Managing Plone

Editing content

To illustrate the editing of a Plone object, we'll edit the welcome page.

Short name

The short name is also called the id of a Plone object and will become part of that object's url. This field is by default not visible, which means Plone will automatically set the short name. The option to set the short name manually can be set on the portal properties form in the Plone control panel. The default view of any folder is index_html.

Title

The title is a required field and appears throughout the site such as in the portlets and in the search interface. The title also appears as the content view on the object's view and in the browser's title bar.

Description

The description is used in listings and searches and is usually a short paragraph that describes the document's contents.

Body Text

The body text field contains the content of the document. By default, this field is edited with an HTML editor called Kupu, although 4rd party editors such as FCKEditor can also be installed and used.

The Kupu toolbar

In the Kupu toolbar, can be seen some icons and buttons that also appear on desktop word processors and that allow you to change the text formatting. The buttons are:

• bold
• italics
• subscript
• superscript
• left align
• center align
• right align
• numbering
• list
• definitionl ist
• increase quote level
• decrease quote level
• insert image
• insert internal link
• insert extenal link
• insert table
• undo
• redo
• edit HTML
• style selection
• toggle fullâ‚‹screen

Formatting

This is used to determine the format of the body content. Usually this will be HTML. Plain text is the text without any formatting, while Structured text allows us to write plain text so that it is formatted similarly to HTML with the advantage that it is easier to read.

Filtering

Aesthetic filtering

Kupu does some aesthetic filtering of the HTML by removing some tags or attributes of elements. By default Kupu will remove the center, span, big, u, strike, font and basefont tags.

This is done to preserve the look and feel of the site. The Kupu configlet in the Plone control panel allows you change which elements and attributes will be filtered.

Security: HTML filtering

Kupu also filters some of the HTML to prevent the malicious insertion of HTMl and javascrÑ–pt. Some HTML elements are removed entirely, specifically the applet, embed, object and script elements.

In other cases, the content of the HTML element is kept, while the tag itself is removed. For example the strike and iframe tags.

Editing the metadata

As explained earlier, metadata is data about the content itself, such as:

• Who authored it
• When was it created
• When was last modified

The metadata can be changed by clicking on the properties tab.

• Exclude from navigation

• If checked, the object will be excluded from the navigation portlet.

• Keywords

• Keywords are analogous to the ubiquitous tags found on the world wide web. Tags can be added to aid users in finding this object.

• Contributors
• Creators
• Language

• Doesn't do anything but marks the content for multilingual sites for use with LinguaPlone.

• Copyrights
• Effective / Expiration Dates
• • The effective and expiration dates determine when the content should be publicly via navigation and search results (useful for future and/or time-limited content, like a marketing campain, sale items etc).
  • However, if the user knows the URL, they can navigate to it and see the content.
  • The content will be marked as "expired" when viewed after the expiration date.
  • 
    
• Allow discussion

• This option can be checked to allow users to add comments. This option can also be set for the content type by using the portal_types tool in the ZMI. It will then be inherited by all instances of that type.

  This option only allows discussion on this specific content. To have a more general bulletin board-style forum, we can install a third party product called Ploneboard.