Book Review for "Plone 3.3 Site Administration: Manage your site like a Plone professional" by Alex Clark

Book Review for "Plone 3.3 Site Administration: Manage your site like a Plone professional" by Alex Clark.

Are you a Plone administrator or content editor? If so, there's a new book from Packt that's worth your attention.

"Plone 3.3 Site Administration: Manage your site like a Plone professional" guides the reader through site installation and configuration of many useful add-ons. The tool of choice for a modern Plone site is 'zc.Buildout', and this book makes extensive use of buildout in each chapter as the author guides the reader from a basic Plone site to one well adorned with add-ons to enhance the appearance, functionality, and scalability of the site.

One thing I'd like to emphasize is that this book is all about configuration of these add-ons. As an example, the book will introduce the reader to some desirable non-standard bit-- let's say the Varnish HTTP accelerator-- and give step-by-step instructions on how to get Varnish downloaded and configured for your Plone site. What's missing is an overview of exactly what Varnish is. There are no diagrams and not much text explaining how it works. This pattern is repeated nearly everywhere-- you get the buildout configuration (and the response to expect when running buildout), but it's up to you to get your head wrapped around exactly what it is that you're adding to your site. I find this ok, given that the book is targeted to readers who are already site administrators and should recognize most of the products we're dealing with. (For the products that I didn't recognize, Google was able to round out my education, so I didn't feel slighted.) I did think this was an important thing to point out so a first-time reader of the book will recognize what's in store in this book.

There's a lot of good advice that's not Plone specific. Best practices regarding version control of configurations, database maintenance, database packing, and more are covered. These are the sort of thing that an experienced administrator will see value in, and a new administrator will appreciate having spelled out for them. (One way or another, new administrators will adapt policies like these. Maybe after reading some text and realizing the value, maybe after getting burned once or twice and learning it the hard way.) In that regard, even one of these tips is probably worth the price of the book.

I continue to be impressed by the Plone community and the effort they have put forth to build the impressive ecosystem around this impressive CMS. This one's for the admins, an audience that probably doesn't get as many books as they should.

The book can be found here.

Happy Administering!

Rick

Book Review for "Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook"

Let me make one thing clear to start: This is a book by developers, for developers. The authors clearly state in the Preface that the readers should have some knowledge of Python, Plone and Zope and I believe this is very true. There's little material here to get the newbie up to speed on basic concepts. But if you're already at that point, then this book reads like working notes from an expert Plone 3 consultant, and there is much worthwhile content here for you.

The first chapter is the only one that offers a newbie-level entry level. It covers Plone 3 installation, and gives some advice on establishing your initial Plone site. Once that chapters done, hang on tight-- the coddling is over! The text then jumps straight to recommendations for tools used for development. The authors clearly have a good amount of experience in adding functionality to Plone, and they offer great advice on which tools will be useful. Given the base of those two chapters, the book then launches right into the proper way to develop products for Plone 3.

The goals of the book are really outlined back in the preface. The authors have selected 10 pieces of functionality that are not found in a base Plone 3 installation. I found all 10 to be requests you might easily find in the 'real world'. (Examples: Prepare the website for internationalization, allow multimedia content that should be both playable on the site and downloadable. The rest are just as reasonable.)

Once you know what the authors are setting out to accomplish, you are presented with answers to all these challenges. The answers are formatted in a pattern repeated for each action that adds functionality:

Getting Ready - outlines installation prerequisites, the things you'll need to gather.
How to Do It - step by step instructions on how to implement your changes.
How It Works - after you've configured things in the previous step, this step explains why things work.
There's More - an optional section where further reading can be found, or maybe extras like test procedures.

Along the way the authors provide tips and techniques for expert Plone development. These include debugging, documentation, testing, and packaging. I was especially pleased that the authors took time to provide text on performance considerations, something not always present in books of this type.

If I had one wish for this book, it would be for more illustrations and a little more remedial material for developers not already knee-deep in Plone development. Outside that, I'd recommend that anyone doing Plone 3 development should look at this book. There are so many expert level tips and tricks contained here, I imagine nearly everyone is going to learn something-- many will learn many things.

The book can be found here.

Happy Reading!

Packt Plone double-whammy

Packt Plone double-whammy





Have you tried Plone? It's an open source content management system that can be used as the basis for many kinds of websites. Plone strong points are its flexible and adaptable workflow, very good security, extensibility, high usability and flexibility. Sound interesting? If so, you're in luck. I'll be reviewing 2 new Plone books in the near future and you have the opportunity to purchase Plone books at a discount.

The first new book is "Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook", which promises 70 Plone recipes, and can be found here:


The book offers a sample chapter, it reads cleanly and clearly.


The second book is "Plone 3 Multimedia", which tells how to build a media-rich website with images, audio, video, and Flash.
The book is found here and a sample chapter is here.

In addition to the special pricing (discounts of 20% on print books and 30% on e-books) my friends at Packt tell me they'll be offering a chance at a 'lucky draw' iTunes or Amazon gift card to early purchasers of these books. I'm not privvy to exact details of that part of the promotion, so watch the web site for that one.

The special offer is detailed here.

I look forward to providing reviews on this blog in the near future. 'Till then,

Happy Reading!