Changing the properties of a Plone Site

Plone control panel

The Plone control panel, which can be accessed via the site setup link, is a useful aggregation of configuration options, which makes it a suitable starting point when we want to make customizations. Since the goal of the control panel is to provide an administrative interface, only administrators (users with the manager role) are able to see it.

• Add/Remove Products

• This is the Plone front-end for the Zope portal_quickinstaller tool which we'll encounter later. It allows the administrator to install or uninstall third party applications for Zope and Plone more commonly referred to as products.

  A Plone or CMF product has to be made available for Zope by placing it in the Products directory in the file system. Once this has been done and the Zope server restarted, the product will appear in the Products available for install section.

  If the product's directory in the Products folder has a README.txt file, it will be visible through the Plone interface via the Product description link.

  The installed products also have an Install log link that gives useful install information such as the product's skin folder (useful when we start customizing templates in portal_skins), the portal objects installed by the product (to be found in the Plone root of the ZMI) and a transcript of the install operations.

  Sometimes products will not be installed successfully. They will stay in the uninstalled column and will be visibly marked to indicate that they could not be installed. These products will also have an Install log that can be used for troubleshooting.

• Error log

• The error log is a useful troubleshooting tool and should be the first place to investigate when an error is encountered on the site. Errors are caused by exceptions (also known in computer science circles as interrupts) which are raised when something unexpected or unrecognisable happens.

  The error log keeps a log of the last 20 exceptions that have been raised in the site. Of importance here, is the Ignored exception types field, which contains three values. Exceptions, like content, have certain types that indicate what type of error occurred. By default Plone does not log 3 types of exceptions since they will happen frequently with normal use of the site and do not neccessarily indicate that there is anything wrong with the site. It is however sometimes necessary to see the error information supplied by these exceptions. If this is the case, simply remove the exception from the textbox and it will be shown in the error log.

  • Unauthorized

  • This exception is raised when a user tries to access a piece of content for which he or she does not have the necessary permissions. Remove this exception from the textbox if you are debugging permission problems.

  • NotFound

  • This exception occures when the user tried to access a piece of content that doesn't exist. This is the infamous 404 HTTP standard response code. Remove this exception from the textbox if you would like to see what invalid content URLs your users try to access.

  • Redirect

  • This error raises a HTTP redirect operation to redirect the browser to a different URL.

• Mail Settings

• This configlet allows you to set the SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) server settings that the Plone site will use to allow it to send email. The most common usage for email with Plone is sending new users their login details.

  The default values assume that the email server is on the same machine as the Plone server and should be fine for those cases. The only value that might usually be set is the SMTP server name for cases where the server resides on a different machine. Mail servers are rarely set on a different port thatn 25.

• Navigation Settings

• This configlet allows us to configure how navigation is constructed in the site. Mostly it is used to configure the portal tabs in the global_nav row and the links in the navigation portlet. The form itself is pretty self-explanatory, so І won't be expanding on it any further.

• Placeful Workflow

• Local content type to workflow mapping

  Here you can configure your workflow policies. A workflow policy is a mapping of content types to workflows. By default the content in Plone uses a workflow policy called Global workflow. We can change the workflow policy for a specific object by clicking on the state content action and then selecting the policy option.

  This will then mean that the current object and, if so configured, all it's subobjects will assigned to them the workflows as outlined in the custom workflow policy as opposed to the default policy.

  Global content type to workflow mapping

  In this section you can configure theGlobal workflow mapping. A mapping made here, will apply to all instances of the type in the workflow, unless that instance has a local workflow policy.

• Portal Settings

• The portal settings configlet gathers a number of fundamental configuration settings for the portal into one place. Please study the portal settings confliglet for more information the form itself is pretty self-explanatory except perhaps for the Enable External Editor Feature setting which is tied to the external editor functionality of Plone that allows you to edit templates and scripts in a text editor reÑ•iding on your desktop instead of through the ZMI.

• Search Settings

• The search settings configlet allows you to set which content types are searchable through Plone. You can also disable the LiveSearch feature which prefetches results for your typeÑ• search before you clicked the search button but which requireÑ• javascript for your browser.

• Skins

• Plone uses a skin system for customizing its theme and interface. This configlet allows you to select a different skin. By default in a Plone 2.5 site, you can only choose between the standad or tableless skins. In Plone 3 there is now a new skin available called NuPlone while the tableless skin has been removed due to a lack of maintainers. The goal of the tableless skin was to remove all HTML table elements from the skin.

  The Make skin cookie persist indefinitely setting is an advanced option. Set this option if your Plone site is configured to authenticate users using persistent cookies without requiring them to log in.

• Smart Folder Settings

• Smart folder indexes

  This form configures which indeces will be displayed in the criteria form on Smart folders and how they will be displayed.

  Smart folder metadata

  This form configures which metadata will be available for Smart Folder views. Please not that a specific piece of metadata will only be shown if it is selected on the edit form of a smart folder and the Display as table option on is set.

• Users and Groups administration

• This is Plone's functionality for adding and managing users and groups. It is more user friendly version of the acl_users tool in the ZMI.

  Users

  The Users form allows us to search for users on the site to which we can then assign new roles, reset their passwords or remove them altogether. We can also use this form to add new users.

  Groups

  The Groups form is similar to the Users form in the sense that it allows the same functionality but in relation to groups.

• Zope Management Interface (ZMI)

• This link takes us to the ZMI. We'll delve into the ZMI in the next section.

• Add-on product configuration

• Third party products can also add their own configlets. They will appear under the Add-on Product Configuration header. On a vanilla Plone site, you will see the Kupu configlet.