Plone Management Interface
In this section, we have a look at the manager's configuration area for a Plone site as a whole.
We've already encounted the Plone setup area while administering users and groups. It provides an interface for the global configuration of Plone and Plone add-on products to users with the Manager role.
As a framework, Plone will seldom be used as-is. Even out of the box, it comes with some add-on products that aren't installed into a Plone site by default. As there may be many Plone sites within a single Zope instance, Plone product installations are local to a Plone object. In this, they differ from Zope products that are global.
After installing the Epoz product, this is what you'll see:
We've already encountered the error log while doing DTML. This merely integrates the error log with the Plone interface. The option to Copy exceptions to the event log is an important one: it causes all errors to go to the log file defined in the etc/zope.conf file of your Zope instance, which is very useful if you need to search past errors.
Collects a rather miscellaneous selection of global settings. They are self-explanatory for the most part. Default Language refers to the Dublin Core Language metadata property of content. The External Editor is the interface to an editor of choice on your client. It's very convenient while developing, but may require some thought when deploying, as it has to be configured on the client's PC. When an Office suite has been configured as external editor and Plone is used to collaborate on Office documents, it can provide a very rich and seamless working environment, but there are alternatives that can be considered (such as mounting the Plone site as a WebDAV server, and browsing that from the Office suite).
The portal_skins tool has evolved from a mechanism to allow alternative templates to be provided to change the look and feel of a site, to an intricate tool enabling finegrained customisation of many aspects of Plone's functionality. As such, it no longer addresses looks primarily, and the only alternate skin currently provided with Plone replaces the table-based main_template with one that does all the layout using CSS. It's unlikely that you'll want users to change skins, especially if you customise Plone.
