TalkQuintagroup is a place to engage with us on topics important to you concerning the information technology industry. Read blogs from Quintagroup employees, customers, and analysts, visit our forums and let us know what you think. The topics are broad and relevant, including Zope and Plone hosting, Zope and Plone development, Plone skins, web design and content management solutions.
Plone Demo
Quintagroup has recently launched a new version of our Plone Demo website, where you can see and feel Plone CMS at first hand.
Admin demo account can be used to log in and, thus, get the experience of a true Plone user. You will be able to add content by creating pages, folders, events; move content between site sections; manage workflow for every content item by publishing or making it private; and much more.
Plone Add-ons
Apart from out-of-the-box Plone features, you can try several Plone add-ons in work. These are:
- PloneFormGen, a tool for creating/managing online forms
- Plone Carousel, a tool for creating image carousel in Plone
- collective.embedly, a tool for embedding video, images and other rich media files via providing their URL
- ContentWellPortlets, a tool for adding portlets into places other than left and right columns
- Plone Drop Down Menu, a tool for creating multi-level navigation menus
- Plone SEO, a tool for editing meta tags to enhance search engines visibility of Plone sites
Plone Themes
Plone demo site also has Quintagroup diazo themes for Plone installed. There are 15 themes right now, they are all very different and include a bunch of theme-specific features. You can try any of the installed Plone themes right now by following the instructions on Plone Themes page. Enjoy Plone new look!
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Free diazo Themes for Plone 4.1 from Quintagroup
After diazo approach introduction to the Plone theming world we decided to restructure all our free themes: now they are dependent on plone.app.theming package.
The following are feature list for most popular Quintagroup free themes:
SunRain Plone Theme (quintagroup.theme.sunrain)
- Two different views: Rain and Sun
- Replaceable header image for the whole site and site sections
- Subscribe viewlet with 4 editable actions: share on Twitter & Facebook, Send this and Subscribe to RSS
- Customizable site slogan on the header area
- Blogging support (requires Products.Quills or blog.star product)
- Styles for portlet culumus (tag cloud portlet)
- 2 portlet styles for static stylish portlet: Green Item and Grey Item and special styling for links in such portlets
Schools Plone Theme (quintagroup.theme.schools)
- Styles for front page image carousel (works with Products.Carousel)
- Replaceable header image for the whole site or site sections
- Right top area reserved for the first portlet from the right column
- Customizable top area height
- Configurable columns width
- Editable color of links, links hover, and visited links
WhiteBlack Theme (quintagroup.theme.whiteblack)
- Replaceable header image for the whole site or site sections
- Configurable columns width
- Header area height depend on number of site actions
- Global navigation located above the content area between portlet columns
Other Free Plone Themes
There are also TechLight, Lite and EstateLite free diazo Plone themes that are ready-to-be-used on your Plone 4.1 site.
All our themes use Plone 4 logo that is customizable as in default Plone via ZMI portal_skins/sunburst_images/logo.png. Themes' footer is also editable as in default Plone: via portal_view_customizations/plone.footer.
We also included improved thumbnail display view (switch to Thumbnail view for this) for all themes.
All themes were tested with such popular Plone products as: Products.Carousel, Products.ContentWellPortlets, Products.LinguaPlone, and quintagroup.dropdownmenu. We added special styles to make our themes look nice with these products activated.
Theme Installation
Themes can be installed into buildout via adding theme name into eggs section of buildout.cfg file, rerunning the buildout and restarting instance. Then activate theme via Site Setup -> Add-ons and enjoy!
Please, feel free to contact us any time with any feedback or improvement suggestion. Thank you for using our products.
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SunRain Theme for Plone 4
SunRain theme is a free theme, initially developed for Plone 3, but now can be activated on Plone 4.0 sites.
Features
The theme includes 2 different views: default 'Rain' and 'Sun' (can be activated via ZMI) - click the following screenshots to see full-screen images.
Additional Portlets
Theme comes with Static Stylish portlet, that allows to add specially-styled text portlets: 'Green Item' and 'Grey Item'. Apart from setting portlet background color, such portlets has portlet text of different size. This allows creating portlets with important information which will easily be noticed by site users. Static Stylish portlets also include special styling for portlet links.
The theme is tested with Portlet Cumulus that allows adding Tag Cloud portlet to Plone site.
Other features
SunRain theme has 'subscribe' viewlet integrated, that adds 4 actions 'Share on Twitter', 'Share on Facebook', 'Send this' and 'Subscribe to RSS'. You can set necessary icon links as simply as editing corresponding portal_action items in ZMI. You are also able to hide/show items that you need.
SunRain Theme uses customizable slogan and replaceable logo.
Want SunRain theme?
You can freely install and customize SunRain Plone Theme on your Plone 4 instance right away. Simply add quintagroup.theme.sunrain to eggs and zcml sections of your buildout.cfg file, rebuild it, restart your Plone site, and activate the theme via Site setup -> Add-ons.
SunRain on TalkQuintagroup
We decided to use SunRain theme on a new version of our corporate blogging site - TalkQuintagroup, that has just migrated from Plone 2.5.1 to Plone 4.0.7. The theme suits perfectly our blogging purposes because it has special blog and blog listing views styled for collective.blogstar and Products.Quills.
We would be very grateful if you inform us about Plone site(s) that use our SunRain Theme, so that we add it to the list of live websites with Quintagroup Plone Themes.
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Scheduled Maintenance 2011-06-28
Quintagroup is performing scheduled software maintenance at all Quintagroup servers due to security vulnerability in Plone.
When: June 28th, 2011
Time: 14:30-15:30 UTC (see in your timezone)
Expected Impact: Website is not available
Recommendations: Suspend advertising programs during this window, disable notifications of website monitoring systems
Security advisory: http://plone.org/products/plone/security/advisories/20110622
UPDATE: We have to extend maintenance window for another 30 minutes as Hotfix is being rolled out.
UPDATE (17:01 UTC): Patch rollout finished. Sorry for inconveniences caused.
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Embedly Services for Plone
Collective.embedly allows to embed videos, images and other rich media to Plone by simply adding external links that are converted into embeddable content. The approach here is to use the Transform machinery to replace the URL with embed code by calling the embed.ly API.
There are more than 200 services that support embed.ly service. With collective.embedly it becomes very easy to insert content from those websites simply by proving object URL. Embedly-supported serices s include such video sharing sites as Youtube, Blip.tv, Vimeo; such audio streaming services as Grooveshark, SoundCloud, last.fm; such image/photo stocks as Flickr, and many other: GoogleMaps, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
collective.embedly: how to embed media to Plone
To embed media from any of the embedly-supported external resources to Plone - follow such instructions:
- Open edit form of the object you want to embed content into. Select some text and choose Embedly link style for it. As a result, the text will now look like linked. You should be careful here since TinyMCE makes the whole passage linked, so keep in mind that the whole passage will later be substituted with embedded media.
- Select this text again and go to Insert link dialog to insert the URL to the desired object on the external service.
- Save this page. Now when rendered, there will be "preview" from embed.ly service inserted instead of the linked text.
For more illustrative instructions - see collective.embedly documentation. You will find how-tos on embedding videos to Plone from YouTube, blip.tv, vimeo and TED.com websites there. Also see how to embed images from Flickr, how to embed map from GoogleMaps, how to embed audio from SoundCloud, and how to embed content from Facebook to Plone.
Screenshot on the right dislays how can a page with different embedly-converted content look in Plone 4. collective.embedly works in Plone 4.
Give it a try!
collective.embedly is compatible with Plone 4. It is distributed as a Python egg and can easily be installed into your buildout as other packages for Plone.
Visit the following pages to find more information about collective.embedly:
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Analytics Tool for Plone
Quintagroup Analytics Tool allows to see Plone site content from different perspectives. Presenting site's statistic information in different statistic views, quintagroup.analytics allows to visually audit Plone content.
Information generated by Quintagroup Analytics can be very useful while migrating your site into newer Plone version. With its help you can audit the content in Plone site before migration and compare it with the migrated website structure.
quintagroup.analytics is now compatible with Plone 4 and Plone 3. But we plan to test it on Plone 2.5 and Plone 2.1 soon: you may expect a new product release for earlier Plone versions in the nearest future.
How to Use
You can install quintagroup.analytics on your Plone 4 or Plone 3 instance by adding quintagroup.analytics to the buildout (see detailed installation instructions). Having activated Quintagroup Analytics via QuickInstaller in Plone you will see a new Quintagroup Analytics item appeared under Add-on Products Configuarion.
Quintagroup Analytics configlet consists of several tabs that present different statistics about your Plone site. Every chart is followed by a table, presenting all statistic data in numbers:
So, what statistics can you have by using Quintagroup Analytics?
- Content Ownership by Type - information about most popular content types on your Plone site. Here you can see the most frequently created content types on your site and their owners.
- Content Ownership by State - information about your site's content workflow states. Here you can see how many content object are published/submitted for review/etc. and their owners.
- Content Types by State - information about your site's most frequently created content types and their workflow states.
- Site Portlets and Legacy Portlets - information about site portlets (legacy portlets) assigned throughout site sections. This information can be exported into .csv format. Apart from having all site portlets listed in one place, you can immediately edit them.
- Properties Stats - information on certain property values for all site objects, such as titles, descriptions, etc. This information can be exported into .csv format.
Try it!
Visit the following pages to find more information about quintagroup.analytics features, usage and installation:
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Drop-down Menu for Plone
Quintagroup is pleased to announce a new quintagroup.dropdownmenu add-on for building drop-down menus on Plone sites. With quintagroup.dropdownmenu your Plone navigation tabs can become multilevel menu items.
quintagroup.dropdownmenu is a successor of qPloneDropDownMenu product, but we took different concept of creating menus as a basis for our new package. Starting from Plone 3, when portal_actions introduced CMF Action Category containers, an opportunity to build nested actions trees was opened.
While developing our new product we decided to use that portal_actions feature. Thus, quintagroup.dropdownmenu builds drop-down menu through the web from a tree of nested Category Actions and Actions within portal_actions tool. Since CMF Action Category does not behave as a regular action and it has different set of properties, we introduced convention in quintagroup.dropdownmenu that requires to have a specially named Action for each Actions Category.
Features
Apart from building drop-down menu on the basis of portal_action items, quintagroup.dropdownmenu allows to generate it on the basis of site structure. This is governed by settings in the Drop Down Menu configlet. There you can also define whether:
- Turn on/off tabs icons display. If you enable this feature your drop-down menu will have the following look:
- Turn on/off non-folderish objects display - here you can specify whether to display non-folderish menu items (such as pages, images, files, etc.) or not;
- Turn on/off navigation & portal_actions strategy - here you can specify if drop-down menu will be built on the basis of Plone site structure, on portal_action items, or on both;
- Drop-down menu depth - here you can specify how many levels folders to list after the top level.
Give it a try
quintagroup.dropdownmenu is compatible with Plone 4 and Plone 3. It is distributed as a Python egg and can easily be installed into your buildout as other packages for Plone.
Visit the following pages to find more information about quintagroup.dropdownmenu features, usage and installation:
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New Screencast: Plone Google Sitemaps
New screencast about quintagroup.plonegooglesitemaps product for Plone. If compared to a Plone Google Sitemaps previous screencast, this new one covers Plone Google Sitemaps package installation on buildout-based instance for Plone 3. Also, apart from explaining creation of Content Sitemap, we added example of creating News Sitemap and showed News Sitemap peculiar features, as well as new configlet added to News Items objects for defining News Item specific features.
In this screencast we also describe how to register Plone site in Google Webmaster Tools area, how to validate it and submit Sitemap.
Helpful links
- Plone Google Sitemaps home page and documentation area
- Post feedback about this product in TalkQuintagroup Plone Forums Plone Google Sitemap area
- More screencasts from Quintagroup can be found in the Screencasts section.
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Screencast: Schools Plone Theme
In this screencast you will find information about Schools Plone Theme's basic features, installation instructions and main customizations. You will learn how to manage site's carousel banners, how to use additional portlets manager, how to change top area image and logo.
Helpful Links
- Schools Plone Theme home page
- More screencasts from Quintagroup can be found in the Screencasts section
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Screencast: TinyMCE Visual Editor
