Press Room is a simple add-on product which can be used to easily manage an online Press Room within your Plone site. It adds 4 new content types to your Plone site including a Press Release, a Press Clip (i.e. an outside news piece), and a Press Contact (someone who might be available to speak to the press.)
   
It also provides a Press Room, a folderish content type with a nice default view and some automatically created folders and Collections (aka Smart Folders) to help you organize and present your press materials.
   
Some press rooms we observed in making this product are found at microsoft.com, intel.com, nrdc.org, sierraclub.org, and google.com.  Our goal was to make something suitable for many kinds of organizations, including nonprofits, businesses, educational institutions, and more.

Current Status of Press Room

The 3.0 line of PressRoom is tested with Plone 2.5.3 and Plone 3.0. We assume it will work for most Plone 2.5.x and 3.0.x releases.  If you have a Plone 2.1 site, please see the PressRoom 1.1 line.  
   
Note: we opted to skip a 2.0 line in order to sync up with the Plone version number that Press Room supports. Hence the 3.0 line works with Plone 3 (and 2.5) and 3.5 will be intended to work with Plone 3.5 (and 3.0).  We are committed to supporting the two most current Plone releases at a time.

• Known bugs and issues are listed at http://plone.org/products/pressroom/issues
• Suggestions welcome!  (Code even more welcome!) http://plone.org/products/pressroom/roadmap

Installation

Install in the usual way, by:

• Uncompressing Press Room in your Zope instances "Products" directory
• Browse to your plone site --> site setup --> add/remove products
• Click install (or you can use the QuickInstaller tool in the Zope Management Interface)

Usage

We recommend creating a Press Room object in the root of your site. Then begin creating Press Releases, Press Clips and Press Contacts in your Press Room.
     
The "Add Press (item)" links in the Press Room will shortcut you to subfolders intended to store these items.  Only items stored in their appropriate subfolder will be shown in the Press Room view.
     
You may create Press Releases, Clips and Contacts elsewhere in your site, but these will not be shown in the Press Room view.
     
You might find it useful to suppress the ability to add normal News Items if Press Room replaces that need.  You can do that by going into the portal_types tool in the ZMI and unchecking "implicitly addable" for News Items.
   
Note that in Plone 3.0, the infrastructure supporting each Press Room by default is created as "private".  The Press Room provides a button to publish all of these.  That button will NOT publish any actual Releases, Clips or Contacts -- just the folders that contain them and the Collections that aggregate them.