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Plone Guide
Guidance for Plone Reviewers and Webmasters
The idea of Plone is to make it easy to add content without having much technical knowledge. I learnt to use Plone through trial and error but made some mistakes in the process, no harm came but it did waste some effort. Plone is a powerful tool and to get the most from Plone it is useful to know about several features this will be of use to those using Plone to add content. I hope to add to this document and maybe improve the clarity over time. If you have any suggestions or questions do let me know.
Structure of the Site
The structure of a site should be logical and easy to follow but try to avoid having too many levels or subsites. As a general the higher up a page it is the better, although this is more difficult in multi country sites like Sri Chinmoy Centre.
This is bad:
/the_poetseers/sri_chinmoy/library/poems_of_sri_chinmoy/poems_happiness/be_happy/
This is better:
/sri_chinmoy/selected_poems/be_happy/
Add Page
This used to be add document in old Plone versions. Documents are versatile and the main body of a Plone website. After saving your changes to a document you will need to Publish the document or submit it for publication depending on userstatus
Short Names.
This is what show up in the address at the top of the browser e.g.
http//www.poetseers.org/the_poetseers/hafiz/ the short name or short url is thus: /the_poetseers/hafiz/
These are standardised as lowercase. Also instead of spaces use _ e.g sri_chinmoy would be the short name for a folder or page “Sri Chinmoy”
Index_html Pages
These are very useful for improving the layout and design of Plone sites.
If you view a folder without an index_html page Plone shows a list of items in the folder. This is not necessary because it is also in the navigation bar on the left.
To create an index_html page you give a document the short name = index_html.
The title can be anything you want.
You should be able to choose the short name for a document above the title. If not let me know and I can change settings. (You can also change names by clicking on contents of the folder and then highlight the document and then press rename)
Index_html pages are important because these pages will be viewed the most.
If you look at
www.poetseers.org/the_great_poets/ the page you see is an index_html page. It is mainly a menu for interesting things in the site and is mainly composed of internal links (many of them are to different folders in the site) e.g. /the_romantics/william_wordsworth/
Internal Links
These are useful for:
· site navigation. It means you don’t have to worry about having everything in the correct folder. You can link to objects in other folders which are relevant
· Increasing PR of a page. For example it is good to have links to a page like /sri_chinmoy/
· Showing visitors your best pages
Internal links can be added by pressing
i) Ctrl K and then adding the internal link (it is useful to have 2 browsers open to copy and paste the correct url)
ii) Using Kupu - internal link button (looks like a chain) but Plone 2.1.1 has a bug at the moment.
Internal links should always be added like this
/the_poetseers/sri_chinmoy/
or
/uk/sri_chinmoy/music_of_sri_chinmoy/
(Note: Unfortunately Plone and Kupu has a bug adding a link from /the_great_poets/ it can give /the_great_poets/the_poetseers/sri_chinmoy/ - This is not correct it should always be /the_poetseers/sri_chinmoy/
also never add internal links like:
the_poetseers/sri_chinmoy/ this causes duplicate URLs.
Creator of the Pages.
One featur of Plone is that at the top of the page it says who created the page. It is ok if you wrote the page but if it is a poem by someone one else you might like to change the creator e.g.rather than saying “The Absolute” by R.Pettinger you can change this to by Sri Chinmoy.
You can change this be clicking properties in the Edit box (next to ) and changing creator to Sri Chinmoy or whatever.
You can also change an entire folder in one go by using vschangecreator. You need to have manager privileges. It is very straight forward but you can ask me for further info if you are interested in using it.
Properties
In the properties function you can also give a document a property and so link related pages together. For example if you look at
www.writespirit.net/authors/sri_aurobindo. on the right portlet you see all the pages which have been given the properties of Sri Aurobindo, this makes it easy to navigate.
Smart Folders
These allow you to list pages with related properties.
E.g : Poems on Happiness
Images
Images are very useful for improving the look of a site, it is always good to try to break up large amounts of text. You can add an image from your hard drive to the relevant folder or add it an image library (there’s no need to publish image library’s) Kupu makes adding images easy.
It is good practice to reduce the size of the image using something like photoshop 30k is usually a good size 100k takes along time to load
Functions within Kupu
You can experiment with the buttons in the Kupu editor. For example if you have a long list you can make them all bullet points or numbers. Centring text is also beneficial.
Other Useful things for Websites
1. Getting External Links from other sites. This is very helpful for the website. It boosts its page rank. However Google is clever, it rates the quality of links. Getting a link in the middle of text from a good quality website with high PR is the most use.
The link should be generally from related sites Sri Chinmoy Poetry wants links from other poetry sites. A link from Bob’s Bingo is not much use.
Links should be natural it is not good to get 100 at once. Google thinks you’ve cheated. It should be a gradual process of e.g 1 a week or 1 a month.
Add unique content on a regular basis. Especially home page
2. Pages benefit from having relevant external links. E.g. A page about the music of Sri Chinmoy would benefit from having links to RadioSriChinmoy.org, Sri Chinmoy Library/music pages; Appleitunes/sri_chinmoy e.t.c. It is best to link to established sites with high PR. Linking to sites with PR = 0 is not good.
- R.Pettinger 29/12/2005
