As Plone is packaged for debian unstable as one of the Zope packages I was able to install it through apt. You can also install using apt straight from sourceforge by adding deb http://plone.sourceforge.net/debian/ ./to your sources.list file. The package plone contained dependencies to pull all the required Zope packages.

The first step if you are running debian stable is to edit your /etc/apt/sources.list file to point to unstable. Then

   $ sudo apt-get update
   $ sudo apt-get install plone

This pulled in a total of 12.8 MB of packages but this will depend on what dependencies need to be satisified on your system.

The first question that debconf asks during the install is for the Zope administrator user name

   $ cmsuser

Then the password

   $ password

You are then asked what sort of encrytion that you want to use for the password. I chose SHA (Secure Hash Algorithm) which was the default. You are then asked if you want to limit the domains from which the administrator can log into Zope. This would increase the security of the site, for example if I said localdomain but is not necessary for my purpose. I chose to let any domain be allowed so just left this option empty and selected OK.

You are then asked how you would like Zope to restart when you are installing additional Zope modules. I chose to go with the default that debconf selected which was to restart Zope at the end.

The zope-cmfplone package was then configured and I was asked if I wanted Zope to be restarted automatically. I said yes. The zope-formulator package failed to preconfigure, with exit status 10. As I had upgraded the libc6 package I was told, when it was being unpacked, that a number of services needed to be restarted and asked if I wanted to do that. I said yes. Unfortunately apache failed to be restarted so I switched to another terminal to restart it manually which worked fine. I pressed enter to continue.

Setting up zope took so long I was worried that it had hung but then eventually zope started starting up, only to fail to start up. This caused to the other zope packages to say the zope is restarting or something is very strange when they were being setup. Then zope-formulator started being setup and debconf asked me a configuration question which was do I want to restart zope. I accepted the default which was yes and pressed enter.

Zope was successfully restarted after a bit of a wait. Zope-cmfplone was then setup and zope was restarted successfully again and then plone was setup and that was it.

I then had a look in /usr/share/doc/zope-cmfplone to see what the README.Debian said.

   $ cd /usr/share/doc/zope-cmfplone/
   $ less README.Debian

Not much it just referred me to the the plone website for documentation.
So I had a look at the README.

   $less README

Didn't say much either apart from telling me that plone was aiming to be a gui interface to CMF. So I tried man zope-cmfplone only to find there was no man page. I then had a look to see what was in the zope-cmfplone package and to see where it was put

   $ dpkg -L zope-cmfplone

only to find that there was massive amounts of python scripts and dhtml pages. I then repeated the previous command but piped it through grep for bin

   $ dpkg -L zope-cmfplone |grep bin

which didn't really help.

Ok after a bit of man page looking and README looking I found in the /usr/share/doc/zope/README.Debian.gz that zope by default in debian listens on port 9673 so typing my domainname:9673 in my browser bought me to the front page of zope.

The install doc for cmfplone

   $ less

/usr/lib/zope/lib/python/Products/CMFPlone/INSTALL.txt
told me how to set it up from the /manage interface in Zope. So clicking on the Zope Management Interface I was prompted for a password however when I put in the admin user and password I had said when debconf was configuring the packages it failed to log me in.

Looking at the /usr/share/doc/zope/README.Debian.gz file I found that you have to create an emergency zope user before you can log in. I used

   # zope-zpasswd -u cmsuser -p password /var/lib/zope/access

I then restarted zope

   # /etc/init.d/zope restart

and then when I put in the username and password I was logged into the management interface.

Looks good! It is faster than any of the perl and php CMSs that I have installed. According to the README.Debian.gz file the first thing to do is to create a new user, as the emergency user is unable to create anything or add any objects and the file gives instructions on how to do that. I created a user in a management role and then logged out of the emergency user and tried to log in as the user. As soon as I logged out I got this message Failed Authentication Do you want to Retry I clicked on yes and then tried to log in as the user that I had just created but was unable to authenticate. I also noticed that I was still logged in as the emergency user. Reloading the page didn't help. I found that I had to actually delete all the cookies from the cache and then shut konqueror down and then open it up again to be able to log into the new user. In galeon simply refreshing the page was enough to allow me to log in again. It looks like it then just depends on how the browser refreshes.

Ok now to check out the plone stuff. The instructions are a bit sparse in the docs that came with the package. I found more detailed instructions for setting up a plone site here which is part of the documentation available at the plone homepage.

On the front page of the management interface at the top right there is an Add with a drop down menu button next to it. Click on the drop down button and select Plone Site from the menu. A form then prompts you to add some information about your plone site.
The first field Id is just a simple alphanumeric character that will be used as the URL of the site. I entered "tws". Title refers to the name of the site that will appear on all pages. I put in a short description of the site, left the other fields as the defaults and then clicked on Add Plone Site. After about 30 seconds or so in which nothing appeared to be happening the plone site appeared.
Cool plone was now installed, time to learn how to use it. The plone site appeared within my zope management interface but I could access the site directly by pointing my browser at mydomain.org:9673/tws and I would be taken directly to the site.