Review: Plone Live

Oh in a review of four books, someone has to pull up the end of the line. In this field of 4 this book just doesn't connect with me on certain levels, and I hope that my review may help the authors with constructive feedback to improve future editions. I commend the authors (2) and their editors (2), first of all, for developing the book in the way they have. It appears to be an on-demand published book that they improve with feedback from readers, using a website. However, maybe my issues stem from there being multiple "voices" and threads coming through the book at me, leading me to feel it is less of a book and more of a reference work.

One thing I don't like is that the first 35 pages of the book (paper side, not numbered pages) include: Forward, TOC, About Authors, About Editors, Introduction, and Acknowledgements... seems a bit overkill, almost 10% of about 396 pages.

Then Chapter 1 starts out, in my opinion, with the books weakest section of all, on installation. Two sentences on Plone installation on Linux!!!!! The book then does a good treatment of the basics of what a Plone site and how to do basic customizations (up through Chapter 4).

However, I feel that Chapter 4 ends on a sour note starting on page 137, where they state "...you should always develop serious web sites using file system development". How can that be when so many fantastic Plone sites out there use CSS modifications only, made through the web? Why include all the great powerful tools in Plone, if only for "non-serious" sites? This seems to be somewhat in conflict with an earlier comparison of the two approaches on page 99. Regardless, less commentary and more examples would be more helpful to the intermediate to advanced user developing sites either way.

As a reference, Chapter 10 has the best treatment of using LDAP of any of the books, and this can be extremely critical for those setting up Intranet sites who already have dozens or hundreds of users logging into a network - it really makes managing users, groups, and passwords a snap. Using LDAP also helps make the Intranet easier to use, as they use the same userid and password as the network. Once again, this LDAP chapter is very well done.

Now for just two more negative observations. I don't get the significance of the tables used extensively throughout this book. I think that is what gives this book a real reference book feel, but I think the way it is done breaks up the flow of the chapters too much. I was also mystified as to the benefit of the "Mind Maps" in Appendix A. Maybe I am just a bit slow, but I would have rather had more examples about CSS or saving a skin on the file system.

The book does end with a good index. Overall, Michel Pelletier and Munwar Shariff have produced a volume I recommend that every advanced user have on the shelf, although I can't recommend it for a starter book.

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