Plone User Guide 20241201_18:30

Introduction

Plone is a fully featured web content management system for creating public websites and intranets. It lets you create and organize pages, folders, files, news items, events, almost any type of information you can imagine.

Noteworthy feature of Plone include:

• collaborative editing: support for having multiple editors creating, editing, and managing a website simultaneously

• workflow: content items, when created, are initially in a private state and are not visible to the public, and can be advanced to other states, such as "review" and "published"

• content rules: sets of triggers and actions that can be performed automatically on content items

In this user guide, we will show how to use Plone to create, edit, and manage content.

For Attendees of the Plone Conference Training

If you're reading this because you attended the Plone Conference training for Content Editors, thank you for coming to our class, and we hope you will have come away with practical techniques and ideas!

If you have any feedback or suggestions, please contact us at:

• Paul Roeland

• Kim Nguyen

Here are additional resources for this class:

• Documentation and training materials

  • This user guide: https://plone.org/userguide

  • Older "Working with Content" documentation https://5.docs.plone.org/working-with-content/index.html

  • Plone Training home https://training.plone.org/

  • Plone 6 documentation https://6-dev-docs.plone.org/

• Demo sites

  • Plone 6 Volto demo site https://demo.plone.org/

    • Volto 18.1.0

    • Plone 6.1.0b1

    • plone.restapi 9.8.3

  • https://volto.kitconcept.dev 

    • Volto 18.0.0-alpha.28

    • Plone 6.0.10

    • plone.restapi 9.5.0

    • kitconcept.volto add-on version:   3.0.0a9.dev0 https://github.com/kitconcept/kitconcept.volto

• Volto blocks examples https://volto.kitconcept.dev/block

• Awesome Volto, the ecosystem of add-ons https://github.com/collective/awesome-volto

• Plone 6 Classic demo site https://classic.demo.plone.org/

A Tour of Plone

Let's take a look at what you see on a typical Plone page.

Logging In and Out of Plone

Unless you are logged into a Plone site, all you can do is read and search for content.

To create, edit, or manage content, you must first log in.

From Content Creation to Publication

In this section, we introduce how to create and save a content item (a News Item in this case), edit it, and use workflow to publish it.

At this point, our News Item is in the "private" workflow state.

Items in the private state are visible only to and editable only by their creator and site administrators. Website visitors (the public, or anyone not logged in) cannot see private items.

Now we show how to publish an item. Items in the "published" state are visible to everyone, including the public, but continue to be editable only by their creator and site administrators.

Pages

Pages are the most common content type in most Plone sites.

Like every other type of content item, a page includes:

• a title

• a summary, or description

• a body

The body of a page is composed of blocks, such as:

• headings

• text

• images

• listings

There are many other types of blocks, and we will cover them further below.

Here we show how to create a new page.

Use Pages to Organize Content

Pages can contain other items, and can be nested to any depth.

Here we show how to create a page that will contain Event content items, and how to create an Event content item.

Create an Event

Add a File

You can add any type of file to your Plone site. Files can be any "binary file", including PDFs, text files, videos, and Word documents.

You could follow this method to add an image, but rather than add an image as a file, you should add an image as an image! (see Add an Image below).

Add a Link

You use a Link when you would like a page on your site to redirect a visitor to a web address external to your site.

A Link acts as bookmark on your site for something that is elsewhere on the Internet.

We show how to add a Link.

Add an Image

Here we show how to add an image. Most image formats are supported, including GIF, JPEG, and PNG.

When you add an image to Plone, several sizes of thumbnails are generated automatically for you, and the display of images includes their thumbnails. This makes them easier to use than if you had added an image as a file.

Add an Image Block to a Page

You can add an image to a page by adding an image block.

This is different from adding an image content item, which is an item on its own.

When you add an image block to a page, you can place the image block on the page anywhere you want, including wrapping text around it or placing the image block to the left or right of text.

Add a Video Block

You can add an embedded video block to a page.

Deleting a Block

This shows how to delete any block.

Search

Plone has built-in search that returns results matching text found in titles, summaries, page bodies, and keywords.

Here we show how search works for looking up text that appears on a page.

An Editor's Power Tool: the Contents View

We have shown how to create, edit, and publish items one by one.

For editors who want to manage larger numbers of content items, the Contents view allows them to select one or more items to perform actions on. Those actions include:

• copying, cutting, and pasting

• deleting

• renaming

• assigning or removing keywords

Here we look at how to use the Contents View.

This shows how to use the Contents view to delete items.

Moving Content Automatically to a Particular Folder Using Content Rules

We show how to use a content rule to move content items automatically to a particular folder on your site. This helps keep the site content well organized.

Your Personal Profile and Settings

We saw earlier how to use the personal menu to log out of Plone, but the personal menu lets you do more:

• set a profile image

• set your full name, email address, home page, location, and short bio

• set your language preference

Site Setup and Configuration

Plone configuration is done through control panels available in Site Setup.

Access Site Setup

Here we show how to access Site Setup and how control panels are grouped.

Use the Add-ons Control Panel

You use the Add-ons control panel to see the details of which add-ons are installed on your site and which ones are available to be installed.

Use the Database Control Panel

The Database control panel displays information about the database and cache used by your site.

Use the Date and Time Control Panel

The Date and Time control panels lets you change timezones and day of the week settings.