Professional Plone 4 Development [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Martin Aspeli's Professional Plone 4 Development is the most-anticipated Plone book since Martin's earlier Professional Plone 3 Development. For Plone developers, it pretty much goes without saying that Martin is an outstanding technical writer, and that his documentation of Plone's development environment is definitive.

What got my attention about PP4D was that the contrast between it and PP3D is very much like the contrast between Plone 4 and Plone 3.

Plone 4 does more than Plone 3, and Martin's book is bigger and has new chapters and sections to cover the new features. But Plone 4 is also sleeker and faster than 3. Its parts fit together better, and it's more approachable to new users and integrators.

Martin shows us that the same is true for Plone 4 development. Both the Plone 4 development environment and the PP4D book make more sense than their Plone 3 counterparts. The parts fit together better. Plone 3 development required that you know, and practice, both new (Zope 3 style) and old (Archetypes) development paradigms. You had to know how to use Python packages and Zope products, skins and browser views. And, I think the Plone development community (and Martin) were not really sure how these fit together and when it was best to use which.

PP4D is much more confident. Dexterity (content-type development framework) and Diazo (theming system) are much better ways to develop, and Martin is able to explain them clearly without having to burden the reader with some many layers of history. PP4D, like its predecessor, is still a book for experienced, versatile programmers, but it doesn't need to make as many apologies to its audience.

Professional Plone 4 Development is thus a better book than its predecessor in part because Plone 4.x is a better development platform. Martin's community leadership is -- of course -- a large part of the reason for this advance. But, the improvements are also due to the great work of the many folks on the core development and framework teams.

So, Martin should take a big bow. But Hanno Schlichting, David Glick, Laurence Rowe, Eric Steele, Denys Mishunov, Rob Gietma, Alex Limi and many others should be proudly joining that curtain call. Bravo.

Yesterday I reviewed a book on vtiger, vtiger CRM Beginner's Guide, which is a beginner's guide to installing and administering that package. The current book by Aspeli is a big contrast, and not because its topic is running a CMS. Aspeli writes for a developer or administrator already well versed in Plone. The text is not about using a nice easy GUI to do straightforward administration or customising tasks. Instead, it focuses on hard core programming issues. There are relatively few screen captures of a cute GUI, as an empirical indicator of this.

Informally, the book is a sequel to Aspeli's text on Plone 3 - Professional Plone Development: Building robust, content-centric web applications with Plone 3, an open source Content Management System., which came out in 2007. The 4 intervening years have meant that Plone 4 has significant enhancements over Plone 3, and if you are still using the latter, consider at least perusing this book to see how you might improve the customising of your website. Likewise, Aspeli co-authored a recent [2009] book on Plone 3, Practical Plone 3: A Beginner's Guide to Building Powerful Websites. If you founds its advice germane and useful, this could be another inducement to read about the latest Plone.

The book has several parts, roughly in order of increasing difficulty. The simplest is part 1, the first 3 chapters, which is an overview and explains the installation steps. Let me just say candidly that if you can't get through this part, then barring an error in the downloaded code, you shouldn't be reading this book at all, because not only can't you get to the rest of the book, but even if you could, it will likely be over your head.

Part 2, chapters 4 to 8, explains how to use themes in Plone. A lot of Plone administrators will only need this part. There are many ways to alter the look and feel of Plone and of many of its other runtime characteristics. Changing the skins is the quickest way to present a unique look to your website. Separate from user interface visuals, the other main idea in these chapters is understanding the different roles in Plone. Each role is a job, like member, manager and reviewer. The table on page 109 summarises these well. Plone's developers have tried to factor out as many parameters as possible, and have these alterable by you, often via a Plone-provided window for simplicity.

Part 3, chapters 9 to 15, is much harder. This is where you go to code new functionality, that is outside the default scope of part 2. The current book might be seen as an extension of Zope, where the latter is a successful web application server that is also open source. There are many references to Zope features in the narrative and in the code snippets. Chapter 9 is devoted to the key concepts of Zope. As a practical matter, it would greatly aid you to be already facile in Zope, so that chapter 9 is merely review. And perhaps consider getting an accompanying text on Zope, like this one - Web Component Development with Zope 3. It transpires that to write new code, you need to understand the enclosing framework of Zope, because you might [actually probably will] have to step outside the current Plone 4 environment, since that is what you may want to modify.

Part 4, which is the rest of the book, chapters 16 to 18, is easier than part 3. Here you tackle server deployment issues. No actual programming is likely needed. This section is mostly for the Plone administrator or the system administrator of your computers and network.

I grabbed this book gratefully, because any guidance on using Plone, Zope, Dexterity, etc... is very helpful.

The book does explain the concepts pretty decently. Unfortunately, I still find that because the products change so rapidly and there are so many little magic details on different versions and variants of sub-products, the book is not as helpful as, say, a good book on a programming language will be.

What Plone needs is a book/DVD set that includes a Linux Plone implementation on which each chapter's examples HAVE run, WILL run, and WILL CONTINUE to run no matter what changes in "on-the-web" Plone. That would be a starting point from which a subscription-style book-web-thing could continue. Maybe the author of this book could consider turning the next edition into something like that, because he's a good tech writer.