Plone is widely used for creating feature-rich and secure enterprise intranets. Each company has different goals, architecture, hierarchy, and size and requires a very different intranet to manage its business. No matter what size, or what purpose, Plone offers solutions to the most common intranet needs, and more.

If you've never built an intranet before, you don't even have programming skills, or you don't have any experience with CMSs, this practical guide targeted at people with no previous experience with Plone is the most suitable book for you. Starting from scratch, it will show you how to design and build a feature-rich, secure corporate intranet easily, by optimizing the features of Plone. It will guide you from the initial setup through Plone basics, security, and workflow-related topics, ending with the most common deployment techniques. It will help you learn how to use content types effectively for your intranet. You will learn how to manage the life cycle of your documents and content in general using workflows. It will teach you how to manage security and access to your content granularly. You will learn to manage local users, and get to know about the mechanisms that Plone makes available to the users to manage their data.

This step-by-step book will also show you how to choose the right add-on products for your site, and how to enhance your intranet by using them efficiently. At the end, you will learn how to deploy your intranet and make your site live for your users.

Build your own Plone-based intranet easily and successfully by focusing on effective usage of content type, security, content life cycle, and suitable Plone add-ons

What you will learn from this book

• Get to grips with installing Plone and all its dependencies
• Easily set up your Plone site and optimize it to work as an intranet
• Manage users and groups, and use local and global roles to manage content access
• Create and modify Plone workflows and learn how to use them
• Explore the most common security use cases in an intranet and learn how to deal with them in Plone
• Make effective use of content type and some of the out-of-the-box Plone features to work for your intranet
• Enhance your intranet with useful add-on products, like corporate blogs, message boards, document preview helpers, and so on
• Give a fresh, standing-out look to your intranet with attractive themes
• Deploy your intranet and make your site live

Approach

This is a step-by-step guide, from installing your first Plone instance to deploying your intranet. Each chapter will show you an essential aspect that your intranet should have. However, each chapter is isolated enough to serve as a reference manual for later use. The book is packed with examples and useful screenshots for easy learning.

Who this book is written for

This book is for anyone who needs to build an intranet with no limits on capabilities or features. Even if you don't have previous CMS experience or programming skills, this book is for you. Targeted at beginners with no previous experience with Plone, this book will teach you step by step and at the end you should have a full-featured, reliable, and secure intranet.