The basics

• The most important thing to realize is that Plone is a "placeful" system. That is, it matters where you put stuff. Think of it like just another filesystem. The place you put an object actually becomes its URL.
• So, when you want to put up new content, first think about where it should go. Then, navigate to that area, Then create the content .
• So, if you want to create an Event, first go to the Event folder, and add it there. To make this easy on your already overworked brain, this is actually the ONLY location you can add events. But still, this also holds true for more generic content
• Learn to use the wysiwyg editor. It has lots of nice features, like easy linking to pictures  while showing you thumbnails. You can also edit HTML directly, but the editor will scrape out lots of evil tags. It uses htmltidy to do this.
  
• Paste your content as plain text, then style it using the styles available in the editor. Copy and paste from OpenOffice or (god forbid) Word delivers absolute crap.
• Think about your content before you place it. Is it an event? Is it a news item? Please DON'T use both.
• Please use the "Description" field. It's nice for the internal search engine, it's nice to external search engines. The Description field can ONLY contain plain text, no html. This is to ensure compliance with all kinds of metadata standards (Dublin Core for those who care)
• You will notice that while you are logged in , you will see little icons in front of all content that makes it easier to see if it's a document, a folder, a newsitem, or whatever. These icons are not shown to anonymous visitors, as they look crap, but are handy while editing.

About Workflow and State:

• Each content item has a "state". The standard states are: Published, Public Draft and Private. No prizes for guessing what they do...
• only the "Published" state will show up automagically in the "news" and "events" portlets. So publish your content, using the drop-down menu on the top right, that mentions: "state: xxxx".
• and remember to set content in the "internal" section to "private" !!!
• you may not be able to publish content anywhere, sometimes you can just "submit" it. Then, somebody with "editor" rights can publish it for you.
  
• For the moment, we stick with a simple workflow. We may create more complicated ones if the need arises.
  

The most important content types:

• "Richdocument". This is the most generic one. It's a page that can contain anything. The nifty thing about it, is that it can contain image and file attachments, and that it can do magic stuff like auto-thumbnailing the images and floating them around your text.
  One drawback: as you create a new RichDocument, it has no fixed place in the database yet. This means you cannot directly add attachments while it is being created for the first time. So: Create the document, save, edit again, add images and file attachments. In the text of your document you can refer to embedded images just by their name.
  
• News. This is for, you guessed it, news items. They should be reasonably short, and can contain ONE special image, that is automatically shown as a thumbnail in the News overview. Of course you can link to other images and show them, but there's only one auto-thumbnail.
  In general, we show news that's up to 3 months old, after which it gets auto-moved to the archive section.
  
• Events. Yep, it's for events and courses. It can contain a full styled description of any length, so no need to create both an event and a descriptive site anymore.
• The Blog. In the blog, you can create Blog entries. Duh.
• Link. You can only put these in the "Links" folder. Even then, they will only show up in the listing if you fill in the description, and if you  also pick a keyword (on the "properties" tab).
  
• SmartFolders. The best thing since sliced bread. Honestly. In principle, they are pre-populated searches. You define any number of criteria, based on content type, keywords, several date criteria and so on, just like you would with an "advanced search" query. The only difference: the results of this "SmartFolder" search are kept up-to-date in the background automagically. Thus, the results are very quick.
  This is actually how we implement the "News" and "Events" folders, they are nothing more than SmartFolders with the right criteria applied.