Getting started with Plone

This isn't meant to be some grand tutorial or go super in-depth, it is only some basic personal notes I thought I'd share on my website, nothing special, and mostly from the official Plone documentation.  In fact, my notes follow this document almost exactly, and I don't really want to replicate it all here, but perhaps I will for completions sake, as I do have a lot of the Zope installation copied as well.

First ensure that Python and the virtual environment system packages are installed, for Debian:

apt-get install python3-dev python3.13-venv git 

The tool make might be required for development of add-ons, so install that as well if you will be developing Plone add-ons.

mkdir plone
cd plone
python3 -m venv venv
venv/bin/pip install -c https://dist.plone.org/release/6-latest/constraints.txt Plone pipx

Create a basic instance.yaml file as such:

default_context:
  initial_user_name: "admin"
# Use a secure token for the password in a production environment.
  initial_user_password: "admin"
  wsgi_listen: "localhost:8080"
  debug_mode: false
  verbose_security: false
  db_storage: "direct"
  environment: {
    "zope_i18n_compile_mo_files": true,
  }

Once the configuration has been created, the Zope Instance can be created as such:

venv/bin/pipx run cookiecutter -f --no-input --config-file instance.yaml gh:plone/cookiecutter-zope-instance

Once it has been created, it can run in the foreground during development with:

venv/bin/runwsgi -v instance/etc/zope.ini

I cannot recall if cookiecutter required that make be installed or not.  If you plan on developing an add-on, there is an additional Python package which will make it easier to get started:

venv/bin/pip install plonecli

Due to the way that plonecli works, you will need to enter the virtual environment for it to work correctly:

source venv/bin/activate

This will put (venv) before your shell prompt to show you that this shell is within a virtual environment.  Here are the commands needed to say create a new content-type, and a view for it in the current directory:

plonecli create addon myaddons.todo
cd myaddons.todo
plonecli add content_type
plonecli add view

You can see all the components that you can add via:

plonecli -l

This will list add-on at the root, and below it all of the various components that can be created within an add-on project.  To make this new add-on available to be installed within your local Plone site, you can add it in and keep it editable via:

pip install -e myaddons.todo

You can start the WSGI server with additional options for development and debugging with:

runwsgi -v -d -e instance/etc/zope.ini

And that's all I got in my notes for now.  Happy Ploning!