Plone

A CMS is a specialzed web application designed to help you organize, maintain and present content in a way that is accessible and user-friendly.

Plone is an Open Source CMS (Content Management System). Open Source means it's source code is freely available to inspect and modify. It also happens to be licensed under the GNU GPL which means there is no charge for the software or its use. More information can be found on the Plone website at www.plone.org.  A CMS is a specialized web application designed to help you organize, maintain and present content in a way that is accessible and user-friendly. It has many tools and features out-of-the-box and many, many more contributed by users and developers. The content objects described below can be thought of as a starter kit for building and maintaining your site.

News Items

News Items have a header, description and body. They may also have an associated photo.

Events

Events have start and stop times, location, contact, phone and URL When you add Events, the date will be highlighted in the Calendar.

Pages

Pages have title, description and body. They are used to add content at a particular location in the site. This document is a page. The body supports all the features of the Kupu editor (see below).

Files

Files are uploaded from your local machine and made available for download by users.

Images

Images may be uploaded for use inside the body of a News Item or Page. For your users sake keep them reasonable. Use a maximum of 800 pixels high by 800 pixels wide for your photos.  After you've uploaded the image, when you add it to your Page or News Item, the image can be downsized. When the user clicks on it, they'll get the full size.

Folders

Folders are created to help organize content in the same way they do on your local machine. Folders are automatically added to the navigation when you create them. The 'properties' tab will allow you to mark them as 'excluded from navigation' if you wish.

Smart Folders

A smart folder is a pre-defined search for content items on your site. The News and Events folders are Smart Folders. You can design your own to look for content by date or using tags or keywords like 'soccer.'

iCal and vCal for Events

Events support vCal (Outlook) and iCal (Mac). On an Event page, click on link to add to your personal calendar.

RSS Feeds

RSS feeds are enabled for News and Events. Newer versions of popular browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari) support RSS feeds.  There are also many RSS Reader programs available for both PC and Mac. Some good ones, like Juice, are free. Other SMA feeds may be added at a later time. Podcasting is being explored.

Kupu Text Editor

Perhaps the simplest way to create content is using the Kupu editor. It has many of the features found in simple word processors.  To achieve a consistent style and format for the website, Kupu will not allow all of the things you can do with HTML tags, but it will serve for most documents.

Kupu will handle much of your daily content creation needs. (This is a Pull-quote)

• Useful Headings and Styles
• Bold
• Italic

• Discreet style
  

• Call-out style
  

• Literal style (monospaced font; like a typewriter)
  0 1 2 3 4 
  5 6 7 8 9 
  

• Bulleted Lists (like this one!)
  
• Numbered Lists

1. Like this one
2. Like this two
3. Like this three
   

• Internal Hyperlinks (within the site)
• External HyperLinks (off site)
• Images. See home page.
  
• Simple tables
  

Portlets

Portlets are the little boxes on the left and right hand side. Right now, they need to be custom-made, but in the next release of Plone (March 2007), we'll be able to build pages with portlets too.

Discussion

Content items may be marked for discussion which will allow people to provide feedback. I suggest we look at this in the future, as it introduces a number of thorny issues.