[Setup] Re: which install method is recommended

[Martin Aspeli]

browni wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm a brand new plone user.  I recently downloaded the 3.0.2 unified
> installer and used it to build my first plone site.  (RedHat Linux,
> root-install, zeo cluster, 2 clients).   Now, I'm looking at the
> documentation on plone.org, and alot of it seems to presume that you've used
> buildout to build the install.  
> 
> Can someone explain to me what the effective difference is between using
> buildout and using the Unified Installer?  Should I start over?

The Unified Installer is great to get up and running quickly, and if you 
plan to use Plone mostly as it comes out of the box, maybe with a few 
add-on products.

The buildout approach is great if you're a developer, or if you want to 
have a bit more fine-grained controlled. I also find it easier to work 
with buildout when it comes to installing packages that are distributed 
as eggs, which more and more packages are, but you can use the 
easy_install binary that the Unified Installer installs to install 
egg-based packages.

Note that in the future, we hope that the installers will actually just 
create a pre-configured buildout for you, unifying (heh) these two 
approaches further.

Martin

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book