The easy way to get into the ZMI from Plone

Once you are logged into Plone as the site administrator, you are only a few clicks away from the ZMI or Zope Management Interface we discussed earlier.

Look at the blue personal bar again, and click the preferences hyper-link. The following screen appears:

I have marked in red the hyper-link to the ZMI, here written out as Zope Management Interface. Because you are already logged into Plone as the site administrator, if you click this link you will open up the ZMI without having to log into it.

Once again, the ZMI screen will look something like the above screenshot.

Notice that the ZMI screen appeared at the expense of the normal Plone front-end of your site. Rest assured that your site still exists, and anyone else in the world looking at your website will in only see the Plone view.

To get back to your website, you could hit the browser's back arrow. Also from the ZMI, you could always get back to your normal site by manually changing the address URL in the browser to the site address.

Another thing to note is the web address in the URL box of your browser. When you are looking at the Plone front-end of your website, the URL is something like "http://www.testsite.com" if you have set up an Internet hosted site with a domain name, or the URL was "http://localhost" if it is a site running on your own local PC.

When you got into the ZMI back-end of your site, notice the URL is now something like "http://www.testsite.com/manage_main" if you were going to your Internet hosted site, or the URL was "http://localhost/manage_main" if you are running Plone on your local PC.

But there is another way to have both the Plone and ZMI up at the same time...