After you login, you should notice some differences in the way the site appears; you're no longer an anonymous user, so depending on the permissions given to your account, you will be able to see different protected or hidden features of the site.

One difference is that (in most sites), the left navigation should be more extensive. This is because you can now see most pages in the site, not just the ones that are published. We'll go into that in more depth later.

You will also notice a new toolbar bar towards the top of the page with your login name at its far left. It might include a link to your home folder, your preferences, undo, plone setup, and a button to logout. The only one of those that requires no explanation is the logout button; you should hit that when you're done editing your site so no one sneaks some unexpected edits when you're not looking.

(See the Plone 2.0 quickstart tutorial for more on editing pages in Plone 2.0.)

The first thing to realize when adding a new page to your site is that Plone has more than one kind of "webpage".  The most generic type of page -- the one that will comprise most of your site -- Plone 2.0 calls a "document".  This might be a little confusing, because that word carries some computer baggage thanks to Microsoft Word.  However, it's just a normal webpage, just like the one you're reading now.

Plone uses other kinds of pages for more specialized purposes, and each one has at least one feature that sets it apart from the others.  You can see the full list of kinds of pages you can add to the site by logging in and looking at the Add New Item dropdown menu on the page.  (It's the menu in the upper right-hand corner of the main content area, within the thick top border.)

Here are the types of pages that ship with a normal Plone site.

    * Document
    * Event
    * File
    * Folder
    * Image
    * Link
    * News Item
    * Topic

Adding a New Page
Simply click on any of the page types from the Add New Item menu, and it will create a new page of that type in whatever folder you happen to be in at the time.  (You can get a clue to what folder you're in by consulting the breadcrumbs for the page.)   

 You might have noticed that the pages on your site say "state: visible" or "state: published" (this appears to the right of the Add New Item menu, at the top right-hand corner of the main content area of each page).  That is its "publishing state", or how Plone decides how and which people get to see a page.  There are three basic states: private, visible and published.  In more involved sites where different accounts have different levels of permission, this gets more complicated; this page will describe the more typical case where all users have the ability to edit all the pages in the site.

Private - If you designate a page or folder as private, you will need to login in order to see it.  It will not appear in any search results, site maps, or automatically generated menus unless you have logged in.  This is useful for draft content that is not ready for public consumption, and on a larger scale, can be employed to create an intranet for storing internal documents.  Note that this also works for files that you upload, such as, say, board meeting minutes, or strategy documents.

Visible (Public Draft) - This is the state all pages are in until you explicitly change them.  If a page is visible, it can be seen by everyone if they are given a link to it, if it appears in search results, or if they otherwise somehow come across it.  It is most useful for images and pdf files, since you want them to available to people.

Published - Published is Visible, and then some.  Published pages turn up in the sitemap and in the automatically generated navigation that usually appears in the left column (like on this site).  Note that everything appears in the left navigation if you are logged in, but only published pages and folders appear there when you're not.  It's very important to publish all of your web content when you want it to show up in these places.  Additionally, published events and news items will appear in their corresponding sidebars only when published.

You should only change the state after you have saved.  Do not try to change the state while editing.

The "contents" tab shows what's in the current folder.  This listing should be somewhat familiar, because it looks roughly like what you might see in Windows Explorer (or the Finder, for you Mac users), so probably the most confusing aspect is determining what "the current folder" actually is, so I'll give a few examples.

• This page you're reading ("The Folder Contents Tab") lives in the "Full Tutorial" folder; the contents tab will show a list of the other Tutorial pages.  This makes sense if you look at the breadcrumbs at the top or the navigation to the left.
  
• If I'm logged in and looking at the homepage of my site, then my current folder is the top level folder that contains the whole site.
• If I were currently looking at a folder instead of a normal webpage (as I was in the first two examples), the contents tab would simply show me the listing for that folder (not the one containing it).

What The Contents Listing Shows

• Checkboxes - used to select one or more pages, for which the buttons on the bottom can be used.  The very top most checkbox selects or deselects all of the checkboxes.
• Title - Simply the title of the page.  If the title was never supplied, Plone will use the "shortname" (explained in the Plone 2.0 Quickstart tutorial).  (This frequently happens when a page is inadvertently created, but never filled out.)
• Size - This is the filesize, usually small for documents, but larger for PDFs, and possibly very large for images. Generally, images shouldn't be larger than 20 KB or so, to prevent inordinate download times for dialup users.  You should save your images so that their file size is as small as possible.
  
• Modified - When edits were last made to the page.  Don't let the military time throw you!
• State - The publishing state, as explained in the previous page.
• Order - The pages are listed in the order in which they were created (unless you moved them around), and that's how they will appear in the navigation.  The Order column has two arrows for each page; click on them to move a page up or down in the sequence. 

• Rename - While you can rename a page when you're in the Edit tab, this button allows you rename more than one page at a time.  You can change the title and the short name.
  
• Cut - Just like in Windows Explorer, this allows you to move one or more pages.  After selecting which pages and hitting Cut, a Paste button will appear in all subsequent folder listings, allowing you to navigate anywhere in the site and paste those pages.  Note that pages will not move until you actually hit Paste, so you will never lose anything by using the Cut button.
  
• Copy - Copy is just like Cut, only it creates a copy of the original page, instead of moving it.  After hitting Copy, a Paste button will appear just as with Cut.  Note that Paste will paste only the most recent item(s) that you copied or cut.
  
• Delete - Very straightforward, this button deletes all checked items.  (Although as explained in the undo section, this shouldn't necessarily be permanent.)
  
• Change State - This is lets you change the publishing state for more than one page at a time, including also the option to change the state for the contents of subfolders.  This can be a handy time saver if you are drafting a lot of content at once.