Document Actions
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FAQs
How-tos
Tutorials
Reference Manuals
Error References
Links
Glossary Definitions
| Thoroughbred Champions |
Quarter Horse Champions |
|---|---|
| Man O' War |
First Down Dash |
| Secretariat |
Dashing Folly |
| Citation |
Special Leader |
| Kelso |
Gold Coast Express |
| Count Fleet |
Easy Jet |
listing:
| Thoroughbred Champions |
Quarter Horse Champions |
|---|---|
| Man O' War |
First Down Dash |
| Secretariat |
Dashing Folly |
| Citation |
Special Leader |
| Kelso |
Gold Coast Express |
| Count Fleet |
Easy Jet |
HTML Editor
The HTML Editor is available to people who want to edit the actual HyperText Markup Language code, which web browsers use to describe web pages and web site. Learning HTML basics lets you do special things, but it isn't necessary for typical use. If you click the HTML icon you'll see a panel with the actual code, which you can edit, and then close the panel to get back to the WYSIWYG view.
Styles
The Styles pull-down menu lets you set the style for a selected block of text. Here are typical choices:
Normal is for normal text. Heading is usually bold, a slightly larger font, left-aligned, and with a single horizontal line extending across the page. Subheading is usually bold, an intermediate size font, and left-aligned. Literal is useful for quotes and for lining up text precisely, as with programming language code. Literal text is monospaced text set off by a box:
programming language code:
class SortAdvectionVelocities ___init__(self, advectionVelocities): this.advectionVelocities = advectionVelocities sortVelocities(): this.advectionVelocities.sort()
or columns of numbers:
location velocity -------- -------- vector a 21.7 vector b 15.4 vector c 48.3 vector d 38.2
You could also use a table for such data.
Zoom
The zoom icon expands the edit panel to take up the full browser window. Click the icon again and it will toggle back to the normal edit panel size.
2.5. Adding Files
Choose file in the add item menu for a folder to upload a file:
You will see the edit file panel:
Click the Browse button to navigate to the file you want to upload from your local computer. Provide a title (you can use the same file name used on your local computer if you want). Provide a description, or select Related Item(s) if you want. When you click the save button the file will be uploaded to the folder.
Watch a video on adding a file.
Example file types include PDF files, Word documents, database files, zip files... -- well, practically anything. Files on a Plone web site are treated as just files and will show up in contents lists for folders, but there won't be any special display of them. They will appear by name in lists and will be available for download if clicked.
There are specialized add-on tools for Plone web sites that search contents of files. If you are interested in this functionality, ask your Plone web site administrator.
2.6. Adding Links
Add a link by clicking the menu choice in the add item menu for a folder:
You will see the edit link panel:
Good titles for links are important, because the titles will show up in lists of links, and because there tend to be quite a number of links held in a folder as a set. Paste the web address in the URL field or type it in. There is no preview feature here, so it is best to paste the web address from a browser window where you are viewing the target for the link.
Links created in this way will result in discrete content items, as compared to links embedded within web pages. Having links as discrete items lets you do things like organizing them in folders or setting keywords on them to facilitate grouping in lists and search results.
2.7. Adding Events
Use the add item menu for a folder to add an event:
From the top, we have the following fields:
- Title - REQUIRED
- Description
- Start date and time - REQUIRED
- End date and time - REQUIRED
- Event location
- Event body text (visual editor panel)
- Attendees
- Event type(s)
- Event URL
- Contact Name
- Contact Email
- Contact Phone
- Related Item(s)
One part of the panel needs a bit more explanation: the event start and end times. The year, month, day, and other fields are simple pull-down menus. But for the day, often you can't remember exactly and you need to consult a calendar. There is a handy pop-up calendar that offers an alternate way to select the day. If you click one of the little calendar icons adjacent to the day pull-down, :
It will not show on the main web site calendar until it has been published. <-- READ THIS!
How to Have Your Events Appear in Portlets and the calendar
As with News items, Events will not appear in the main events listing or the events portlet until they are published. You publish items using the state drop-down menu as shown in the following figure:
Watch a video on adding an event.
2.8. Adding News Items
Use the add item menu for a folder to add a news item:
You will see the edit news item panel:
The standard fields for title, description, and related item(s) are in the panel, along with a visual editor area for body text and image and image caption fields. You can be as creative as you want in the body text area, and you can use the insert image (upload image) function to add as much illustration as needed. The images you upload for the news item will be added to the folder in which you are adding the news item.
The Image and Image Caption fields, proper, are for adding an image to be used as a representative graphic for the news item, for posting in news item listings.
How to Have Your News Items to Appear in Portlets
As with events showing up in the calendar: News items will not appear in the main web site news listing until they are published. You publish items using the state drop-down menu as shown in the following figure:
Watch a video on adding a news item.
2.9. Establishing Relationships
On several of those screen captures illustrating adding content, you may have noticed a Related Items area at the bottom of edit panels. This is where you can pick related items to establish connections between content items. Once items have been related to one another, links will automatically show for related items when an item is viewed. You can't do this for folders, but you can for regular content, such as pages and images.
For example, in a folder containing several photographs, you may wish to relate two of them so that when one is viewed, a link to the other will show. First, click the image (this image is called PhotographOne.jpg) and choose the edit tab. At the bottom will be the simple Related Item(s) input area:
Clicking the browse... button will bring up a search panel to find items you may relate to PhotographOne.jpg:
PhotographOne.jpg is shown greyed out (you can't relate an item to itself), and other images in the current folder are shown. If there were pages or other content items in the folder, they would show too. There is a search box if you would like to find items outside of the current folder. The list of items at the bottom has insert | view choices at far right. In this example, the insert choice is about to be made to select PhotographTwo.jpg, which will be added to the list of items relating to PhotographOne.jpg:
Now, when PhotographOne.jpg is viewed, a link to PhotographTwo.jpg will be shown at the bottom of the display:
This is an easy way to give life to your website, so that content, however nicely organized it may be within folders, will have a dynamic aspect. Use your imagination, but concentrate on making sensible choices for establishing relationships. There are other ways of making connections in Plone, through use of SmartFolders, but the ease of setting related items at the time of content creation, or upon item editing, is a feature that should not be overlooked.
2.10. Setting Basic Properties
The properties tab panel has input fields for basic descriptive information called metadata. Metadata is sometimes called "data about data." The panel contains settings and fields for:
- whether the item shows up in the navigation menu
- keywords you wish to add or set
- a list of contributors for the item
- principle and secondary creators
- effective date
- expiration date
- language setting for the item
- copyrights that may pertain
- and whether discussion is allowed on the item
The properties tab panel:
There is no requirement to specify this information, but it is a good idea to do so when there are several people involved in content creation, especially if there are multiple creators and contributors working in groups. You don't always need fields such as effective and expiration dates, language, and copyrights, but these data should be specified when appropriate. A content management system can only be as good as the data completeness allows. Specifying keywords requires attention, but if you are able to get into the habit, and are thoughtful to create a meaningful set of keywords, there is a return on the investment through searching and other facilities in Plone. You'll be able to put your finger on what you need, and can discover and use relationships within the content.
3. Managing Content
3.1. Editing Content
Of course, when we edit an item of content, the item already exists. Click the edit tab for an item and you will see the data entry panel for the item, along with the existing values of the item's data.
For an example of something really simple, where editing looks the same as adding, we can review how to edit a folder.
The edit panel for a folder simply shows the title and description input areas. Often a description is not provided for a folder, so the only thing to change is the title. If you do wish to give a description, which is a good idea for distinguishing folders in a list, the description can be text only -- there is no opportunity for setting styling of text, such as bold, italics, or other formatting. This keeps the descriptions of Plone content items as simple as possible.
Here is the edit panel for a folder, in this case, one called "Butterflies":
That's it. Change what you want and save, and the content item will be updated in Plone's storage system. You can repeatedly edit content items, just as you can repeatedly edit files on your local computer. By now you have appreciated that Plone stores discrete content items as separate entities, akin to "files" on a local computer, but you really don't have to think about it that way. Plone is a content management system, where the content comes in the form of numerous discrete content items that may be individually edited. Edit away at your heart's content.
For an example of editing a content item that is a bit different than adding in the first place, we can examine editing an image. Editing an Image can be done by navigating to an individual image and clicking the edit tab. Clicking the edit tab for the image, you will see the following edit panel:
Here, an image called Butterfly-small.jpg is being edited. You can change the title and description, as usual, in which case you would usually keep the setting to "Keep existing image." You can also change the image itself by checking the "Replace with new image" choice. Or, clicking the "Delete current image" choice will simply delete the image entirely. The "Related Item(s)" setting at the bottom is the same one always present for Plone content.
So, editing an image is a bit different than adding one in the first place, but not by much.
Editing panels for other content items are straightforward.
3.2. Folder View
For most content items, if you want to change how it looks, you edit the content directly. But folders are a different animal. As containers of other items, folders are "where the action is" in Plone, so we will treat folder management in this and the following section.
Consider a scenario where a butterly enthusiast, John Smith, has logged in to his web site to work on the part devoted to Skipper butterflies. He navigates to the "Skippers" folder by clicking the navigation menu, which is on the left in his default Plone web site design. When he clicks the "Skippers" folder in the navigation menu, the view tab panel, or just "the view," for the folder is shown:
And, here is summary view:
And, tabular view:
And, thumbnail view, which is mainly useful for photographs, but still works for normal content:
Making a photo album is easy. Just add the photographs (images, or image files, the most common being .jpg files) to a folder and set the display view for the folder as thumbnail view. Thumbnail view will automatically handle the display as images are added to the folder, presenting a multi-page division into sets of images, as needed, as the number of images grows. If you are uploading photographic images from a digital camera or scanner, you will most likely want to resize them on your local computer before uploading them, because they are too large. This is described in a later section of this manual.
Setting an Individual Content Item as the View for a Folder
The basic list view functionality described above for folders fits the normal way we think of folders -- as containers of items -- but Plone adds a nice facility to set the view of a folder to be that of any single item contained within the folder. This takes advantage of the way the navigation system gets automatically wired up in a Plone web site as folders are created (As folders are created and published, they automatically show up in the navigation menu). Consider several scenarios where the custom display setting feature for a folder is very useful:
- Let's say you are setting up a hierarchy of web pages, with customized text on the pages and links to other pages. This is a case where you as the web page designer would like to control what the pages look like, how the links to other pages appear, perhaps as links in a table or as icons in a graphic design. For a custom web page that will contain links to "sub web pages," you would add the page to a folder and then set the default display view for the folder to be the contained page. The display menu is one of the basic menus available for a folder (Look at any of the screen capture images above). The basic folder views described above will be overridden, and when the folder is clicked in the navigation menu, the web page with the customized links to "sub web pages" will show. This may seem a bit daunting, but people who have created fairly complicated web page hierarchies and menu systems appreciate this functionality, because of the intimate way folders form the navigation system of Plone web sites. A custom web page for a folder can be an elaborate graphical design, or it can be a simple textual description with instructions to use the navigation menu, as the following video illustrates:
Watch a video about setting the page display view. - For another situation where this functionality is useful, consider a folder as a container of a document that gets updated periodically. There could be twenty versions of the document in the folder, but only one is current. The display of the folder would have been set to show the view of the first version of the document, when it was first created. As new documents were uploaded, the display of the folder was reset each time to show the current document, and the defunct documents were kept around for posterity, but set as private, so they won't appear.
- This dual nature of Plone folders, acting as generic containers or as navigation-wired "nodes" in a hierarchy, allows a kind of put-stuff-where-you-need-it approach. As the site is developed, folders get naturally created as work progresses. Pre-existing files, images, web pages get uploaded or newly created in folders throughout the web site. By "naturally" here, we mean that storage of content just falls out in the normal course of doing the work, just as you would add and organize files on your personal computer without thinking about it too hard. Before you know it, you have a large system of folders in a hierarchy, with some folders containing all sorts of files. Plone web sites get like that too, but this is a good thing -- it is a content management system, after all. An individual folder might contain all sorts of old pages, supporting data files and documents, original graphics files, etc., but if the display view for the folder is set to a single page amongst the crowd, the other documents will not be seen when the web site is surfed. But they will be there next year when you ask, "Now where did I put the original Adobe Illustrator version of that graphic?," and answer "Oh, yes, it is in the folder along with all the other stuff on that project." This way of doing things -- taking advantage of the storage system aspect of Plone -- is very important when several people share web site folder access and work collaboratively, but it happens even for web sites managed by a single person.
These examples illustrate that the flexibility of Plone folders is a central feature in the content management system.
Next, we move to the contents tab to see important functions for managing content.
3.3. Folder Contents
The contents tab for folders is like "File Manager" or "My Computer" system utilities in Windows and Linux desktops and the "Finder" in Mac OS X, with similar functionality.
Clicking the contents tab for a folder, such as the "Skippers" folder below, shows the contents tab panel:
The contents tab panel is immediately recognized by observing the check boxes beside the items in the contents list. Click these check boxes to select multiple items for performing copy, cut, rename, delete, or change state operations.
Plone has a clipboard for copy and cut operations. If you check one or more items, and click cut or copy, a paste button will be added to the row of buttons along the bottom of the panel. If you then click another folder, you'll be able to paste the items there. For a cut operation, the items will remain in the source folder -- they won't disappear -- until they are pasted somewhere.
Renaming items will show a panel for entering a new name for the short name (or id) of the item, as well as the title. The distinction between short name and title is one that becomes apparent only when you rename, because Plone automatically creates the short name from the title in most Plone web sites. But the renaming operation must show you the short name as well as the title, because usually would want to change both, if changing either. Consider the following example:
If you were to change the title to "Long-tailed Skippers," you would also change the short name to "long-tailed-skippers." This keeps things tidy -- it keeps them correct, so that the URL for the item, the web address, is kept up-to-date with the actual content item. Note that the short name should contain no blanks. Use dashes for any blanks in the title, and otherwise make it a carbon copy of the title. Also, use lowercase for the short name. See also the page "What's in a Web Name?" for a description of how Plone handles web addressing and the short name. The following video also includes in illustration of renaming:
Watch a video that includes renaming an item.
The delete operation is straightforward. Click to select one or more items, and then the delete button, and the items will be deleted.
The change state operation offers a great way to change the publication state of a selection of folders, and their subfolders if you select this option. In the following example, the publication state for a folder called "Long-tailed Skippers" is being modified. Checking the "Include Folder Items" will make the state change affect all contained content. Don't forget that you can do this to, say, three folders at a time, and all of their subfolders and contained content, so that in one fell swoop you can quickly publish, unpublish, etc.
In addition to these individual action operations, reordering is a natural mouse-driven manipulation, as described in the next section.
3.4. Reordering Items
Consider the following folder, called "Skippers," for holding information about this type of butterfly. Often, when we add content items, we don't initially get them in the order we want. The desired ordering is not always alphabetical, but in this example we can assume so. Below you see the Skipper butterfly subfolders are not in alphabetical order:
One way to move the top item, "Spread-winged Skippers," to the bottom of the list would be to click the small down arrow icon on the right, and keep working it down to the bottom. This is useful for small changes, but for such a multi-row move, it is better to click the top row and drag it to the bottom and drop it there (a so-called "drag and drop" action). Take care to click in an area of the row to be moved where the cursor is not over any text (click in the open space between the words), and simply drag and drop (hold the mouse button down as you move the item), as the following little animation illustrates:
The item that is being moved turns yellow as it is being moved. When the mouse button is released, the item stays where it was dragged. Click the view tab to see the reordered listing.
3.5. Cutting, Copying and Pasting Items
Cut/Paste
Moving items from one area to another on a website is a common task. Often this need arises with placement of content in the wrong folder. For example, if the author of the following content about Skipper butterflies realizes that a Swallowtail butterfly was mistakenly included -- the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder shown below -- the folder can simply be moved with a cut/paste operation:
Note that the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder has been checked, and that the cut button is about to be clicked. After clicking the cut button, the screen will show a new paste button. The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder and all of its contents are now in the web site's "memory." The Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder does not immediately disappear, however, awaiting the actual paste operation:
The paste button is now active. The next step is to navigate to the destination folder, in this case the Swallowtails folder:
After clicking the Swallowtails folder, the paste button will continue to show, because the paste operation has not yet been completed:
And last, clicking the paste button for the destination folder adds the Eastern Tiger Swallowtail folder to its proper place in the Swallowtails folder, and cuts it from the original location, the Skippers folder, and the cut/paste operation is complete.
Copy/Paste
A copy/paste operation is identical to the cut/paste operation, except that there is no removal of content from the original folder. It works as you would expect it to work.
Watch a video about performing these operations.
.
3.6. Deleting Items
Sometimes it is necessary to delete a content item, often to replace it with an updated version. For example, perhaps you uploaded a photograph, only to realize that you picked the wrong one to upload from your local computer. Simply go to the contents tab and find the uploaded photograph, click to check it, then click the delete button:
In the example shown above, PhotographThree.jpg is about to be deleted.
Entire folders may be deleted, so care must be taken with the delete operation, but this is true for computer use in general, and we all have learned to do a last minute self-check to make sure the delete operation is intended.
As you will see in the next section, an undo operation is available, which offers some measure of protection against inadvertent deletion and major editing operations.
3.7. Undo!
The undo operation is available for undoing one or several recent changes. To undo, click the undo link to the right of your name at the top of the edit area:
After clicking undo, you will see a list of recent changes to the web site, in the order of most recent on top of the list. Click to check the actions you would like to undo, and then click the undo button at the bottom of the list:
Using undo on a Plone web site, as with using undo on computers in general, should be considered as a luxury not to be abused by overuse, as it adds a level of complexity to behind-the-scenes database storage. However, use it when you need it.
3.8. Renaming things
There are generally two ways you can rename an item: from the contents view or by using the [actions] menu's rename option. This section will show you how, and give you a few tips and techniques to create more publishable and accessible URLs.
When you create something in UofL's Plone CMS, the URL or short name is automatically generated, based on the Title. If your Title is really long, the URL that is automatically created will be, too. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, as search engines pay attention to your URLs. Having a descriptive URL can actually give you higher google ratings. However, there are times when you'll want your URLs to be brief, particularly for folders or documents that you want to link to easily. This is when you'll want to know how to use Plone's various renaming options.
Renaming items from the contents view
You can rename one or more items at a time from the [contents] tab. First, select the item or items you want to rename by clicking on the checkboxes next to the title of the item(s). Then, click on the rename button.
Now you will see a "Rename Item" screen. In this instance, we are only renaming one item. TIP: You can also rename and re-Title a number of files and folders all at once!
Since we want a shorter URL part of the filename, simply change what's in the "New Short Name" field to something more brief - in this case, we'll rename the URL part from 'massive-science-experiment-from-mars.html' to simply, 'experiments.html' as shown in the following figure:
Simply click on the rename all button, and your page has a new URL!
Renaming An Item From the Action Menu
If you're already on a page or folder, you can easily get to the Rename Item screen by clicking-on the [actions] drop-down and selecting the 'rename' option:
After selecting the rename option, you'll be presented with the same Rename Item
screen in the previous example. Simply update your URL and click on the Save All button when you are done.
Conclusion
Now that you can rename things, you can set the URL to whatever you need it to be. This is particularly helpful when you create information pages or departmental sites, and want your URLs to be easy to read and type!
4. Using Smart Folders
4.1. Organization of Content
Before you know it, folders and subfolders have been created on a Plone web site and content added. Content may be organized naturally by the hierarchy of folders.
Consider the butterflies web site, which would have an organization something like this, with the main areas of the web site each a few layers deep, and the butterfly pages arrayed in a hierarchy:
About History Keeping a Journal as a Kid Natural History Mentors The Present Treatment Family John Bio Other Interests Tennis Conservation Local Politics Sally Bio Other Interests Karate Cooking Edward Bio Other Interests Football Painting Elizabeth Bio Other Interests Clarinet Snowboarding Photography Equipment Techniques Favorite Photographers Butterflies Overview Biology Life Cycle Egg Caterpillar Pupa Adult Distribution Migration Field Work Projects Organizations North American Butterfly Association Lepidopterists’ Society Xerces Society Nature Conservancy Bibliography Species Treatments Swallowtails 13 species pages Pierids (Whites and Yellows) 30 species pages Hairstreaks 5 species pages Satyrium Hairstreaks 18 species pages Scrub Hairstreaks 9 species pages Blues 9 species pages Azures 9 species pages Metalmarks 3 species pages Brushfoots 4 species pages Greater Fritillaries 7 species pages Lesser Fritillaries 16 species pages Angelwings and Tortoiseshells 18 species pages Red-Spotted Admiral 10 species pages Satyrs (Browns) 13 species pages Alpines and Arctics 10 species pages Monarchs (Milkweed Butterflies) 3 species pages Skippers Spread-Wing Skippers 8 species pages Cloudy Wings 8 species pages Duskywings 15 species pages Intermediate Skippers 1 species page Grass Skippers 12 species pages Hesperia Skippers 41 species pages Roadside Skippers 16 species pages Giant Skippers 2 species pages
Each of the butterfly treatment pages has sections on identification tips, a description, and keywords. Photographs are scattered through the butterfly section for butterflies John as seen personally. He writes an observation account for each new species he photographs, providing location, habitat, and any specific behavioral observations made.
This web site has a range of content, from personal biographies and interests of John and his family, to expanded pages on photography and other topics, to the many butterfly pages and photographs. Click-navigation is effective for finding most information, and for the butterfly content the organization by taxonomy is useful and fitting for the most common needs, but this is not the only way it could be organized. For instance, the butterfly pages could have been organized by habitat, by behavior, by size, by color, by whether or not John has observed the species, etc. John was torn between these ways of organizing the butterfly pages, but chose the taxonomic structure, because grouping and relating species by evolutionary relationship is the most useful way to do it. But John discovered how Plone lets him have his cake and eat it too:
Smart folders offer a way to create separate organizational treatments for content.
4.2. Adding Smart Folders
A smart folder is used for building a kind of virtual container for content -- the content actually exists wherever the items are stored throughout the web site, but the smart folder finds content along the guidelines set by a search criterion and makes it appear as if the items were stored in an alternate arrangement. For the butterfly pages described in the introduction to this section, the actual storage arrangement is by taxonomic grouping (Skippers, Monarchs, Dustywings, etc.), but with smart folders there can be virtual groupings by various criteria, such as by color. The butterfly pages matching the search criteria will be shown as if they "live" in the smart folder holding butterfly pages organized by color. Of course, there must be keywords for color in the butterfly pages for this to work. Search criteria made for searching general text can assemble very meaningful arrangements also.
Learning to think about content being stored wherever it is stored, and about using custom smart folders to gather up different "views" of the content, is an important step to using Plone most effectively. It is an intelligent system.
To add a smart folder, use the add item menu, as for adding other content types:
You will see the edit smart folder panel:
Below the title and description fields is a set of fields for specifying the format of search results returned by the search criterion for the new smart folder. The four fields in the panel above are in pairs. The top two fields let you limit the search results to a number of items that will be displayed. The bottom two fields let you control which pieces of information about the search result items will be shown in the table listing of the results.
Setting the search criterion
After setting the display configuration in the edit panel shown above, click the criteria tab to show the panel for setting search criteria:
The top area of the panel, Add New Search Criteria, lets you set a field and a matching criterion. The bottom area, Set Sort Order, is a simple selection for a field to sort on.
For setting the search criterion, you have the choice of these fields:
The criteria types for matching data in content items depend on which field is selected.
After saving the smart folder, the search criteria will be applied and the results shown when the smart folder is clicked. You can create any number of smart folders for such custom views. For the butterfly example described above, the keywords field could be used to match color to have a series of smart folders for "Blue Butterflies," "White Butterfles," etc.
Multiple criteria can be used for a smart folder. For example, a smart folder called "Butterflies Photographed in the Last Month," could be made by setting a criterion on Creation Date and on Item Type as Image. Such date-based smart folders are really effective to show up-to-date views of content that don't require any administrative hand-work -- once such a smart folder has been created, it will automatically stay up to date.
Note: A smart folder doesn't behave like a normal folder -- you can't add content items via the add item menu, as you can for a normal folder.
Watch a video about adding a smart folder.
4.3. Smart Folder Intelligence
You've seen how collections provide a way to augment an organization of content, with overlapping or overarching additional smart folders that key on date, or specific fields, or text searches. There is a deeper meaning to this, which gets to something called metadata, or "data about data," introduced in the section on Setting Basic Properties. Content management systems have this metadata, a kind of low-level intelligence, built into them. Plone incorporates the Dublin Core metadata element set, which was devised in Dublin, Ohio in 1995 at a library conference (Librarians are on the ones really on top of information, you know). As the name indicates, there is a core set of things one could describe for different bits of content, be they images or full documents, or whatever. The Dublin Core, properly, the Simple Dublin Core, includes the following 15 items:
- Title
- Creator
- Subject
- Description
- Publisher
- Contributor
- Date
- Type
- Format
- Identifier
- Source
- Language
- Relation
- Coverage
- Rights
There are added-on wrinkles to this core you may read about here, but for this introduction to the concept, the Simple Dublin Core will suffice. You'll find some of these under the Properties tab of any item in Plone, and several others are implied by the nature of the content itself, such as for Type and Format, or by basic record-keeping wired into Plone, as for Publisher.
We are all lazy by nature, someone said. If only we filled in this optional information for any content item we create -- Think of the vast information and power at our fingertips! An exaggeration? Perhaps, but as we explore here, the functionality is there waiting for your data-describing impulse to discover hidden potential (not so hidden -- in fact, right in front of your face).
Imagine a woman who stuffs all her content into a single big folder holding thousands of content items -- images, pages, events, news items, links -- the works. If you looked over her shoulder at this swirling mass, you might first think her to be a lazy person, or just one missing the organization gene. But you notice that she can always find stuff, and has quick search links stored away, and, when she needs to find something special, or to build a custom report, she is adept at fast assembly. How does she do it? She does it by dedication to filling out those metadata fields and by taking advantage of those clever smart folders.
The one-folder woman is using Plone as a content management system de rigueur. (Of course, it is so easy to also organize by folders, even in some crude sense, if you really are missing the organization gene). You might think such dedication should be limited to very large organizations, or especially to those cases where finding connections within information can bring significantly greater understanding -- or, potentially, wealth. But think of all those photos you've been taking with your digital camera. You have had the presence of mind to fill in at least the description field, haven't you? You know how quickly months become years, and 100s of photos become 1000s. You get the idea.
The payoff to using an intelligent system properly is efficiency and the discovery of relationships, perhaps subtle.
5. Collaboration, Publication, And Workflow
5.1. Basic Publication States
In the upper right corner of the edit panel for any content type -- folders, images, pages, etc., and any specialized content types -- there is a menu on the right for publication state. This state menu has settings for controlling publication state:
At UofL, These are the default transition options to change state that appear in the state: drop-down:
- Make Private
- Publish
- Require Login
- Restrict Access
- Submit
The header for the menu will show the current publication state for the content item, such as state: public draft, as shown above. Public draft is the initial state when you create a content item -- an uploaded image, a page, a news item -- and in the public draft state, as the name indicates, the content item will generally be available to visitors to the web site. There are several subtleties about this, however. Content items in public draft state may or may not be shown in menus, but they could be seen by search engines and by direct access by web address. So, if the item is definitely meant to be hidden from view, because it is very rough draft perhaps, the make private menu choice is the appropriate step after the content item has been created.
Also, and this will be very important, certain content types, such as news items and events, will not appear on the website as you expect, until they are explicitly published.
Store this in your memory: Publication state is important!
Publication state can be changed only by users whose accounts have the necessary permissions. The menu choices in the state menu will reflect existing permissions settings. For example, in a big newspaper web site, a reporter could add pages for news articles, but the state menu will not show a publish menu choice, only a