.. contents:: Table of Contents
.. note:: 2.1.1 is the last Plone 4 compatible release.
Dexterity wants to make some things really easy. These are:
Dexterity is designed with a specific philosophy in mind. This can be summarised as follows:
Reuse over reinvention As far as possible, Dexterity should reuse components and technologies that already exist. More importantly, however, Dexterity should reuse concepts that exist elsewhere. It should be easy to learn Dexterity by analogy, and to work with Dexterity types using familiar APIs and techniques.
Small over big Mega-frameworks be damned. Dexterity consists of a number of specialised packages, each of which is independently tested and reusable. Furthermore, packages should have as few dependencies as possible, and should declare their dependencies explicitly. This helps keep the design clean and the code manageable.
Natural interaction over excessive generality The Dexterity design was driven by several use cases that express the way in which we want people to work with Dexterity. The end goal is to make it easy to get started, but also easy to progress from an initial prototype to a complex set of types and associated behaviours through step-wise learning and natural interaction patterns. Dexterity aims to consider its users - be they business analysts, light integrators or Python developers, and be they new or experienced - and cater to them explicitly with obvious, well-documented, natural interaction patterns.
Real code over generated code Generated code is difficult to understand and difficult to debug when it doesn't work as expected. There is rarely, if ever, any reason to scribble methods or 'exec' strings of Python code.
Zope 3 over Zope 2 Although Dexterity does not pretend to work with non-CMF systems, as many components as possible should work with plain Zope 3, and even where there are dependencies on Zope 2, CMF or Plone, they should - as far as is practical - follow Zope 3 techniques and best practices. Many operations (e.g. managing objects in a folder, creating new objects or manipulating objects through a defined schema) are better designed in Zope 3 than they were in Zope 2.
Zope concepts over new paradigms We want Dexterity to be "Zope-ish". Zope is a mature, well-designed (well, mostly) and battle tested platform. We do not want to invent brand new paradigms and techniques if we can help it.
Automated testing over wishful thinking "Everything" should be covered by automated tests. Dexterity necessarily has a lot of moving parts. Untested moving parts tend to come loose and fall on people's heads. Nobody likes that.
Please read the installation guide_ to get Dexterity up and running.
.. _installation guide: http://docs.plone.org/external/plone.app.dexterity/docs/install.html
Then log in to Plone, go to Site Setup, and go to the Dexterity Types
control panel to get started creating content types through the web.
Or read the Dexterity Developer Manual_ to get started developing
Dexterity content types on the filesystem.
The 2.0.x release series of Dexterity is compatible with and included with Plone 4.3.
If you are upgrading from a previous release of Dexterity, you need to:
Various documentation is available:
Dexterity Developer Manual_How to create reusable behaviors for Dexterity types_.. Dexterity Developer Manual: http://docs.plone.org/external/plone.app.dexterity/docs/index.html
.. How to create reusable behaviors for Dexterity types: http://docs.plone.org/external/plone.app.dexterity/docs/behaviors/index.html
The following documents are not Dexterity-specific, but will likely be useful to users of Dexterity:
Schema-driven forms manual_.. _Schema-driven forms manual: http://docs.plone.org/develop/addons/schema-driven-forms/index.html
Please report issues via the Plone issue tracker_.
.. _Plone issue tracker: https://github.com/plone/plone.app.dexterity/issues
Dexterity use questions may be answered via Plone's support channels_.
.. _Plone's support channels: http://plone.org/support
Contributors please read the document Process for Plone core's development <https://docs.plone.org/develop/coredev/docs/index.html>_
Sources are at the Plone code repository hosted at Github <https://github.com/plone/plone.app.dexterity>_.
Dexterity wouldn't be possible without the hard work of a lot of people, including:
(Please add your name if we have neglected to.)