The Hindu : Plone: A Zope-based content management tool

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Monday, Jun 23, 2003

Business

Business

Plone: A Zope-based content management tool

THIS WEEK NetSpeak focuses on a content management tool based on the Zope application server.

The content management system has completely changed the web site development process as it enables content creators to automatically type/post content to the appropriate section of a web site.

An interesting development in this regard has been the proliferation of numerous free open-source content management systems on the Net. We have already seen many such free tools and now we will have a look at another relatively stable content management tool called Plone that has been built on top of the free application server Zope, already featured in this column.

For readers who missed the earlier reference, here is a brief recap of Zope.

Zope (http://www.zope.org) is a powerful web-application generation tool written in Python that can be used to create almost all kinds of web-based applications. It is an integrated system that contains all the required components to build a web-based application.

More details at http://www.hinduonnet.com/ thehindu/biz/2003/04/21/ stories/20030 42100150200.htm).

Plone

As already mentioned, Plone (http://www.plone.org) is a content management system that runs on Zope. If you are not familiar with Zope or do not have it installed in your system, download the Plone full installer that contains Zope, Python and Plone.

Now, run the installer file and start the setup process. During installation the Plone system will ask you to enter the password for the `admin' user. Enter an appropriate password and complete the installation.

When you start Plone after installation, it will display the `Plone Properties' window that can be used to configure/control the Plone system. Select the `Emergency user' option, create a manager account and then `Start' the Plone server.

If everything goes smooth, you will be able to access the opening page of your Plone-based portal by typing the URL: http://localhost. At this point, you will get the default page of the Plone system, which can be customised by editing its various components after logging-in to the system using the `Manager account'.

Once the set-up is ready, other users can start publishing different content types that include documents (in Plone a document is a "self-contained piece of text''), images, files and news items after registering with the site. Once you log in to the site, you will be taken to your web page where you can store your documents and other contents.

Once logged-in you can manipulate the look and feel of your web page and control the aspects that can be seen by other visitors. You can alter various access features of your content.

For example, you can make it `discussible'' by other users of the portal or can make it automatically invisible after a particular period. A member's web page can be accessed by anyone on the web using the URL: http://localhost/Members/member-log-in-name/. Also, a logged-in user can see the content published by other users of the portal if the required permissions are set. This way the Plone system can be used as a collaboration tool. For more details refer to the Plone documentation available at: http://plone.org/documentation/book. To experiment with the various facilities available with the Plone system, you may check out the demo site at: http://demo.plone.org.

Many factors control the speed of your access to various Net services. One such factor is DNS requests. Each computer on the Net has a unique address called IP-address. But it is difficult for humans to remember the IP address, which is a string of numbers. Hence a more comprehensible domain name to represent each IP address was evolved.

Thus, the primary task of any program that tries to access a Net application is to get the IP-address of the server from its domain name. For example, to pick the mails using a mail client, first it will try to get the IP address of the mail server represented by the domain name. This task, which is also called domain name resolution, is achieved by sending requests to the DNS server. Though this task takes only a few seconds, as we need to repeat this exercise several times, the accumulated time taken by this domain name translation process becomes pretty large. If some means can be found to speed up the domain name translation process, it can help improve the Net access speed.

AnalogX FastCache

One method to speed up the translation process is to get the domain name translated locally, instead of always trying to get the IP number from the DNS server. The AnalogX's DNS cache proxy server program is a tool that functions on this line.

The program sits between other Net applications and the DNS server. Whenever any Net application needs a domain name's IP address, instead of sending the DNS request directly to the DNS server, it is sent to DNS proxy.

The proxy server searches the DNS-IP data stored in its local memory for the IP address and if it finds it, passes on the information immediately to the program that sent the request. If the IP info is not available in its cache, the proxy routes the request to the appropriate DNS server, collects the IP info, then hands over the IP number to the application concerned.

The proxy also saves the result in its cache so that when a request is made next time, it can provide the DNS answer quickly from the local cache. That is, as the proxy server saves the IP data in the local machine, the DNS resolution process for this domain becomes faster the next time for any application that needs to access a server with this domain name.

To test this tool, download the proxy server set-up program from AnalogX (http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/fc.htm), install and run it. If the program is live, you will find its icon in the system tray. Now, to direct all DNS requests from any application to this tool, you need to make some configuration adjustments in your network set-up. If you are a Windows user, right-click on `Network Neighborhood' icon, select `Properties' then access the `TCP/IP' option of the `Properties' button. Access the `DNS Configuration,' enable DNS and add the IP number 127.0.0.1 to the DNS servers list.

Apart from the proxy cache server FastCache, you will find many other free useful tools at the Analogx's web site. NetStat Live (http://www.analogx.com/contents/download/network/nsl.htm), the program that enables you to measure the current speed of your Net link, is another product worth downloading.

WordSpy

Some Net analysts categorise technologies/movements such as open-source, blogs and wiki as disruptive technologies. Of course, by calling them disruptive they do not mean to say these technologies are destructive. As per the site WordSpy (http://www.wordspy.com/words/disruptivetechnology.asp), disruptive technology means "a new product or service that disrupts an industry and eventually wins most of the market share.'' In fact in your daily life you may come across several new words/phrases of this type whose meanings may not be quite obvious. When you come across such newly coined words/phrases, it is worth visiting the site Wordspy (http://www.wordspy.com), which has been created to provide the user with information on "recently coined words.''

J. Murali

Email the author at:

murali27@satyam.net.in

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Plone: A Zope-based content management tool