Configuring and Customizing Plone "Through The Web"#

Todo

  • Update for Plone 6!

  • Add Volto screenshots for control panels

The Control Panel#

The most important parts of Plone can be configured in the control panel.

  • Click on the portrait/username in the toolbar

  • Click Site Setup

Site Setup

Site Setup#

We'll explain every page and mention some of the actions you can perform here.

Note

Not all control panels are available in Volto. Some are not useful in Volto, e.g. TinyMCE since that editor is not used here. Other control panels, e.g. Content Rules still need to be implemented.

General#

  1. Add-ons

  2. Database

  3. Date and Time

  4. Language

  5. Mail

  6. Navigation

  7. Search

  8. Site

  9. Social Media

  10. Undo

  11. URL Management

  12. Volto Settings

The following control panels are so far only available in the backend:

  1. Actions

  2. Discussion

  3. Syndication

  4. Theming

  5. TinyMCE

Content#

  1. Content Types

  2. Editing

  3. Image Handling

  4. Markup

  5. Moderate Comments

The following control panels are so far only available in the backend:

  1. Content Settings

Users#

  1. Editing users

Security#

  1. Security

The following control panels are so far only available in the backend:

  1. Errors

  2. HTML Filtering

Advanced#

The following control panels are so far only available in the backend:

  1. Caching

  2. Configuration Registry

  3. Maintenance

  4. Management Interface

  5. Resource Registries

Below the links you will find information on your Plone, Zope and Python Versions and an indicator as to whether you're running in production or development mode.

Portlets#

Note

Portlets only exist in the classic frontend. Volto has no equivalent so far. The discussion about this is ongoing :)

In the toolbar under the Portlets section, you can open the configuration for the different places where you can have portlets.

  • UI fit for smart content editors

  • Various types

  • Portlet configuration is inherited

  • Managing

  • Ordering/weighting

  • The future: may be replaced by tiles

  • @@manage-portlets

Example:

  • Go to http://localhost:8080/Plone/@@manage-portlets

  • Add a static portlet "Sponsors" on the right side.

  • Remove the news portlet and add a new one on the left side.

  • Go to the training folder: http://localhost:8080/Plone/training and click Manage portlets

  • Add a static portlet. "Featured training: Become a Plone-Rockstar at Mastering Plone!"

  • Use the toolbar to configure the portlets of the footer:

    • Hide the portlets "Footer" and "Colophon".

    • Add a Static text portlet and enter "Copyright 2019 by Plone Community".

    • Use Insert ‣ Special Character to add a real © sign.

    • You could turn that into a link to a copyright page later.

Viewlets#

Note

Viewlets only exist in the classic frontend. In Volto they are replaced by react components and have no user-interface to move or show/hide them. How to customize these elements in Volto is discussed in next chapter Customizing Volto Components.

Portlets save data, Viewlets usually don't. Viewlets are often used for UI-Elements and have no nice UI to customize them.

  • @@manage-viewlets

  • Viewlets have no nice UI

  • Not aimed at content editors

  • Not locally addable, no configurable inheritance.

  • Usually global (depends on code)

  • Will be replaced by tiles?

  • The code is much simpler (we'll create one tomorrow).

  • Live in viewlet managers, can be nested (by adding a viewlet that contains a viewlet manager).

  • TTW reordering only within the same viewlet manager.

  • The code decides when it is shown and what it shows.

ZMI (Zope Management Interface)#

Go to http://localhost:8080/Plone/manage

Zope is the foundation of Plone. Here you can access the inner workings of Zope and Plone alike.

Note

Here you can easily break your site so you should know what you are doing!

We only cover three parts of customization in the ZMI now. Later on when we added our own code we'll come back to the ZMI and will look for it.

At some point you'll have to learn what all those objects are about. But not today.

Actions (portal_actions)#

  • Actions are mostly links. But really flexible links.

  • Actions are configurable TTW (Through-The-Web) and through code.

  • These actions are usually iterated over in viewlets and displayed.

Examples:

  • Links in the Footer (site_actions)

  • Actions Dropdown (object_buttons)

Actions have properties like:

  • description

  • url

  • i18n-domain

  • condition

  • permissions

site_actions#

These are the links at the bottom of the page:

  • Site Map

  • Accessibility

  • Contact

  • Site Setup

We want a new link to legal information, called "Imprint".

  • Go to site_actions (we know that because we checked in @@manage-viewlets)

  • Add a CMF Action imprint

  • Set URL to string:${portal_url}/imprint

  • Leave condition empty

  • Set permission to View

  • Save

explain

  • Check if the link is on the page

  • Create new Document "Imprint" and publish

See also

https://5.docs.plone.org/develop/plone/functionality/actions.html

portal_view_customizations#

Note

This feature has no effect for Volto since it allows customzing server-side rendered templates. How to customize the equivalent views in Volto is discussed in next chapter Customizing Volto Components.

Further tools in the ZMI#

There are many more notable items in the ZMI. We'll visit some of them later.

  • acl_users

  • error_log

  • portal_setup

  • portal_workflow

  • portal_catalog

Summary#

You can configure and customize a lot in Plone through the web. The most important options are accessible in the Plone control panel but some are hidden away in the ZMI. The amount and presentation of information may be overwhelming and the differences between the Volto frontend and the Classic Plone frontend adds even more complexity. Don't worry, you'll get the hang of it through practice.