Hello, I am Jamie Robe, author of the Plone CMS Lessons
These free lessons are my way of saying thank you to the Plone community, especially to people who are just starting out using CMS to build Internet or Intranet websites. Pick your starting point below, based on your particular interests; however, I suggest doing the first lesson, as installing and running an experimental Plone website on your own PC is the best way to learn in my opinion (it's how I got started and I still install Plone and test things first on my PC even today).
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Lesson 1 - Installing Plone on Your Own PC in Minutes: Learn how to install Plone on your local PC for testing and Intranet development. Includes modifications to a Windows installation to allow multiple sites. |
Using Plone's Windows installer is easy, but the default installation deviates from a "normal" install, introducing simplifications that can restrict how you create and use your sites. This lesson holds you hand through the easy parts, as well as the simple but non-obvious fixes to allow you to host multiple websites on your PC. This opens up the ability to host a real Intranet site on a PC, as well as provides you with experience with setups identical to those on a hosting service. |
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Lesson 2 - How To Get Your Website On The Internet Using A Plone Hosting Service: Learn how to get your Plone website on-line quickly and cheaply, with steps on how to purchase and configure your domain name, as well as steps on locating and using Plone hosting on the Internet. |
Covers all the steps in detail, so that you end up with a fully functional website accessible from any Internet computer in the world. Such a Plone hosting solution could power a company's Intranet, an Internet marketing site, a government website, non-profit community site, or any other type. |
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Lesson 3 - Create a Custom Design for your Plone Website: Learn to Customize the default Plone website design (light pastel blue with Plone logo, etc) into a unique, professional looking website. |
Plone has a powerful, but somewhat cryptic skin system (for the beginner), and this takes you through the development of a site from "cradle-to-grave", so that you see every step. If you have completed one of the two earlier lessons, you can follow this lesson to take your Plone site from the all to familiar default design to a different looking site. In addition to the steps on creating and customizing the skin, other non-skin steps are included to help with site layout and functions important to the site design process. You can take what you learn here and build upon it to come up with your own truly unique website. |
