A little howto to quickly install and try Plone (a GPL’d CMS based on Zope) on your linux box. Well, the installer seems to do the job nicely. 🙂

Tested on Plone 3.* version, Debian “Lenny”.

• apt-get install g++
• Download latest version of Plone (Unified Installer)
  
• Execute:
  tar zxvf Plone-YOURVERSION-UnifiedInstaller.tgz
cd Plone-YOURVERSION-UnifiedInstaller
./install.sh standalone
gedit /usr/local/Plone/zinstance/README.txt &
gedit /usr/local/Plone/zinstance/buildout.cfg &
/usr/local/Plone/zinstance/bin/plonectl start
less /usr/local/Plone/zinstance/adminPassword.txt

README should be read to follow installation instructions, then you can modify Plone configuration on buildout.cfg, and then you can start Plone. On adminPassword.txt you’ll find your Plone passwords to use for administrative purpouses.

• Add /usr/local/Plone/zinstance/bin/plonectl start to /etc/rc.local before exit 0 (Red Hat) to run plone at any server restart or create a script on /etc/init.d/ (Debian) like.

Now you can test this CMS based on Python (I’ve tested it 4 years ago, maybe it hardly can replace Drupal but you can give it a try 😉 ).