Welcome to Plone Fast Track! This book serves as a guide for working with Plone 2.0, from installation (or upgrading) to ongoing administration and customization. You'll learn about the underlying reasons for using a content-management system (CMS) through examples and practical application. You'll also learn how to work with the core feature set of Plone, and you'll see examples of third-party add-ons, including how to install and integrate them within your Plone site. Additionally, a basic Python primer is included at the end of the book, if you want to get your feet wet with the language used to extend Plone even further by writing modules and implementing custom code.

Plone, an open source technology for Web and content publishing that is built on the powerful and free Zope Application server. Plone requires minimal effort to set up, flexible, and allows for the facilitation of content creation, publication and retrieval of content on large and complex Web sites. It does this through built-in tools and through a customizable and highly usable interface. To use Plone you don't need to learn anything about Zope, but a small amount of knowledge of Zope is helpful. Nasa uses Plone for their WITS project and Plone also powers their extremely popular "Mars Rover" Web site.

Author Julie Meloni, employs Plone on a daily basis in her work. In Plone Web Development, Julie writes a practical application-oriented guide to building content-intensive Web sites and portals with the Zope-based Plone package.