Professional Plone Development -- a review

Recently I volunteered to set up a website for a small student association at my university. Nothing fancy: corporate design, community-managed content, private member area for managing the association's internal affairs, etc. "Sure thing," I thought, "I'll just use Plone. It's something I know." But it turned out I didn't really. Anymore.

You see, I rarely do content-management projects, and the last time I customized and deployed Plone was when Archetypes was considered the cutting edge. Luckily, I had been given Martin Aspeli's book Professional Plone Development for review, so to kill two birds with one stone, I did what any Plone noob is supposed to: RTFB.

Professional Plone Development starts out with a gentle introduction to the Plone community and software. It goes on explaining how to set up a development environment. This chapter is very well sorted out, especially insofar as it's currently the only printed material that explains the techniques revolving around eggs and zc.buildout.

Over the next couple of chapters, the book then takes you on a typical walk through the Plone customization jungle: though-the-web customization, policy products and GenericSetup profiles, security and workflow, custom themes. These things changed drastically in the last Plone releases, and even though they're now often based on Zope 3 techniques, I had no idea about the specifics of the system. With the help of just this part of the book, I had my 90% of my website up and running. But then again, it's a small and simple site.

The rest of the book dives into the core of Plone and Zope programming. Here's where I have my only few negative points of criticism. Chapter 9 in which Martin explains a couple of core Zope concepts (Object Publishing, Acquisition, Persistence, Component Architecture, etc.) feels a bit disconnected from the rest and frankly overwhelming (not to me, mind you, but I'm imagining for others it might be). Some of these concepts could have easily explained earlier on and some of them only start to make sense when you're actually using them.

Admittedly, it is hard to talk about browser views or automated forms without some Component Architecture theory. Also, the slightly dry Chapter 9 does make a good reference for later. Lastly, the criticism is completely outweighed by another highlight that awaits the reader at the end of the book: a couple of very thorough chapters on deployment.

Looking at this book, I can't help but wonder: how can he cover it all in just onder 400 pages? This is not only a very good book, it's also good value for money.

P.S.: I wrote up this review a while ago already but forgot to post it, so apologies if it comes a bit late now...