Links for the book, A User's Guide to Plone 4

Helpful URLs mentioned in the User's Guide to Plone. By Robert Nagle

(See also: how to buy a digital or print version of A User's Guide to Plone 4).

Links Referred to in the Book

  • Video talk, Workflows & Wisdom (download 190mb  .mov file). Presented by Joel Burton at Plone Symposium 2010 East.  Burton regularly does Plone Bootcamp training for many groups.
    Highly recommended.
  • Videos about Plone 4 from Plone Symposium 2010 East, especially Preview of Plone 4 by Eric Steele (download 238mb .mov file). Many of the video presentations are geared towards developers, but the case studies give good examples of what kinds of things can be done with Plone.
  • The Plone Conference 2010 Bristol will be held at the end of October 2010. If the past is any indication, I would bet that several of these talks will be available as online videos.
  • How to Embed Flickr, Youtube or MySpace content in Plone.  By Sam Knox. This talks about some ways a Plone Administrator can embed multimedia in Plone.
  • S5: A Simple Standards Based Slideshow System. By CSS Guru Eric Meyer.  This explains the technology upon which "presentation mode" in Plone is based.
  • Full RSS in Plone 3. A tutorial about how to enable full RSS feeds. This is just one method.
  • Using Webdav with Plone. A brief introduction to Webdav technology and how it can be used with Plone.
  • Uploading Multiple files into Plone with Enfold Desktop. Here's a tutorial I wrote in 2008 about this free Windows-based tool.  I understand that there are some compatibility problems with Windows 7.
  • 10 Useful Usability Findings and Guidelines. Smashing Magazine. There is honest disagreement about some of these points, but this article is a good place to start.
  • Scope attribute in tables. This was  something I only learned while writing the User  Guide for Plone 4 book.
  • Notetab Lite free text editor for Windows. There are dozens of perfectly good text editors for Windows. I like this one especially because you can remove carriage returns with the Join function.

List of online Plone 4 Web Resources.

  • Plone 4 User Manual on Plone.org is a manual written and maintained by the great Plone documentation team. In many respects it covers much of the same ground as the User Guide for Plone 4. It is more comprehensive than User Guide for Plone 4 and has more screenshots (one of the constraints of making a print book!) . This reference table about TinyMCE toolbar icons is particularly helpful. On the other hand, my book covers in more depth those  topics  likely to be "pain points" for content creators.
  • Plone.org has an excellent documentation section, but there are some challenges in finding what you need. First, some of the documentation is out-of-date and some of it is not really intended for end users or content creators. 
  • The Plone forum is a helpful place to get help with basic questions even though most of the people reading the forum are developers.
  • Plone Planet is a blog that rounds up Plone-related postings by various developers. A lot of stuff is not relevant to content creators, but occasionally you will find links to tutorials and web demos and announcements about new Plone add-ons.

Other  links: