Professional Plone Development

I am the author of Professional Plone Development, a book about building web applications with Plone 3.It was published by Packt Publishing in late September 2007.

It is available in dead-tree and PDF e-book format, and can be bought from Packt's website, Amazon and other book stores.

From the blurb on Packt's website (which I wrote):

This book aims to teach best practices of Plone development, focusing on Plone 3.0. It covers setting up a suitable development environment, customizing Plone’s look and feel, creating new content types and forms, connecting to external databases, and managing users and groups intelligently. It also shows how to configure a production-ready server, with LDAP authentication and caching.

• How to set up a suitable development environment
• The importance of automated testing of any code you write
• How to perform Plone customizations in a manageable, re-usable fashion
• Techniques for branding Plone and changing its look and feel
• How to safely install and manage third-party add-on components
• How to create your own content types
• How to create new forms and templates
• Ways of interacting with external relational databases
• Techniques for managing users and custom user metadata
• Using Plone’s new AJAX framework to build dynamic user interfaces
• How to set up Zope and Plone in a production environment
• How to connect to an LDAP/Active Directory repository for authentication
• How to configure a caching proxy to improve Plone's performance

Throughout the chapters, there is an emphasis on demonstrating key concepts with practical examples. The reader should be able to borrow from the examples to get up and running quickly, but refer to the explanations provided to fully appreciate what is going on under the hood.