Mastering Plone Development

Mastering Plone Development is intended as a training to learn proven practices of Plone development. It's both an online course and a sketch for an on-site training.

The story of a conference platform provides a training of several development topics that can be split into two trainings:

• A beginner training (2 to 3 days) covering the essentials of Plone development.

• An advanced training (3 to 5 days) with additional advanced topics concerning the Plone backend.

Note

Mastering Plone Development focuses on Plone backend architecture and topics of Volto development as long as the backend is involved.

We do not deal with pure Volto topics here. For Volto development see training Effective Volto.

We expect you to work with the Plone frontend called Volto. Therefore we do not deal with Plone Blicca (Classic) topics here. For Plone Blicca see training Plone 6 Classic UI Theming, training Mastering Plone 5 development and documentation Classic UI

Mastering Plone Development

• 1. About Mastering Plone Development
  • 1.1. The beginning and the continuation
  • 1.2. Upcoming trainings
  • 1.3. Watch the training video
  • 1.4. Trainers
  • 1.5. Optional topics without documentation
  • 1.6. Topics covered in other trainings and documentation
  • 1.7. License
  • 1.8. Using the documentation for a training
  • 1.9. Contributing
• 2. Introduction
  • 2.1. Who are you?
  • 2.2. Classroom
  • 2.3. Documentation
  • 2.4. Learn
  • 2.5. Further Reading
• 3. The case study
  • 3.1. Background
  • 3.2. Requirements
  • 3.3. Changing requirements
  • 3.4. Tasks
• 4. What is Plone?
  • 4.1. Core concepts
    • Traversal
    • Schema-driven content
    • Component Architecture
  • 4.2. Architecture
    • Python
    • Database (ZODB)
    • Zope
    • Plone content management system
    • REST API
    • Volto frontend
    • Blicca frontend
• 5. Installation
  • 5.1. Prerequisites
  • 5.2. The project structure
  • 5.3. Install the project
  • 5.4. Start the backend
  • 5.5. Start the frontend
  • 5.6. Log in
  • 5.7. Change ports
  • 5.8. Configure a mail server
• 6. Features of Plone
  • 6.1. Start Plone
  • 6.2. Walk through the user interface
  • 6.3. The site structure
  • 6.4. Default content types
    • Page
    • News Item
    • Event
    • Other available content types
    • Editing content
  • 6.5. Folderish content
  • 6.6. History
  • 6.7. Users and groups
    • Excursion
    • Exercise
    • Groups and users
  • 6.8. Workflows
    • Placeful workflows
  • 6.9. Publishing date and expiration date
  • 6.10. Sharing
  • 6.11. URL management
  • 6.12. Content rules
    • Exercise
  • 6.13. Working copy
• 7. Configure Plone "through the web"
  • 7.1. Site Setup
    • General
    • Content
    • Users
    • Security
    • Advanced
    • Add-ons
  • 7.2. Zope Management Interface (ZMI)
  • 7.3. Summary
• 8. Extend Plone with add-on packages
  • 8.1. How to find appropriate add-ons
  • 8.2. Example: the form block add-on
  • 8.3. Install the backend add-on
  • 8.4. Install the frontend add-on
  • 8.5. Summary
• 9. Extend and customize Plone
  • 9.1. Extension packages
  • 9.2. Component Architecture
  • 9.3. Configure Zope Components with ZCML
  • 9.4. Generic Setup
• 10. Content types I
  • 10.1. What is a content type?
  • 10.2. The makings of a Plone content type
  • 10.3. Schemas, Fields and Values
  • 10.4. Behaviors
  • 10.5. Modify an existing content type schema
  • 10.6. Create a content type through the web
  • 10.7. Exercises
    • Exercise 1
  • 10.8. Further reading
• 11. Development tools
  • 11.1. Integrated development environment (IDE)
  • 11.2. Browser development tools
  • 11.3. Postman
  • 11.4. Tips
• 12. Content types II: Talk
  • 12.1. The type registration
  • 12.2. The FTI
  • 12.3. The schema
  • 12.4. The instance class
  • 12.5. Try the new type
  • 12.6. Summary
• 13. Content types reference
  • 13.1. Fields included in Plone
  • 13.2. How fields look like
  • 13.3. mixedfield (datagrid field)
    • Backend
    • Frontend
  • 13.4. Widgets
    • Determine frontend widget
  • 13.5. Directives
  • 13.6. Validation and default values
• 14. Customize Volto components
  • 14.1. Component shadowing
    • Example: Customize the footer
  • 14.2. Customize the News Item view
  • 14.3. Summary
• 15. Add a custom view
  • 15.1. Creating and registering a new view component
  • 15.2. Enhance the view
  • 15.3. Summary
• 16. Behaviors
  • 16.1. Why behaviors?
  • 16.2. Names and Theory
  • 16.3. Practical example
  • 16.4. Enable the behavior on our talk
  • 16.5. Add an index
  • 16.6. Add a metadata column
  • 16.7. Exercise
• 17. Create a dynamic front page listing
  • 17.1. Query criteria
  • 17.2. Add an index to the query criteria
  • 17.3. Add a listing block to show the featured content
• 18. Programming Plone
  • 18.1. plone.api
  • 18.2. Portal tools
  • 18.3. Debugging
  • 18.4. Exercise 1
  • 18.5. Exercise 2
  • 18.6. Exercise 3
• 19. Add event dates to talks
  • 19.1. Add date fields
  • 19.2. Display the dates
  • 19.3. Hide fields from certain users
    • Exercise
  • 19.4. Summary
• 20. Registry, control panels, and vocabularies
  • 20.1. Introduction
  • 20.2. The registry
  • 20.3. Registry records
  • 20.4. Access and modify records in the registry
  • 20.5. Custom registry records
  • 20.6. Add a custom control panel
  • 20.7. Vocabularies
  • 20.8. Use vocabularies in a schema
  • 20.9. Adjust frontend according schema changes
  • 20.10. Summary
• 21. Custom search
  • 21.1. Exercise
• 22. Testing
  • 22.1. Test the rendering of a component
  • 22.2. Run an end-to-end acceptance test
• 23. Content types III: Sponsor
  • 23.1. The Python schema
  • 23.2. The Factory Type Information (FTI)
  • 23.3. Summary
• 24. Upgrade steps
  • 24.1. Add upgrade steps
  • 24.2. Run upgrade steps
  • 24.3. Summary
• 25. Search block variation
  • 25.1. Add catalog indexes
  • 25.2. Add collection criteria
  • 25.3. Add upgrade step
  • 25.4. Create a search block for talks
  • 25.5. Create and register a new block variation
• 26. Search for additional fields
• 27. The Sponsors component
  • 27.1. Slots
  • 27.2. The Sponsors component
  • 27.3. Fetch the sponsors data
    • Search options
  • 27.4. Use the fetched data
  • 27.5. Render the sponsor data
  • 27.6. Exercise
  • 27.7. Summary
• 28. Create a custom block
  • 28.1. The block schema
  • 28.2. Block view
• 29. Workflow, roles and permissions
  • 29.1. Self-registration
  • 29.2. Constrain types to be addable
  • 29.3. Grant local roles
  • 29.4. A custom workflow for talks
  • 29.5. Move the changes to the file system
    • Export the workflow
    • Grant local roles and constrain types to be addable
  • 29.6. Exercise
• 30. Relations
  • 30.1. Use relation fields in a schema
  • 30.2. The widget
  • 30.3. Access and display related items
  • 30.4. Inspect relations
  • 30.5. Programming with relations
  • 30.6. Exercise 1
  • 30.7. Exercise 2
• 31. Create an add-on [The voting story]
  • 31.5. The add-on concept
  • 31.6. Create the add-on
  • 31.7. Install the development add-on in the project
• 32. Next steps
  • 31.1. Complex behaviors [voting story]
    • Schema design
    • Add the behavior
    • Enable the behavior
  • 31.2. REST API endpoints [voting story]
    • Implement the service
    • Register the service
    • Test the service
  • 31.3. Volto actions and component state [voting story]
    • Request votes from the REST API
    • Actions, reducers and the Redux store
    • Include the new component in the talk view
    • Write votes to the REST API
    • Component state
  • 31.4. Permissions [voting story]
    • Add custom permissions
    • Check permissions
    • Configure the rolemap
• 33. Deploy in production
  • 33.1. Release the add-on
  • 33.2. Deploy using containers
• 34. Appendix
  • 34.1. The code for the training
    • Get the code for a particular chapter
    • Move from chapter to chapter
    • Tags
  • 34.2. Trainer: Preparation
    • Technical set up to do before a training
    • Update the example code

Please note that this document is not complete without the spoken word of a trainer.

We attempt to include the most important parts of what we teach in the training. But reading it here can not be considered equal to attending a training.