Overview

Download the product, usually from the Plone.org site, but sometimes from SVN. Copy it into the /products directory of your Zope instance. Restart Zope. Add and configure it.

You'll need bits of this process for products you create when you use ArchGenXML, for example. The first product I installed was ATVocabularyManager.

On my PC, I download the products and then install them. But on a remote host, it might be smarter to download them directly to your remote system, avoiding the step of uploading from your PC to the remote system. Be careful when uploading, ASCII files can be uploaded as binaries, or visa versa.

Download

If you're downloading from Plone.org/products, this is simple. I've read that you shouldn't use WinZip to unpack these files, since it has problems with empty directories and zero-length files. I use 7-zip. Be sure when you unpack, you preserve the directory structure.

I don't know how to get files out of SVN yet.

Install

On to your PC: Copy into the C:\Program Files\Plone 2.5\Data\Products directory.

Onto a remote host, in this case, WebFaction: Use an SFTP program to upload the file; Fugu on OS X, WinSCP on Windows.

On WinSCP/Webfaction, hostname is username.webfactional.com. From your Plone website, Site setup > Add/Remove products tells you the path at the top of the screen. For me it was something like /home2/username/webapps/zope/Zope-xxx.instance/Products.

On Zettai, it was tau.zettai.net.

Add and configure

Restart Zope. You can do it through the web by accessing your root ZMI. This isn't the one you can reach through the Plone UI. I go to http://admin.username.webfactional.com/manage. From there, go to the Zope control panel and click Restart.

You can also restart Zope from the command line. Details to follow.

Go to Site Setup > Add Products.

Problems

Some products won't even show up in the list if their prerequisites aren't there (like PloneFormGen). Check that carefully.