Plone API Tutorial in English and Spanish

Following the success of ifPeople's publication based on research on Plone, the leading Open Source Content Management System, we have released another great resource for Plone developers - a tutorial on Plone API. Originally created in Spanish for the Plone/Zope training ifPeople sponsored in Argentina, ifPeople has recently translated the document into English for greater access.

ifPeople's FairSource partners developed a tutorial to enable others to discover the benefits and use of the API. The Plone API (API = Application Programming Interface) provides a convenient way for developers to manipulate Plone, its content, users, and other objects using scripts. This allows a developer to integrate other systems (ie legacy applications or other tools) and automate tasks in Plone itself. "The API is great," says Emanuel Sartor, who created the tutorial, "it can do everything you want, even things that you can't do using the user interface of the system." The tutorial was led at the Plone/Zope training sponsored by ifPeople in Argentina and delivered by Emanuel Sartor of Menttes.

Since the tutorial was published online, it has gotten a substantial amount of traffic. "We realized that if we translated the original API tutorial in Spanish to English we could reach a lot more people," says Chris Johnson. The new English version of the tutorial is available at ifPeople.net along with the original Spanish version (and other materials from the Plone/Zope training).

The first research report published on ifPeople.net looked at Plone performance issues, comparing it to other popular web publishing systems and reporting on optimization and caching results. The research found that Plone, which is a powerful and resource intensive Web application, could achieve drastic improvements in performance with proper tools and techniques. That document has become a reference in the community and continues to receive over 200 downloads per month.

"We have been very pleased at the response to our Plone publications," says ifPeople CEO Chris Johnson. "We want to provide useful information for the community, and we have achieved that as shown by the downloads and traffic to our Plone resources."