Chris Hughes, Spring Hill College Webmaster

Plone is a big hairy monster. Well, at least it is for those of us who work on the backend, writing the code and working with the database. For end-users, such as content authors and site editors, it is a breeze, as long as you get your head around a few simple, but perhaps alien, concepts. This tutorial will walk you through a few of these concepts so you will not be intimidated when you work in the system for the first time.

This tutorial is not meant as a step-by-step tutorial on using the Plone system, it is conceptual and broad in nature but every bit as important (perhaps more important) as the little details involved with using Plone on a day to day basis.

Put on your thinking caps and let’s get started…

First things first

If you got this far, I assume you know that Plone is the Content Management System that runs the new Spring Hill College Web site. If not, I’ll go into just a little bit of detail on what that means.

A Content Management System is a software system for managing content. (Duh.) What that means for you is that someone else (the people who write the Plone software, and your local web developer) is doing all of the hard work so you can focus on writing and managing your content. A CMS handles all of the heavy-lifting involved with publishing content to the web; all you have to do is type in your content and publish it (more on that later.)

Through the web (TTW) editing

When you begin to edit your content in the Plone CMS, you won’t need to install any special software; it’s all built in to the Web site. This is what “through the web” editing means. You go to the Web page you want to edit, you log in, you make your changes, and you are done! Ain’t technology grand! Okay, it’s not quite that simple, but everything you need to do, you do through the web.

Versioning

This section and the next one will likely be the trickiest parts of the whole process if you are not already familiar with the concepts, but relax, it’s much less complicated than it sounds. Versioning simply means that there can be more than one version of a Web page at any given time. For example, you can have a version of the page that is live and visible to the public, and you have another version that you are working on in private that no one else can see.

In our case, it means that when you want to work on a page in your Web site, you do not edit the page directly. You create a new version of the page, leaving the existing page intact for the world to see while you make your changes to a new page. When you have finished with your changes, you publish the new page in place of the old one.

Remember, this is a conceptual discussion, and the system takes care of most of this for you. But knowing what is going on in the background will help you remember how to use the system properly.

Let’s look in on John who is diligently checking the content of the Academics pages in the SHC website, which he is responsible for.

As John carefully checks all of the existing content in the site, he notices that, inexplicably, the Spring Hill College core requires 30 courses in Philosophy. John loves philosophy nearly as much as Mel Brandon, but he can’t believe that 3/4 of our student workload is dedicated to Philosophy. He calls Dr. Sims, and sure enough, someone has inadvertently added a trailing ‘0′ to the number of courses.

John quickly logs into the site and looks for the [edit] button, but the button is not there! What is a responsible web content editor to do?!?! John flashes back to the webmaster droning on and on about ‘content editing’ and ‘workflow’ and ‘versioning’ and so on. Boring!

Wait, that’s it! (John was actually awake during the part about versioning!) He awakes from his nightmarish flashback and selects “create a new version” from the “state:” dropdown menu above the content page.

A new version of the page is created behind the scenes, and John then clicks the [edit] button which has kindly decided to show it’s face.

John removes the offending ‘0′ and saves his changes to the page. He goes again to the “state:” dropdown menu; this time selecting the “submit for publishing” entry.

Once the page goes through the publishing workflow (hold on, that’s coming), the newly created (and edited) page replaces the old page, and students the world over breath a sigh of relief.

The publishing workflow

What the heck is this “state:” dropdown you keep talking about?

At the top of the editing screen in Plone, in a smallish green menu bar, there is a dropdown menu titled “state:” (Refer to the screenshot above.) Here is what it’s there for…

Every document in the system goes through a publishing workflow. That just means that there are a set of steps that must occur, in order, before a document is published live on the web for the world to see. As the document progresses through this series of steps, it moves into various states that determine who can view the document, and what must happen before it can progress to other states. Think about how you might seek approval for a departmental newsletter and you’ll get an idea how this might work…

You would probably start with a rough draft of the newsletter. There, “rough draft” is a state of the newsletter. Once the newsletter is viewed by your superiors and tweaked beyond all recognition, it ends up as a final draft, ready for printing. So, “final” is another state of the newsletter, and you could probably consider “printed” a state as well.

Make sense? The process is remarkably similar on the web.

Let’s step through a typical web workflow (in plain English) to see how that might work.

John has just saved the world from utter doom by correcting the glaring “core philosophy” error listed above. But what the heck happens after he selects that “submit for publishing” option?

1. state: Pending Initial Review - The page John just edited is submitted to the Web Content Manager (WCM) for initial approval. If the changes are minor, the WCM goes ahead and makes the document”live” on the web, where it replaces the previous version of the document. If the changes are relatively large, he sends the page on to step 2.
2. state: Pending Content Review - When the page is in this state, the Chief Editor (CE) must review the page for accuracy and quality of content. The CE can either send the page back to John for further edits, or send it along to step 3.
3. state: Pending Style Review - From here, the Editor (E) checks the page for correct style, spelling, and punctuation, editing as necessary. The E then pushes the page to step 4.
4. state: Pending Technical Review - The WCM sees the page again, this time looking for ways to clean up the HTML and visual style of the page. And then the WCM makes the page…
5. state: Published - Here is John’s page, in all its glory, ready for the world to see. When a page is published, it replaces the old version of the page, and becomes the default view for the page in question.
6. state: Archived - This is what happens to the old version of the page when it is replaced in step 5.

Yes, that sounds like a lot of trouble to get rid of a ‘0,’ but this process allows users to edit content and still have all publicly available content checked for accuracy and timeliness.

Don’t worry if you don’t quite follow everything that goes on in this process. Reread the parts you didn’t follow the first time through, and feel free to ask questions in the comments section below. I’ll try my best to clear things up.

Always keep in mind, this is all conceptual. We will get to the nuts and bolts of actually doing things in other articles. But for now, it is enough to know that there are such things as versioning and workflow and they are not the evil creatures they seem to be. They are benevolent and helpful and I love them as my own children.

That’s a wrap

I’ll stop for now, while some of you are still awake. Yes this stuff can be boring to the Luddites among us, but it can help streamline the way we work and send our messages to the world.

There will be more articles like this in the future, but I’ll try to space them out to keep this blog from being dry as toast.

More info

plone.org

You can find a lot more information on Plone and how to use it on the Plone website at http://plone.org. Check the Documentation tab.

learnplone.org

LearnPlone.org is a website dedicated to non-technical users of Plone, who need to know how to update and manage their website. If you are brand new to Plone, and just need to know how to login and start making updates, the Quick Start Tutorial is the best place to look first. You’ll learn the basics of logging in, updating a webpage, inserting images, and simple site management.

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You can see my other tutorials by visiting the “Instructional” category of this blog.

Chris Hughes - My Site