How to have both Plone and ZMI open at same time

The way I work on Plone websites 99% of the time is to have a tabbed browser, like Firefox 2 or Internet Explorer 7, open and use it to view the two views of the website. One tab will be open to the Plone front-end of my site, while the other tab is open to the ZMI back-end.

As we go through the examples step-by-step, you will soon see how useful this combination can be to the webmaster.

Another tip that will save you time is an additional method of logging into the ZMI. We just saw how you can get into the ZMI from your Plone site, if you are logged into it as the site administrator. You can bypass this by entering in the URL of your site, followed by a /manage . For example:

http://www.myplonesite.com/manage

This will bring you to a log in form, so enter your site administrator userid and password, and you should end up in the ZMI.

If you look in the upper right hand corner of the ZMI, you will notice "logged in as" message, confirming your userid. I have circled it in red on the following screen-shot:

Also, to the right of that is a menu button that says "Zope Quick Start". If you click the drop down arrow on that menu, you will see how to log out of the ZMI (always know how to log into and out of any software you are using).

Here is one more trick that I use all the time. When we logged into the Plone site as the administrator we saw that there were green editing tabs and other visual cues, like the personal bar menu, that are not normally visible for other site visitors. So to see what others will see you should really look at the site NOT logged in. When doing lots of small changes or trial and error test with the way things look, constantly logging out and logging back in can be tiresome. The trick is to use two different types of browsers at the same time. I will keep Firefox open with one tab on the Plone frontend but logged in as administrator and the second tab on the ZMI. I will also have Internet Explorer open to the site but not logged in as anyone. This is possible because the two browsers use different ways of storing cookies and temporary files, so you can be logged into one and not logged in to the other.