playing with plone

I am still playing with plone, it it quite cool; however I had problems with the install, it ended up taking 5 hours on Friday to get it going. Since then, I played with it only a little bit. It feels like any other CMS out there, so I'm dieing to get under the hood of zope; but all this new stuff is to much to do at once.

Incase you are wandering, what took so long getting it installed was finding out I didn't have a python library needed to run plone. The Python Imaging Library (PIL) adds image processing, this is how plone can do things like rotate an image after you uploaded it to the web server. Cool yes? So far the best feature of plone is the ability to hide the site columns so you only have the data column across the full width of the screen. I thought about that one for a second and decided it can be done on anything with some good CSS + javascript code. Onclick width=100% or width=500px... or whatever it is.

Now I am moving on to xmlHttp, which is equally frustrating since I have to learn how to do it for each browser. Stupid non-standard code! Does anyone have any advice