Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

All of the activities described in this chapter take place within the installed Plone site, not the management interface. In other words, you are limited to utilizing the tools that are part of the Plone application itself ”forms, tabs, links, and so forth. This includes helpful error messages when mistakes are made. For example, if you forget to complete a required field in a form, Plone returns an error message describing how to fix your error and continue with your desired action. Similarly, if you attempt to perform an action that is disallowed , such as attempting to undo an action that cannot be undone, Plone simply tells you that it can't be done ”it doesn't halt your program and send it spinning out of control.

Summary

In this chapter, you learned a great deal about how members work with content in their member areas and make it available to other members . You learned about the interaction between the administrator and the general user as it applies to content publication. At this point, you should have a good grasp of the basic elements of a Plone site, and you should be ready to add more elements to it, to enhance the user experience and make the site do more things. In the next chapter, you'll learn where to find the best Plone add-ons, and you'll get specific instructions for adding some of the most popular elements, such as Zwiki, into your Plone site.

Chapter 4. Additional Plone Elements

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using the CMF Collective

• Working with CMFBoard

• Working with CMFMessage and CMFUserTrackTool

• Working with CMFPhoto and CMFPhotoAlbum

• Working with SimpleBlog

• Working with Wikis

• Troubleshooting

In the previous chapter, you navigated through the default Plone installation and became familiar with all of the content types that can be used and the actions that a user can perform. This chapter shows you how to take advantage of the freely available add-on products created by Zope and Plone developers around the world. For the majority of this chapter, you will be using the Plone manager account because a greater level of permissions is required to add elements to your Plone installation. However, the functionality of these elements is demonstrated for the member user as well.

Using the CMF Collective

The CMF Collective is a collection of freely available open -source products created by developers for use with the Zope CMF and, thus, Plone. These items range from packages of skins to installation utilities, to full-fledged shopping carts, photo albums, and messaging applications ”and that's really naming just a few. You can access the CMF Collective at http:// sourceforge .net/projects/ collective. A list of elements in the CMF Collective is maintained as part of the Plone documentation at http://plone.org/documentation/howto/ProjectsInCollective.

Note

Not all CMF- related open-source software is found in the CMF Collective. Zwiki, a product that is discussed later in this chapter, is found at its developer's website. This is not uncommon: Thousands of developers worldwide have products just as useful as those in the CMF Collective but want to house them internally instead of within the CMF Collective framework.