it's the start of day three of plone conference 2006 and I am stuffed with both plone knowlege and lovely delicious fatty food. This hasn't been as debauched as previous conferences (for the netsight contingent at least) as the jet lag has made us flake out in the evening before we manage to to do any serious damage to our livers.

Last night we took a cab up to a mall to try to procure some cheap consumer electronics - the cab ride there and back was an experience in itself - the first driver hadn't got a clue where he was going and was asking for directions from us, while mysteriously changing lanes and indicating for no reason - the driver on the way back thought he was in Gran Turismo or something.

The final afternoon and I face the trickiest decision over which session to attend - all three tracks look useful. I wanted to go to Nate Aune's multimedia and podcasting tutorial, but i'm fairly well up to speed on that already, but it was difficult to decide between the KSS/ Azax and the UI's 2.0 tutorials. I plumped for KSS on the basis that I have no idea what it is..

i'm two days into plone conference 2006 and it has all been a bit of a whirlwind so far. I'm eight hours behind UK time and travelled 26 hours to get here after missing our connecting flight in houston, thanks to some helpful individual at passport control who wouldn't let us jump the queue.

so far we haven't ventured much further than three or four blocks away from the venue, but luckily there are ample bars and restaurants close by. The hotel has good wifi, the conference venue wifi has been intermittent but seems to be improving. I've been too busy to blog much, but I have uploaded one or two photos to flicker.

The conference itself has been interesting and the keynote this morning has given me a clearer understanding of where plone is at the moment and where it is going. I was also pleased to note that I am not alone in having trouble with migrations between version and at least it is a recognised issue and much thought and effort is going into a solution, and that solution involves being able to dump a sites content into an intermediate format that can be used to populate a new site, thus giving me a way to get my content where I can see it, rather than hidden in zodb/zexp voodoo.

If you are like me and have thousands of unread emails for various mailing lists cloghging up your gmail account, you can bulk delete them (rather than paging through and manually secting then deleting 100 or so at a time), by using a filter, or in my case changing the existing filter to delete any matches, then selecting the "apply to x conversations below" checkbox and updating the filter. Don't forget to uncheck the delete checkbox and update the filter again afterwards, unless you want all future matches to automatically be deleted (in which case you might be better unsubscribing!).

At the moment, my pet plone project DFR skate zine is still live, but because netsight have some devious plans for the server it is on, I am trying to upgrade it to the latest version of plone. The site is current running plone 2.1.1 (tip: if you can't remember what version of plone your site is running, go into the ZMI and click on portal_migration - you'll find lots of useful info there, including the plone version).

Initial attempts didn't go well, but I haven't given up yet. I'm now trying a different approach - creating a blank plone 2.5 site and trying to bring the content over bit by bit. Some of it imported just fine and other objects are throwing various key and attribute errors.

This blog post by Andreas Jung looks like it could be quite useful - my version jump is nowhere near as big as the version described here, but the technique looks interesting - particularly the script for cloning a tree of objects.

I have some fairly radical plans for the development of the DFR site, I was actually thinking of recreating the skin and content type products from scratch, because a) I want a single skin for public and admin view now and b) because the archetypes content types were patched together in a bit of an ad-hoc way, and now they seem a bit.. well... unclean, and basically I think I can do better now..
so... the masterplan at the moment is to extract the content into some format that I can get to the data easily (as I still find it very confusing trying to get to data "lost" in zodb, when the site is broken), then write a script to populate the new site from the data. Obviously xml fits the bill (along with files and folders for media content).

Marshall and XMLForest have been whispered to me on a need to know basis! If I can crack this i'll be much more confident about maintaining plone sites long term, in the same way that I am confident with CMS's that use a SQL database for storage.

If you become locked out of a drupal site because you disabled the login form and can't work out where to log in, you can reach a login form by navigating to e.g. yoursite/?q=user/login (or the clean url equivalent)

This command will delete all those pesky .svn directories that have been left by subversion:-

find ./ -name ".svn" | xargs rm -Rf
(obviously you will want to keep the .svn folders if you are still using subversion!)

Today I find myself in Caffe Nero on the triangle. I'd always discounted it before because I didn't realise it had an upstairs bit and I didn't like the idea of using my laptop downstairs with people queing for coffee looking over my shoulder. I'm presented with three possible wifi connections - StreetNet, SurfandSip and Caffe Gusto next door. I couldn't get connected to surfandsip (and I think it's a paid service anyway?), Streetnet seems a reasonable signal, and Caffe Gusto is weak but useable (a bit cheeky too considering, but it's nice not to have to fill out the survey that you do with StreetNet)

I went back to Boston Tea Party today, mainly because i wanted to try Goldbrick House, but it wasn't open at 8.30am (I checked back later, it opens at 9 - a bit late for pre-work coffee. The girl in there said she thought they had wifi for customer use - not sure whether it was streetnet or their own).

Anyway, I decided to see how reliable StreetNet is if I threw caution to the wind and didn't tunnel everything through ssh. Seems it's fine - maybe I confused it before by validating normally, then reverting back to ssh tunnelling..

It's back on my list - nice latte, nice Ikea Poang chair to sit in upstairs by the window :)

It took me ages to work out how to do this for some reason. The solution was to go in via the Admin Control Panel, find the user (via user search on Admin CP homepage) and edit their profile, which will contain a drop down for primary group and multi-select box for secondary groups - select which ones you want and update. Warning - it is possible to lock yourself out of IPB this way!

By some fluke of circumstances, I have ended up listening to my iTunes library organised by song name, beginning with Sonic Youth - Teenage Riot. It's shaping up into a nice little playlist - who needs a DJ ;-)

Teen Age Riot - Sonic Youth
Teenage Ska - The Skatalites And Friends
Tell Her Tonight - Franz Ferdinand
Tell Mama - Janis Joplin
Tell Me Baby - Red Hot Chili Peppers
Tell Me Why - Neil Young
Tell You Why Tomorrow - Husker Du
Temptation island - love as laughter
Terraplane Blues - Robert Johnson
Territorial Pissings - Nirvana
Test Transmission - Kasabian
Testimony - Grant Lee Buffalo
Testing 1, 2, 3 - Barenaked Ladies
Texas Idiot - Athritic Foot Soldiers (AFS)

via hicksdesign:-
img {
width: 0;
padding-left: 20px;
background: url(mynewimage.gif) no-repeat;
}
I have a real-world example of where this would be useful in plone skinning - in some places inline images are still used for icons (here and there - they are generally being phased out). At the moment I usually set them to display:none and apply padding and background image to the containing element, but this may be a better solution.

I'm surprised that I still can't find an ftp export plugin for iPhoto. This would be really handy for maintaining websites but also using the ftp facility with photobox . In fact a photobox export plugin for iPhoto would be even better. If anyone knows of one or a tried and tested solution please leave a comment here!

and just like that my battery fixed itself! Ha. if only - I actually coughed up and bought one from ebay in the end as the Apple store one isn't going to arrive until well after plone conf seattle (but when it does i'll have a spare which will give me a full working days worth of battery power). I think the calibration is confused at the moment as it thinks I have 4539mAh capacity (out of 4400mAh) - the battery status think in mac osx is stuck on "calculating"

This is a useful article about what Content Management is (and isn't). Probably very useful to give to clients who aren't sure what they want or need (or don't need) in the way of a CMS.

Fantastic - at last a solution to IE background image flicker that doesn't involve applying background images to containing elements. I will be using this - I'll be interested to know if I can use the IE CSS filter version without a performance hit, as that could just sit in my IE-only stylesheet.

As I mentioned before a few of us from netsight are going to Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle. Besides actually attending the conference i've been reading up on other things to check out while i'm there. I plan to visit a few of these coffee shops with wifi and i've also just read that the blog business summit is also on at the same time - maybe there could be a bit of cross-fertilisation there as many of the plone bloggers will be at Plone conf?

DFR Skate Zine is the lovechild that keeps me and Plone together outside of our business arrangement.

I need to move the site from plone 2.1 to 2.5, and i've been putting it off.

I provisionally tried a quick import of the zexp for dfr skate zine (exported from the live site on plone 2.1) into a fresh plone 2.5 install on my mac. After resolving the dependencies (see previous post) I was left with this import error:-

'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xe2 in position 4: ordinal not in range(128)

it's this sort of error that makes me shudder, then panic that I have lost all my content (even though it is all still online!), I then start to make threats to rebuild the whole thing in drupal unless someone can help me out ;-)

Full traceback

something worth bearing in mind when moving a plone site (or upgrading a plone site, or any other process that requires a full export and reimport of a plone site). If like me you have a habit of installing lots of products just to see what they do, it is worth uninstalling them (removing any objects in the site created using them first) before you do the export. Otherwise you might just find yourself having to track down all the products you used at any point on the site before it will let you import the zexp.

I wonder if I am missing here - While the plone navtree is set up to help me apply a style to the currently selected item, I can't think of a way to apply a style to the parent folder of that item. If the current location is something like:-

root -> sub-folder 1 -> item 3

"item 3" will have a class of :"navTreeCurrentItem" applied to it, but I would also like "sub-folder 1" to have a class, something like "navTreeCurrentNode" so that I could apply a style to that too.

I can't think of a straightforward way (well, any way in fact, I get so lost trying to find the relevant bit of code in plone 2.5) to do this, please let me know!