content which is organized as Chapters and Images. Uploads/updates can be done in three different ways:

1. from plone-docs cvs at SourceForge
2. from a local checkout on the server and
3. from a fallback folder that is distributed together with the product (see its content subfolder).

The cvs command to be used as well as the path to a local checkout can be configured on the book instance.

PloneBook also supports local navigation between the chapters (next/previous/up links).

What's missing?

pdf output, local comments/annotation support ...

Current Release

No stable release available yet.