Plone Basics

What is the Plone CMS?

• Plone is a web content management system (CMS) that is available to staff as an alternative to doing complex HTML web sites.
• The University has chosen to adopt a CMS because this approach de-emphasises bespoke design and re-focuses web developers on their content. It also lowers the level of web skill/experience needed to create and maintain sites, thus enabling a large majority of users who struggled previously with html sites.
• The University has opted for Plone over other CMS solutions because: a) as an open source product it doesn't tie us to a contract with a single commercial company; b) the costs involved in developing it are significantly less than those of a commercial solution; c) its highly versatile and customisable (we can add our own features and designs) and d) that by using it we become part of a global community collaborating to develop the product further and sharing the fruits of that collaboration.
• We intend for Plone to be the main system by which all web sites are served in the near future.
• Plone’s homepage is currently located at: http://www2.le.ac.uk - this is NOT the same as the current University homepage which is at http://www.le.ac.uk .
• Everyone who has a CFS account has access to the Plone CMS.
• You DON’T need a web account to be able to own a Plone site.
• Department and Corporate Service sites still need to appoint someone to be their official web maintainer with overall responsibility for the main site and any sub sites, in line with the University’s Internet Code of Practice.
• You DO need to be given a folder on Plone before you can create a site. This can be done by the web team or your web maintainer (if your dept/service site already exists within Plone).
• You DON’T need any web page editing software like Dreamweaver or FrontPage to be able to create pages in Plone. All editing is done via your web browser e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox, etc.
• Training courses in Plone will be available from Oct/Nov 2008 – contact Staff Development for details.
• Simple documentation on how to use Plone is available at: http://www2.le.ac.uk/plone-support/documentation but be aware that for the first few weeks after the launch of Plone 3.1 the available documentation will largely refer to the previous version until it can be updated.
• New Plone 3.1 should be available from the 9th September.
• Plone can do more than just simple text and image web pages. It has the following additional built-in features:
• Survey tool
• Email form tool
• Blogs
• Discussion boards
• Wiki tool
• Syndication – meaning that you make your web content easily available to other people as an RSS feed AND you can take in RSS feeds from other sites e.g. you could have the BBC news coming through on a page on your site.
• Accepts Flash and YouTube video content.