This book teaches Plone development best practices, focusing on Plone 3.0. It covers setting up a development environment, customizing Plone's look and feel, creating new content types and forms, connecting to external databases, managing users and groups intelligently, configuring a production-ready server, LDAP authentication, and caching. Aimed at developers wanting to leverage the proven user interface and flexible infrastructure of this open-source Content Management System, it takes a pragmatic approach, building a realistic example application whose code is included with the book. Built on the Zope application server and written in Python, Plone makes it easy for content authors to create and edit web content, and is also used by developers as a framework to build content-centric web applications like dynamic websites and intranets. Readers need familiarity with Python and basic web technologies such as HTML and CSS, and would also benefit from prior Zope/ Plone experience.