Hello, I am trying to help out a friend who had a co-worker leave that was the ONLY person there who understood the company website, which uses Plone. I have HTML knowledge as well as some PHP. I am trying to learn how Plone works and how to navigate to various areas that need editing. Here is my problem:
The large blue button that says "BOOK ONLINE NOW" goes through to a secure page with a pop-up window. I need to find where the content of that pop-up window is stored so I can make an edit. As far as I can tell, when I go through the Home>Contents, I am only finding the files for direct pages (similar to Wordpress pages). Where would I go to look for files on the database end of things?
Looks like a pretty old Plone site. Resources likes CSS could be stored within Zope's database or the CSS is part of a policy package and resides on the filesystem.
Plone is very flexible. Unfortunately, this implies that often different solutions exist for the same problem and it is not necessarily straight forward to find out how/where a given case is handled.
In general, there are two cases:
what you look for is in the file system
what you look for is in Zope's (or even an external) database
To check 1), I would look at the HTML source code of your page, determine key strings and make a recursive search over the sources to find the implicated artefacts.
One uses 2) mainly for content (your description does not directly indicate that your observation come from content) and for customizations. You can find many customizations via the ZMI (= "Zope Management Interface") in the object portal_view_customizations (that is the typical place for customized scripts/templates/views). Unfortunately, custom scripts or templates can be stored anywhere in the Zope database; portal_view_customizations is just the typical place. Let's hope that this is not your case.
The link of the button goes to a "s1a.cfg" file. Try to find the file on the server's disk.
You can find the webserver (Apache) configuration files in /etc/httpd or something like that. Check those config files to locate the DocumentRoot for your website. The folder named there should contains a file called s1a.cfg or something called query.
You can try something like find /var/www -name s1a.cfg as well.
Thank you for all your replies! I am realizing I don't have login information for for the web hosting, so I don't have access to the /etc directory or anything outside of the Plone installation. I'll be inquiring about that and see if I can't find the s1a.cfg file. Thanks again!
The link redirects to another URL, which does not have anything to do with the Plone site, but on a static site with some 'old school script (cgi-bin)'.
The site is on the same server (machine), but not related with Plone in any way.
What does the booking script (site) do ? Does it just send a mail or are data added to some database or something?
If things (cgi-bin scripting) becomes difficult , you could consider making it in Plone (unless it does a lot of 'magic', like writing to a database). There are add-ons that let you make forms in Plone without programming (or with just a little programming). You probably still gone need login for the server to install those add-ons, though.