Mapping the Virtual Host

The following screen should appear, which is mostly informational:

In the upper right, click the Mappings tab.

The following input form appears:

There will be no preset mappings, so go in and type the following in the main area:

www.mydomain.com /Plone

(Note the space before the / is optional). What this tells the Zope application server is that anything coming in with the domain name www.mydomain.com should be directed to and served by the Plone site name Plone .

You can add many mappings here, for all the Plone sites you run and all yoru domain names. You can map subdomains (like poodle.mydogs.com) to go to a different Plone site (like Poodle) - this would look like:

poodle.mydogs.com /poodle

Or you can map multiple domain names to a single Plone website, usefull when trying to store domain names or getting variations to go to one site, such as:

www.mydogs.com/Plone

www.mypups.com/Plone

In our example, we should hit the Save Changes button. Then we can open a new browser window or new tab and type in:

www.mydomain.com

and the following Plone site should appear (not the ZMI):

Note that the URL does not show any /Plone after the domain name. Congratulations, you now have a site on the Internet!

From now on, to get back into the ZMI, type in the URL admin.mydomain.com.

Remember, if you really want to accomplish the above steps, visit a Plone hosting company like WebFaction (click here to see their Shared package 3), which I use.

You should note that one of the strengths of Plone is that it follows what we call in Computer lingo a "top down" approach. That means that as soon as you install a Plone site, you start out with a fully functional website. It might require lots of modifications and changes to the content and skin, but nevertheless, it is 100% operating.

The rest of this site is dedicated to helping you to learn to customize Plone to be exactly what you need, be it a public community portal, a business website, or a corporate Intranet.

Create a Custom Look

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