Looking at the Plone Site for the First Time

Note that the name you gave your Plone website (Plone) appears in the left hand directory listing window of the ZMI, and the main part of the ZMI screen is the back-end representation of your actual site. We will get into more detail on some of the functions of the ZMI for your site in later customization lessons. For now, just remember this important point. If you ever mess up some skin file or advanced programming inteh future, and you can't see your website the normal way in the browser anymore - you can always get into it thru the ZMI. The ZMI skin is not affected by what you do, so it is more failsafe.

So let's look at the Plone site the "normal" way a visitor would see it.

In a new browser window or a new tab in a browser, type in the same URL we did before, but end it with a /Plone , which could be whatever name you gave your Plone site. If you have more than one Plone site, they each can be reach this way. So in this example, type in:

www.mydomain.com/Plone

The following should appear:

Notice the blue personal bar, with the pawn shaped icon. Next to that should be your userid, showing that you are actually logged into the site. This is because you are still logged into the ZMI. When you are logged in to the Plone front-end like this, you always have the personal bar and the content area in the center should have green tabs and menus. This means you have editing rights here.

We will go over all this in detail inthe customizing lesson later on.

You should note that the www.mydomain.com/Plone is not convenient for your users to remember, so there is one more step we can do to get the domain name to go straight to the root of your Plone site and not to the root of the Zope.

Go back to the ZMI screen in yoru browser. You should see the folllowing:

Click on the Root Folder in the upper left hand corner of the ZMI.

Scroll down the main part of the ZMI's screen, and at the bottom should be something called virtual_hosting. Click this.