Our Plone development project
Although this is a cookbook, we won’t give isolated recipes for each individual task, we’ll follow a common theme throughout the book to make it easy to understand.
A short note about the course of the book
Some of the topics that we cover may not be all together in one chapter because:
- They don't require a whole chapter or section but are better explained in different stages of the development project.
- They need an introduction and will be complemented with tips later in the book.
Examples of these subjects are buildout recipe configuration and code testing.
In addition, we’d like to mention that, for ease of explanation and understanding, we approached the writing of the book as if this were a website project commissioned to us by a customer.
Customer requirements
The project we are tackling is the design of a digital newspaper website with a particular requirement: the customer needs, with equal importance, to publish pieces of news and to insert advertisements all over the place.
Below is a summarized list of the functionalities the customer requested and we will cover in this book. We will include details related to specific things that Plone doesn’t provide out of the box.
- News items will be published in several sections and must include fields like country and lead paragraph or intro.
- Multimedia content will illustrate and complement written information.
- Multimedia content should be played online but may also be downloaded.
- Advertisement banners will be located in several areas of every page.
- Advertisement banners may vary according to the section of the website.
- Commercial (and non-technical) staff should be able to modify the location of the banners.
- All sections will have a front page with a special layout including the last published content.
In addition, the customer is planning to release a Spanish version of the website in the near future. So they also require that:
- Everything in the website must be translated or, at least, be translatable into other languages.
There are also two additional requirements that are not particular to this project but to everyone, and are related to the quality of the final product:
- Accessing the website must be fast, especially for readers.
- All of the code must be properly commented and tested so that future changes can be made, without too much effort, by a different development team.
Of course, the customer has his own branding, so they need the website to have a distinctive look and feel. This part of the project will be developed by another company (that will not be covered in this book). The process of creation and applying visual design to a Plone site is called skinning. The result of this process is called the skin or theme, which is usually contained in a single Plone product.
Note
Take a look at the list of ready-to-use themes at: http://plone.org/products/by-category/themes.