Quick start guide to Plone Development

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Note: This is the print view with all the tutorial pages on one page. The paginated version is available here, if you prefer that.

This tutorial is aimed at programmers who are interested in helping build websites for the new evangelisation using plone.

Plone development basics

This page covers a set of links that will help bring you up to speed with our development.

If you are interested in helping develop with cathnet, you should be aware that we are open to all ideas. While we focus on plone at the moment we are also interested in XML and RDF. We hope to help the communication between catholic developers and so we all don't have to reinvent the wheel, but can leverage off each other's efforts. Plone allows us to do that. Already within our team this synergetic effect is very powerful. We make each other's efforts easier.

Obviously the plone site is the primary source of information.

What isn't as obvioius is the online book, The Definite Guide to Plone which is excellent. Also on this website is a guide to plone developing.which has many interesting comments.

I use Wing IDE to develop my products. If you publish your code using an open source licence, you can use a free version of Wing. Wing communicates well with zope/plone and has a complete robust debugger.

Code Repositories

introduces the major code repositories and groups

The plone site has plone available for download. There are several ways to set up plone running on your machine.

1) Go to the plone site and use the correct installer. The latest one is available here: http://plone.org/products/plone (sometimes after a new release the complete installer has not been loaded up yet. so try a previous release, eg http://plone.org/products/plone/releases/2.5.1 or list all releases http://plone.org/products/plone/releases. The advantage of doing this is it will also install the necessary python libraries.

2) OR, download the necessary zope version and install plone and the necessary python libraries.

3) OR, on linux use a software installer.

Once you have plone running, you will need to install the products the site uses. Most products are now available on svn, but some are still in cvs. Here is a description of the major repositories.

Plone's own repositories