Adding content

To add new content, go to the folder where you want it to appear and select its type from the "add to folder" menu at the top of the page.

For news items, I suggest that you create them in your personal folder. For example, I have the News subfolder for this purpose.

Please, consider also adding metainformation in the "properties" tab, especially keywords, as it could greatly aid navigation.

In any case, after you save your new content, change the state to "pending" by selecting "submit" from the "state" menu. Your document will then be presented to the reviewer (that's me, by conicidence) who will either publish the documents or retract it and ask you to do some changes.

Conversely, if you want to edit an already existing page that is in the "published" state, you first have to "retract" it.

Editing text

You can edit the main content of each page using one of the following methods:

1. directly in the web form – depending on how you set the "Content editor" item in your personal preferences: You can either use the Kupu visual editor or the basic HTML textarea editor. In the latter case, you can prepare the content in several formats: plain text, Structured Text, reStructured Text or HTML. This is good for short or quick-and-dirty texts, but for longer texts the other methods are preferable.
2. offline and then upload it - you can prepare the text using your favourite text editor in any of the supported formats mentioned above, and then use the "upload a file" option just under the "Body Text" field. This is my preferred method – most often I prepare the contents as reStructuredText in Emacs. This method is also useful for importing HTML that was obtained from other formats not yet supported directly by Plone. An important special case is DocBook: read more in Using DocBook.
3. using the "External Editor" feature – at the north-east corner of every editable page, you should find this symbol: . By clicking it, you can open the document or other object in any program of your choice. However, this requires that you install client support for this feature on your computer and set up a configuration file. See this page for details.

Using DocBook

Unfortunately, DocBook is not yet among the formats supported by Plone. On the other hand, it is not terribly difficult to import DocBook documents and the results are quite satisfactory. The generic DocBook XSL stylesheets usually work just fine, except one thing: the Plone documents have their own title and description text that is to be entered separately from the main body. Consequently, one usually has to suppress the title inside the DocBook document. A XSL stylesheet that does this and few other customisations of the generic stylesheets is available here: xhtml-plone.xsl

The following Makefile can be used used to automate the process of transforming DocBook documents to Plone-friendly HTML using the xsltproc program. The HTML_OPTIONS variable also shows the recommended values of stylesheet parameters.

XSLT_DIR = /home/lhotka/MyTexts/Webpages/flowmon.org/xsl
STYLE = xhtml-plone.xsl
HTML_OPTIONS = --stringparam chunker.output.encoding "UTF-8" \
    --stringparam citerefentry.link "1" \
    --stringparam table.borders.with.css "1"

%.html: %.dbk
        xsltproc --output $@ $(HTML_OPTIONS) \
        $(XSLT_DIR)/$(STYLE) $<