Q:

How to manage a remote Plone site from my local Plone 5.0?

My team has developed a Plone site using 4.3 and put it on a virtual server. Although I am able to manage many settings as an admin user through the Plone site over the server, when I try to install more add-on and themes to the site, I realize I don't have its buildout nor any file on my Plone5.0 folder. Is there a way for me to pull down that Plone site to my local machine, and create an identical site using Zope instance? Thanks!

A:

Buildout is not 'managed' TTW (through the web), you must have access to the server filesystem where the Plone is hosted. The buildout automates the installation and/or configuration of Plone and their additional components (like a webserver, cache service etc.), but not only Plone, and many other softwares built with python (or not). 
From buildout.org website: "Buildout is a Python-based build system for creating, assembling and deploying applications from multiple parts, some of which may be non-Python-based."
In your case, you can't simply manage a Plone instance in 4.3 through another remote one in 5.0 (not even with same version, as far I know). Well, at least, not without ZEOCluster (and the versions should match).
The unified installer from Plone.org is based on buildout and is well commented (check for files named buildout.cfg, base.cfg, develop.cfg etc.).
To upgrade your plone site from 4.3 to 5.0 you can check this link: http://docs.plone.org/manage/upgrading/, section "Upgrading Plone 4.x to 5.0" The migration should be more simple than older versions like 3.x or 2.x.
You also can use collective.transmogrify (and friends - jsonify, dexterity, filesystem etc.) to 'copy' contents from your live plone 4.3 to a local development in 4.3. In most cases, those tools are recommended for large Plone sites (less than ~100 contents can be a overkill), in my opinion. So, then you can upgrade the 4.3 instance to 5.0 locally. That's the roughly way to do so. Anyway you should have access to the buildout on both Plone instances (local/remote) and a good knowledge of the Plone ecosystem (Zope, ZoDB, Python etc.).
Check if your Plone instance contains content types developed with Archetypes (AT), because, Plone 5 uses the Dexterity content type as default, no more AT. The builtin content types in Plone (folder, file, image etc) can be upgraded by plone.app.contenttypes, but custom content (add-ons) should be migrated by a developer or their maintainer.

