If you’ve never used Plone before, the easiest way to get started is to install it on your windows desktop. Plone installs it’s own webserver, which can be confusing if you’re trying to install it on a server which already has Apache or IIS running.

1. Download Plone for Windows.
2. Make sure you are logged in as the Administrator.
3. Run the installer. The installer asks you to create a username and password. This will be used to access Plone, it is not creating a Windows User.
4. Done! Now find Plone in your start menu, and run it.
5. Click the ‘Start’ button to start Plone
6. Now you should be able to browse to localhost to see your Plone install
7. You can log in with the user you created during the installation process.

After I installed, I tried to create a user and found that I couldn’t because Plone could not send any email. There is two problems here: first, I needed to tell it what to use for an outgoing mail server, and I you’ll also need to set the email address of the administrator.

To set Plone’s ‘From’ email address

1. Log in using the user you created during the installation.
2. Click ‘Preferences’ in the upper right.
3. Click ‘Portal Settings’ on the left.
4. Enter an email address.

Setting Plone to send Email

1. Log in using the user you created during the installation.
2. Click ‘Preferences’ in the upper right.
3. Click ‘Mail Settings’ on the left.
4. Fill in the outgoing mail server. Sometimes you must use the mail server of your internet provider, like: ’smtp.charter.net’, and you won’t need to use a username and password. For the UW, ’smtp.washington.edu’ is the mail server, and you have to use your UWNetID username and password to authenticate to the mail server.

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