Sunday, May 6, 2007

Installing Plone CMS in Fedora Core 6

What is a Content Management System?
Traditionally web sites are maintained by a 'webmaster', he is responsible to getting new material, transforming it into HTML and publishing it to the site. The problem is that this setup is far from the ideal since webmasters, no matter what they had told you, are not gods. They tend to be the bottleneck on the process. CMSs allow for the users to edit the site contents without having to know anything about HTML or web servers. This very blog you are reading now is based in a CMS that allow people to create posts.

Installing Plone in FC6

The Plone package is available from the 'extras' repository for Fedora, run as root:

# yum install plone

This will install plone and it's dependencies (zope, etc).

After the installation you will need to start zope service. Zope is a application server (like Tomcat is, if you know it) that provides a framework for developing web applications. Plone was built on top of it and as such needs Zope to run.

# service zope start

To make it start automatically at boot time run:

# chkconfig zope on

The server will be available at http://localhost:8080/. If you navigate to this page with your browser you will see a page telling you have no administrative account for Zope.

To create an account

# zopectl adduser userName MyPass


After you log in with the new user an password you get the interface show in the right. From the pop up menu under the 'help' link, pick 'Plone Site' and add it.

Give it the name and description you want but be aware that Zope just accept characters from A-Z, for the title and description you can change it latter in Plone.



Your Plone installation is ready to use, if you picked 'plone' as the site title, navigate to http://localhost:8080/plone to access your newly created website.


The user ID and password for Plone are the same used in Zope.


More info:
http://fedorasolved.org/server-solutions/installing-zope-plone-on-fedora