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Plone 3 Intranets Design, build, and deploy a reliable, full-featured, and secure Plone-based enterprise intranet easily from scratch Víctor Fernández de Alba BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI Plone 3 Intranets Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either expressed or implied. Neither the author, nor Packt Publishing, and its dealers and distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all of the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: August 2010 Production Reference: 1220710 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 978-1-847199-08-9 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by Faiz Fattohi ([email protected]) Credits Author Editorial Team Leader Víctor Fernández de Alba Mithun Sehgal Reviewers Project Team Leader Ramon Navarro Bosch Priya Mukherji Enzo Cesanelli Leonardo J. Caballero G. Project Coordinator Prasad Rai Matthew Wilkes Proofreader Acquisition Editor Cathy Cumberlidge Rashmi Phadnis Graphics Development Editor Geetanjali Sawant Ved Prakash Jha Production Coordinator Technical Editors Arvindkumar Gupta Madhumita Singh Arani Roy Cover Work Conrad Sardinha Arvindkumar Gupta Indexer Rekha Nair About the Author Víctor Fernández de Alba has been an IT architect at UPCnet, the Barcelona Tech University (UPC) IT company since 2001. He has been leading the design and technical architecture of more than 100 projects undertaken by the UPCnet Plone Team since its inception in 2004. He has been teaching Plone to non-technical end users at the university for some time now. This allowed him to use this close experience with users for improved usability of web projects developed by its team. He also writes manuals about Plone targeted to end users. The flagship project of UPCnet Plone Team is Genweb UPC. This project allows a fully featured, customized, and end-user ready intranets and public websites to be deployed in few short steps. It has helped to launch more than 200 Plone-powered sites at the university, including departmental web and intranets, university services, faculties, and other entities. In December 2009, the UPCnet Plone Team finished one of its most ambitious projects, and the main website of the Barcelona Tech University became a reality. It was developed focusing on scalability, high performance, and usability, using Plone. Acknowledgement I would like to thank my wife, Agata. This book wouldn't have been possible without her stubbornness, motivation, endless support, and unconditional love. I want to specially thank my beloved mother, father, and brothers who have encouraged me throughout the years to better myself. I am who I am, thanks to them. I would like to thank Javier Otero who has been a guiding light in my professional life, point of reference, endless source of knowledge, and above all, a friend. Thanks to Ramon Navarro who showed me the path to the Plone core and shared with me his dark magic. Thanks to both of them, who helped me review the book. Finally, I want to remember those people at UPCnet who introduced Plone to me, and gave me the chance to work with it. This is a precious gift from the people who have, in one way or another, contributed to make this book a reality: the Plone community, the UPC Plone team, Vilabobo's team, the Packt Publishing team, specially to Rashmi, Ved, Prasad, and Madhumita, and my official book reviewers. Thanks a lot. About the Reviewers Ramon Navarro Bosch has been a computer science engineer since 2002 and is currently pursuing his PhD in Low Power embedded software. He has worked in the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC) as System Administrator and Software Analyst from 1998 to 2006. During this period of time he has been involved in Samba, OLSR networks, C#-Mono, OpenWRT, Debian, LDAP, and Plone. He wrote a book about Mono development in C# using GTK for the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. After working for a period of eighteen months for a Plone company called Headnet in Aarhus (Denmark), he returned to Spain with good knowledge and community contacts to start a Plone business. During the last three years he has been involved in some community projects (multilingual, bug solving, and local talks) and worked on some big projects for the UPC, such as the main page and the nearly 300 Plones infrastructure. He is also a teacher of software development at the UPC (using Python). I thank my family for the support and for buying an Amstrad CPC when I was 10 years old. Enzo Cesanelli has over nine years of experience in designing and testing web solutions. His humanist education, along with endless passion for new technologies, led him to focus on information architecture and user experience design. Along his path, Enzo met Plone, which quickly became his engine of choice for most of his developed projects, namely, corporate websites, intranets, and web applications. A digital nomad, Enzo has just moved to London to broaden his personal and professional horizons, and to find new projects for Noiza, his communication agency based in Trieste, Italy. T.S.U. Esp. Leonardo J. Caballero G. is a native from Maracaibo, Venezuela. He is a graduate of the "Academia de Software Libre" of Fundacite Mérida as "Especialista en Desarrollo en Software Libre" and also a graduate of the Colegio Universitario "Dr. Rafael Belloso Chacín" as "Técnico Superior Universitario en Informática". Currently he is a member of the CENDITEL Foundation community, where he serves as a Developer of Free Technology. He is an advisor to the Venezuelan government agencies regarding issues of community collaboration and free software development. He has experience in using Free Software since 2002. He has participated as a collaborator in the Internationalization process and Spanish localization in many Open Source and Free Software projects. He is an active contributor in Venezuelan projects, such as CANAIMA GNU/Linux, SAID, and others. Since 2006 he has been in charge of testing tools that facilitate the process of structuring and publishing content. He also contributes to the continuous improvement of source code in several third-party products of Plone CMS, OpenCore Software (used in the CoActivate.org website), and recently Django. He is a collaborator to PloneGov communities such as CommunesPlone (Belgiun) and Open eGov (USA). He is a founding member of the Venezuelan Plone community. He has recently reviewed a book for Packt Publishing: Plone Intranet. I want to thank God, all saints Ifa/Orisha, my family, Syra Lacruz, and Francisco Palm for their help and patience. I also want to thank CENDITEL foundation for learning and working with Plone, the members of all the communities including, "Pythonistas de Venezuela", "Plone Venezuela", "Plone ConoSur", and Plone for their comments, advice and patience. Matthew Wilkes has been working with Plone since 2005, originally at Team Rubber, and as a freelance consultant under the name "Circular Triangle". During that time he was involved in every aspect of intranet site creation, from the initial planning stages to optimizing deployed sites to improve performance. He is also an active Plone community foundation member, serving the Plone 4 Framework Team and foundation membership committee, as well as performing documentation reviews and assisting the management of Plone.org itself. Per a tu Àgata, la meva nena bonica.