Chapter 4. Administration
If you have read any of the online Plone documentation or Plone books, you will notice that most of the topics covered in this book are not new. What is new is the Buildout-driven approach to site management. Buildout has been covered before, but only as an aside. A modern Plone site is comprised of many parts that may be tedious to assemble by hand. Fortunately, Buildout lends itself to the task.
Another tool, Make (http://www.gnu.org/software/make/), is perhaps equally well-suited to the task. If you are familiar with Make, Buildout should feel somewhat familiar. The first difference between them is the configuration file syntax. Another difference is that Make is written in C, and is typically used to compile C code, whereas Buildout is written in Python, and is typically used to assemble Python packages. Although they are different in many ways, both the tools share similar concepts:
Building targets or parts
Controlling the build process with configuration files...
