Some notes and thoughts from day of plone conference 2010. These are mostly in note form, but wanted to get these online anyway, while they are fresh in my mind.

fixing the ungoogleable by Elizabeth Leddy

What happens when something breaks, and a simple google search doesn't offer any results?

First, warn people (so they don't bother you while you fix it, and they don't panic).

Work out how quickly can you access your backups? I think this is very important - personally for smaller sites i'm doing individual site backups as packages mainly to make it convenient to restore them in a local dev environment, but I know some people are relying on whole server backups on tape. This would be laborious to restore in an emergency.

Isolation by elimination -> network, hardware, software, data
map out your system!

Eliminate things by switching them off - write your code so that it can handle dependencies being switched off.

Set up a system so that you have an isolated instance (so you can look at logs of only your own activity, rather than mixed with everyone elses)

Create a dashboard (maintenance page)

Monitoring

Write Test case's to diagnose faults

Start writing a "help" email, but don't send it. This is apparently known as "rubber ducking". I do this all the time, I often spot my mistake when I past in a traceback to an email message to send to someone!

"horizon of intervention" - At what point do you need external help?

Get to know people with specialisms and buy them a beer! Participate in the plone community (I really need to do more of that).

Create tickets and close them as you go

Document your processes.

The state of plone caching by Ricardo Newbery

cachefu - useful tool, but as far as "internet time" goes, this is a little long in the tooth now (started 2006). End of life - critical bugfixes only

plone.app.caching - will be in future plone releases, but available now

load testing with funkload (not accurate regarding CSS/ image discovery)

load testing with multi-mechanize

BrowserMob - not free

Building a custom app with plone with minimal development by Eric BREHAULT

This was extremely interesting - Eric is the project manage for Plomino - a plone add-on that provides application development toolkit for creating database applications within plone - i.e. the types of database applications that non-technical people might create on there own machines with Lotus Domino, Filemaker or Access. The data is still stored in the ZODB, but models and forms can views can be created through the web. Formulas are done in python.

I can see this being really useful - all too often I end up building custom applications based on complex access database or excel spreadsheets i've been provided, but if I can persuade clients to use Plomino, then not only will it help get that data in a format suiteble for building a web application, but data can be collaborated on across teams, rather then emailing around (and inevitably forking spreadsheets and databases). There were some nice examples of data visualisation - a great quote "almost useless, but very nice"" - you need these to impress your boss.

Themeing with XDV (Diazo) Laurence Rowe

I wrote some notes on this yesterday, connected to Nates Deliverance talk, so won't go into this here, other than to quote Laurence: "we write XSLT, so you don't have to"

collective.amberjack: chapter one. The interactive age. Massimo Azzolini

Amberjack is a Javascript library for creating a site tour/ tutorial. Collective amberjack wraps this up as an add-on for plone. Interactive tutrials can be created.

An example was given using the windmill testing framework (windmill in itself looks nice alternative to selenium).

The Art of Integrating Plone with Webservices with David Glick

Most of this was over my head, but one important note I made from this is about urlib (which I use in a django screen scraper app i'm developing) can have two possible error responses - URLError and HTTPError - two possible error responses.

external ecommerce and plone playing along with Sasha Vincic

There seems to be a bit of a theme going here - an acknowledgement that Plone works out best long term if you use it as a "black box" CMS, and don't try to do everything with it. The upgrade path is easier if you don't add on your own customisations - "clean plone". The current plone ecommerce offerings are not as good as external systems, so it is better to integrate with an external system, which is also then kept clean to allow easier upgrades.

In the python world there are some Django Ecommerce stores LFS and Satchmo, but the store doesn't have to be Python - other proven systems such as magento can also be integrated with Plone.

To integrate with plone you need to integrate search, linking, thumbnailing. Valentine achieved search compatibility by creating objects in plone via an RSS import - see valentine.rssobjects. A latecomer to the talk asked "but which plone ecommerce product would you use if you had to?". Answer "we wouldn't".

collective.transcode.star (lightning talk)

manage online transcoding
http://plone.org/products/collective.transcode.star - looks interesting, and may bring plone back into the picture for a project i'm doing.

BlueDynamics bda.plone.finder

osx style finder widget for navigating/ organising content in plone - looks great!

Just back home after day one of Plone Conference 2010, with my mind buzzing so thought it would be a good time to write up some of my thoughts and notes. It was really difficult to choose between the talks on offer on the three different different tracks, but here are some thoughts on the ones I attended.

Keynote by Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan

Two main themes here - ubiquity/availaibility and designer friendliness.

To make Plone more mainstream it needs to be available to non-technical end users through the same means that other systems are already available - namely being able to deploy easily on cheap hosting, specifically the one-click installers on shared hosting in cPanel and similar. This would allow users to easily evaluate Plone for their needs in the same ay that they can already with wordpress, drupal and joomla - apparently there is a new joomla instance created about every two minutes. I must stop Alan Runyan and see if he has thought about microsoft web platform installer - nowadays this includes the option to install wordpress, drupal, modX, and load of other systems, including downloading and installing dependencies. It would be great if Plone was in that list.

One of the aims of Plone 5 is to make it more designer friendly. I think this is really important - even though since the release of plone 4 i've started using plone again for intranets and extranets (mainly straight out of the box with a few minor cosmetic tweaks), I currently still use something like wordpress, or a home-rolled CMS for website builds. That is now going to change - the theming story is being completely re-written by the introduction of Deliverance/XDV/Diazo (already available - more on that later), and Deco (TTW layout and content editing). The aim is to make Plone appeal to designers as something that helps, not hinders them.

Quote of the talk has to be from Limi - "Plone doesn't suck, because the developers don't hate the core technology" (or something like that) - in reference to the revelation that many drupal/wordpress/joomla developers admit they actually hate PHP, wheras Plone developers love python.

Deco: new editing interface for plone 5

The next talk I attended was Rob Gietema's demo of Deco. This is looking really good, although i'm a little bit skeptical of drag and drop and in-place editing (I like front-end based editing, but prefer lightboxed modal editing to in-place), mainly because i've seem layouts explode and page elements disappear, or refuse to drop in the correct place on similar systems in the past. However, I haven't actually tried this one yet, maybe i'm just clumsy! I think in general designers and content editors are going to love it.

LDAP and Active Directory integration

I attended Clayton Parker's talk on LDAP and active directory integration - can't say I absorbed much, but i'm sure i'll be asked to do this one day, so it's good to know that this is tried and tested and the tools are already there.

Easier and faster Plone theming with Deliverance and xdv

Nate Aune gave us an overview of Deliverance. I've known about Deliverance for ages, but the penny dropped for me today about how useful this is. The basic principle is this - deliverance acts as a proxy to transparently take HTML output from a website and merge it with HTML from a theme, according to a simple set of rules. In the case of plone, this means you can create a theme in static HTML and have content from a default theme Plone site displayed wrapped up in the static HTML. Simple rules can be applied e.g. "take the news portlet from the plone site, drop the header and footer and all the images and display in the element with and id of "recent-news" from my HTML theme. magic!

Nate quoted one example where the HTML theme is stored in a dropbox folder which the client has access to to make tweaks and changes. I can see front end developers and designers loving this.

There was much discussion at the end over which technology should be used for this - XDV is a fork of an earlier version of Deliverance, which has slightly different functionality. XDV, which is to be renamed Diazo, will be the theming engine for Plone 5. With that in mind, i'll concentrate my efforts on Diazo. I'm excited by this for non-plone reasons - a majority of my works seems to involve integrating technologies that don't belong together - this will really help.

Design and development with Dexterity and convention-over-configuration

Martin Aspelli gave a talk on dexterity - the (eventual) replacement for archetypes. This is already available, but not mature yet. The talk was mainly conceptual rather than code-led, focussing on best practice for designing your site or application - when it is suitable to create a content type, and when you might be better off creating a form, or using a relational database. Best quote "code is like a plastic bag" (reduce, reuse, recycle). Write less code.

Laying Pipe with Transmogrifier

Another talk from Clayton Parker - transmogrifier is a system to package up migrations of content from other systems. My thoughts on this were that it looked like hard work for a one off import (usually i'd write a one-off python script for something like this), but creating packages would benefit the plone community e.g. if there were packages available covering migrations from a standard wordpress, drupal or joomla, this would benefit plone. I suppose this could also be used to import content from older instances of Plone, where the upgrade path is broken.

Multilingual sites - caveats and tips

Sasha Vincic talkd about strategies and gotchas for multilingual site builds. Even though Plone has tools for this, there are common scenarios, such as the "missing page" scenario where a translation of a site may not have the same number of pages as the base translation. He also covered common issues such as escaped HTML being translated by third parties and being delivered content where HTML attributes have been translated, therefore breaking the HTML.

Guest Keynote: Challenging Business

This was an inspirational treat for the end of day one - Richard Noble is a fantastic speaker, and after a day of CMS talk it was great to hear his story of the challenges of his past world land speed record record achievements, and the current one - the Bloodhound SSC project. As well as building insane rocket powered cars (the current one has an F1 engine onboard just to drive the fuel pump!), his goal is to inspire children and young people to become engineers, as there is an impending massive shortage of engineers in training. I was also interest to hear that there will be no patents on the technology developed for the new car - the advancements will be made avaiolable for anyone in the engineering industry to build on - sound familiar?

When it comes to Content Management Systems (CMS's), i've been "round the block a few times" so to speak, having spent the last ten years mostly working on CMS driven sites - starting with bespoke classic asp/ MS Access (shudder) back in 1999, before moving onto bespoke php/mysql systems, wordpress, drupal, zope/plone and dabbling in countless others. My conclusion: there is no holy grail, because the people developing and maintaining the code and content vary, and there are other important factors. Therefore I always take time to decide on the best approach for each project.
It is rare that I get a "greenfield" project where I am free to start from scratch. Without getting right down to weighing up the pros and cons of individual systems, here are some of the factors that help me (and my clients) make a decision:-

• Will I be starting from scratch or building on something else?
• Am I working alone, or with one or more other developers?
• Does the client have a preferred technology i.e. if they already have an intranet written in a particular technology, it makes sense to use the same for their website. (Unless of course they hate their other systems - it might be a good bargaining point to go a different direction altogether!)
• What's the content like? - is there a large amount of text content, categories and pages or is it "snippets" of text that need to be editable, amongst otherwise highly graphical content?

Commercial Content Management Systems I'm not going to talk about the "big" commercial CMS's - the only people they are useful to are the people who's job it is to go and buy a CMS license, companies who own or sell the software and companies who have made the investment to become specialists in such systems. That counts me out, and as i've never heard a developer, designer or content manager singing the praises of such a system (entirely the opposite), i'm going to presume they are all overpriced rubbish, and talk about what I know! I know that sounds flippant, but I refuse to believe that any of the vendors of the expensive, closed commercial systems have solved problems that a community of thousands of people working on competing open source systems haven't. Also money saved on an expensive license can be spent on support, maintenance and customisation of a system with no license costs. Which brings me onto...

Off-the-Shelf open source CMS's One obvious route is to use one of the mature, all singing and dancing systems like Plone (zope/python) or Drupal (php/mysql). They are easy to install and have a comprehensive feature list, but usually one other thing in common - voodoo. By voodoo I mean a whole load of essential code deep down in the architecture that your average web developer (counting myself here) isn't supposed to touch, and can spend hours/ days working out how to hook into it to make seemingly simple changes. For someone who becomes an expert in the system, they have full access to the code, so become familiar with the hooks and this isn't a problem. For the charity/ company/ organisation where the development budget has run dry, it can be tricky finding anyone (available) who can work on it. If the content maintainer likes the admin interface these can work out really well, if they don't it can be a ton of reverse engineering to make it "work" for the content manager.

Bespoke CMS's On the other extreme you have a bespoke CMS written from scratch giving the developer fine grained control over everything they need to do, and easily picked up by another developer, provided that it is sensibly written. However, as developers usually have their own way of doing things, it may take another developer time to learn how the system works before they can make changes, or they may want to re-write it altogether! The downside of any bespoke system is that it can take months to build features that you get for free in an off the shelf system. I often build a bespoke CMS where I need to bolt new functionality onto an existing system, where there isn't enough budget to start from scratch.

Bespoke CMS built on a framework In between are bespoke systems built on a framework (such as Cake PHP, Ruby on Rails, Django), so much of the repetitive coding work (such as user management and admin forms) is handled for you, but it's still a bespoke system. The downside of these is that you need a developer who already knows, or is willing to take the time to learn the framework. The upside is that new functionality can be added quickly and in a consistent manner by someone familiar with the framework.

"In-House" CMS
By which I mean a bespoke CMS which isn't written from scratch each time, but a mature "tried and tested" bespoke CMS built and maintained by an agency or developer, then reusued or repurposed for each new project. The advantage of this is that the developer/ agency have a high level of familiarity with the system, so are able to make fine-grained changes as required, that they may not be able to make with other systems. The disadvantage is that these can be the trickiest systems to be picked up by another agency or developer, and their may be IP issues (see below)

Intellectual Property / licensing I've already said that i'm not going to talk about the commercial CMS's, but one consideration when choosing which way to go, particularly with a bespoke CMS, is what happens if you were to move to another developer or agency? Will the source code and database files for your CMS be handed over along with the website or are you going to have to license it /buy it/ start again? Also what would happen if you wanted to sell the website and CMS on at a later date?

Standalone vs Retrofitting This refers to the last of my bullet points above - not all websites are the same. Some (like news or university websites) are text-content heavy, with hundreds or maybe thousands of pages and categories, and some websites have highly designed (as in graphic design) content.

In the latter scenario it is often better to build the site as static HTML first and retrofit a simple CMS later. The bulk of the work in building such a site will be in getting it looking and behaving correctly, and their may need to be lots of fine tuning to the layout, which is easier if you aren't reverse engineering a theming system. Moreover, the text content may be confined to small snippets of text, or a simple news blog, which can easily be plumbed in later.

The former scenario would suit an off-the-shelf system that works standalone - i.e. one that allows content editors to start populating content before the templates are finished, which are then applied as a skin/theme later - it may even be the case that the site can't really be designed properly until the architecture and content are in place.

As an experienced Plone front end developer, people are often surprised when I often decide not to use Plone, in favour of something like Drupal or Wordpress. I thought it would be useful to explain why and how I make this decision. I know some of these points won't be popular in the Plone community, but they are based on experience, and think this blog post will be useful to people deciding whether to use it or not.

Plone is complex
From a development point of view, Plone is a complex piece of software, at least compared to something like Wordpress. I'm not going to go into specifics here, but for someone like myself who is primarily a front-end developer, sometimes I can lose days trying to add a simple custom feature, that I know I could create in hours on a php based site, probably just with a few lines of code in the template (a practice that is often frowned upon, but usually harmless and more importantly gets the job done). However much of this is down to my skillset and understanding (and probably my natural abilities to a certain extent) which brings me on to the next point.

Development resources - a chicken and egg situation
I have to hold my hand up and admit to being a bit of a "web monkey" when it comes to development - i'm self-taught, beginning with hacking around classic asp and php scripts and moving onto object orientated programming only in the last few years. With Zope and Plone the entry bar is higher - there is a whole framework to learn if you want to develop custom features, which is a good thing from a maintainability and system architecture point of view, but there is a significant time investment involved for someone wanting to transfer from something like php. Even an experienced Python developer will have some learning to do to get to know Zope and Plone.

This means that I struggle to find local freelance resources to work on a large Plone project with me. I also struggle to find sysadmins with zope/plone experience, and not being a sysadmin myself have found myself in a few hairy situations. I know of at least two ventures that have got into difficulties because of resource issues - I think partly because Plone can be a victim of it's own success - there are lots of Plone developers, but they are all busy!

Hosting Plone requires specialist hosting - or rather you can't run it on the majority of locked-down budget shared hosting. Many of my clients already have hosting arranged and don't want to move, so something like Wordpress suits their needs better, for a simple site.

Overkill for simple sites Sometimes a site only needs to be dynamic for the sake of a blog/ news section - I find plone is overkill for this, and often prefer to go with something more lightweight, even (gasp!) a bespoke CMS when I need to bolt extra functionality onto an existing site, and there is no budget for a rewrite.

So when would I use it? Without a doubt Plone makes a fantastic intranet, out of the box. I eat my own dogfood here - I use an unmodified Plone 3 site for my own company intranet and document management system. Drupal/ Wordpress do not even appear on the radar in comparison for this task. I would also use it for any site/ application that has a need for complex workflow, membership and groups.

Lastly, i'm happy to use it for any project where I can team up with an experienced zope/plone techie to help with the more low-level stuff. I was recently blown away by seeing how an experienced Plonista at Team Rubber quickly dealt with some temporary extremely high read/write traffic on a Plone site by firing up a whole set of zeo clients on amazon EC2 - a scenario that i'm sure would have been a nightmare to deal with on a drupal or wordpress site, and i'd be equally out of my depth without help.

In summary I hope this is useful and doesn't upset the Plone evangelists too much. Plone is a serious, well architected, secure system that leaves the competition standing in most cases. I think by "competition" I am talking about proprietry CMS and intranet systems that cost ten or hundreds of thousands of pounds, not the likes of Drupal or Wordpress. If you don't want to do much customisation it makes a good choice for smaller projects, but if you do you are going to need a developer (or invest in growing one of your own), who is a. available, b. you can afford, otherwise you might be better to go with something else, with a lower development entry level.

Now that i'm getting a bit more familiar with zope (2), rather than blog every time I work out how to do things that are blindingly obvious to most zope developers, i've started a zope cheat sheet, to keep track of bits and pieces of example code that took me a fair amount of googling, searching and begging to work out. Most of this is probably stuff that I should have learned on day one of my zope indoctrination, but instead I plunged straight into plone and archetypes and never got to learn the basics, which I think got me into trouble later on. There's not much there at the time of posting, and I need to create a more suitable template, but expect this to grow over the coming months!

I'm pleased to say i've achieved another of my 2009 goals, by launching the (unfinished) new version of one of my personal projects Too Old To Skate. The main site is now running php/codeigniter based sweetcron, which is used to pull content in from the original wordpress, flickr, delicious, twitter, vimeo and a friends blogger based site. I have plenty more planned for the site, but little to no time to do it, so I thought i'd upload the site unfinished in the meantime to allow myself to do incremental updates, rather than be embarrased by a holding page.

Amongst the plans are:-

• bring in the content (articles and photo galleries) from the now defunct plone(2) based DFR Skate zine - i'm thinking some sort of PHP/ codeigniter* front-end sucking in content (as XML/JSON or even plain HTML) from a Plone 3 site acting as a content server. Doing something like this with Plone has been on my mind for years! Maybe I should stick this in as a 2010 goal. Alternatively it may just end up as a skinned Plone 3 site on another subdomain - either would be good.
• Skin the blog to fit in with the main site.
• Other awesomeness - this is a non-commercial personal project and therefore my playground ;-)

*Having now played with both codeigniter and cakephp, I think I prefer cake. However as sweetcron is codeigniter based it would be plain silly to be using cake on the same project.

There's an interesting Plone 3 skinning article over here, which describes how to use viewlets. More interesting to me is the discussion at the end. The general points made here are:-

• Viewlets are complex and can be a barrier to non-programmers, but are probably being used for the wrong things
• Plone 4 will have some radical changes to make stuff like this easier (but learn Plone 3 in the meantime)
• Deliverance is an alternative for skinning, may ship with Plone 4
• Rolling your own public facing skin that ignores viewlets altogether is another alternative

Firstly, to echo something mentioned in one of the articles referenced below - if you just want to install and try out plone on osx leopard - use the installer provided on plone.org. If you want a little more control, or want to get a better understanding of how things work, below describes the steps used to get the development environment I have just set up. I usually get these things wrong when I venture out of the realms of point and click installers, but this was fairly painless. The main purpose for this post is to self-document the process for next time, but hopefully other will find it useful.

1. Install PIL using macports
after installing macports (GUI installer), run this in a terminal :-

$ sudo port install jpeg

This ensures that PIL (Python Imaging Library) is compiled with jpeg support. Thanks to Tom Lazar for the tip

2.check out (from svn) and run this excellent buildout by Florian
(in your home dir - you'll need svn installed)

$ cd

$ svn co http://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/buildout/python-macosx/

$ cd python-macosx

$ python bootstrap.py

$ sudo bin/buildout

This builds several different versions of python, and creates a virtualenv for the 2.x versions. I tried doing the last step without sudoing, but it wouldn't have it. As a result, you'll need an additional step to change the ownership of some of the files/ folders created by the buildout:-

$ cd ../

$ sudo chown -R  yourusername python-macosx

3. Activate your python 2.4 virtualenv:-

$ cd python-macosx/python-2.4

$ source bin/activate

Your command prompt should now have (python-2.4) instead of a $. For information on what a virtualenv is and why to use them, see Dan's article linked below.

4. Follow the instructions for installing ZopeSkel and Plone in Dan Fairs' article
(^^ scroll down and start at the heading ZopeSkel)

(python-2.4) easy_install ZopeSkel

(python-2.4) paster create -t plone3_buildout p3

(python-2.4) cd p3

(python-2.4) python bootstrap.py

(python-2.4) bin/buildout

5. start zope in foreground mode:-

(python-2.4) bin/instance fg

I think that's it. One thing to note is that both the python-macosx and plone 3 buildouts died on me at one point (stalled with no errors - wasn't sure if it was going to come back to life at a later date, so killed the process after about ten minutes of nothingness). In both cases I just tried the buildout again and it worked second time around. Hopefully I haven't missed anything - please do comment if you think I have, or if you followed the above step by step and had no problems/ problems. At time of writing i've only tried creating a default plone site and uploading an image to test the PIL support.

Graham Higgins for the heads-up!

Inspired by Elliot Jay Stocks post "Goals, Old and New", I thought i'd jot down a few goals* for 2009. In no particular order:-

• Launch a web app - the original reason for starting Olivewood. We already have a working prototype (a web based trading/ procurement/communication hub - successfully in service for a distributor over a year), it just needs some refactoring to make it suitable to be released to additional clients with slightly different needs.
• Relaunch Too Old To Skate - it's a personal project, and it's important for me to be working on at least one non-paying project, to remind me that i'm not just in this for the money. I'm already part of the way there with a sweetcron based mashup. I intend to launch it, unfinished or not in January.
• Attend at least one web conference - last year was just too manic, and combined with bad timing I only managed WDC this year. On my possible list are FOWA dublin, bamboo juice in cornwall, plone conf in budapest, Europython in Birmingham and the list goes on.
• Attend at least one barcamp. BathCamp this year was great.
• Fix on a php framework and use it on a "from-scratch" commercial project, and get really, really good with it. Cake is the current fave, though will likely be using Zend Framework too on a magento based project.
• Get to grips with plone 3 skinning - I want to consider myself a plone skinning expert again.
• Get further than "hello world" with Django - ideally at least one commercial project. I'm not beating myself up too much over this, I thrive on examples, so i'm letting other people do all the early adopter stuff ;-)
• Better customer service - by managing my workload to avoid juggling projects, saying NO occasionally, and generally working in a more controlled and predictable manner.
• Put up a proper portfolio on this site, maybe even a redesign - working on this website is always last on the list, it's still using the default wordpress theme from way back.
• Use and understand some technologies that i've been ignoring - JSON, WSGI, Zope 3
• Do more on-site freelancing for agencies. I seem to thrive in that environment. Maybe it's my agency background, or maybe it's because I get to focus on the task in hand rather than the whole "business" side of being a freelancer. There's also the whole co-worker thing.
• Keep trading and survive the credit crunch recession (Touch wood) i'm already booked up for the first few months of 2009 - lets hope the work keeps coming!

* web/ career related - i'll save the more personal goals for drunken new years eve conversations with friends!

The plone performance sprint is now underway at the Pervasive Media studio in Bristol. There are about 16 plone developers from Germany, Norway, Denmark, Italy, USA, and the UK, working for 4 days to work on optimising the performance of plone. I'll be dropping in, but unfortunately won't be able to contribute much due to other commitments.

More photos here.

Today is World Plone Day.

From the website:

"The World Plone Day (WPD) is a worldwide event. Our goal is to promote and educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using Plone in education, government, ngos, and in business."

We held an event in Bristol, which I streamed and recorded via ustream - available here. I did a lightning talk on how to use plone out-of-the-box as a small company intranet and searchable knowledge base, other talks included "big plone", contributing code back to the community and KSS.

The video was streamed straight from the webcam and built in mic on my macbook, so the sound quality isn't great, especially when the fan kicked in, but it was a bit of a last minute effort. Next time it will be camera, mic and tripod!

Firstly an apology: I was sent Martin Aspeli's Professional Plone Development for review back in October last year, and I still haven't got round to reviewing it - not out of laziness, but extreme time shortage due to going freelance/ starting a company last year. Hopefully I can make amends now by reviewing it section by section as I jump into Plone 3.

A bit of background about me and Plone: I have worked predominantly with Plone for about 4 years, coming from a background in classic asp and php. My area of Plone expertise is front end templating and skinning, which was my main area of usefulness at Netsight for a couple of years. I have also presented a couple of Plone based workshops at Bristol Skillswap, attended two Plone conferences and a Snow Sprint. Despite this involvement with Plone, I have had a love/hate relationship with it, at times thoroughly lost deep down in the software stack, and fighting my tendency to think purely in terms of scripts and relational databases, other times singing it's praises to anyone who will listen. Since leaving Netsight I have only worked on one Plone (2) project, as i've gone back to my old ways, favouring php for most projects, but just got stuck into an inherited Plone 3 project, and started using a vanilla Plone 3 site as a knowledge base/document repository/intranet/extranet for my own company, olivewood. (Hosted on a mac mini in-house, which I thoroughly recommend, but that's another post!).

I'm currently feeling a little lost, with the Plone 3, which is why I decided to finally start reading/ reviewing the book.
Ok, enough about me, lets talk about the book: I opened the book last night and read through the foreword by Alexander Limi, and the first chapter. It left me with a fantastic feeling about Plone and the future of Plone - it summarised what is different about Plone, and how important (and fun) it is to participate in the Plone community to get the best out of it - the polar opposite to working with a proprietary product, where the vendor tries to cultivate a community around it, but it's not the same. It also made me feel slightly guilty for moaning about aspects of Plone in the past - who exactly was I complaining to? I resolved to make sure that the next time something frustrates me, that I actively participate in making the situation better, i.e. to at least actively become part of the problem, if not part of the solution!

Chapter 1 covers Zope and Plone history, Plone as application vs Plone as framework, considerations for when deciding if Plone is the right tool for the job, and the importance of the community.
A couple of other things I learned from the foreword and chapter 1:-

• The original release of Plone was built (predominantly*) by just two people, Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan who didn't meet until Europython 2002 just after the first release
• The Goldegg initiative is a sponsored effort to improve Plone's framework stack, not a type of python egg!

Ok, I will try to deliver another installment as soon as possible, but i won't necessarily be doing it in order - i'll be skipping straight to chapter 8 (skinning)
* Building on top of Zope/ CMF - the work of many people!

Scenario: I added a new attribute "orderPriority" to a few different archetypes based content types. These attributes had default values. As this is an existing site, there were 400 or so existing objects that had not picked up these default values - i.e. they would only pick up the value after they had been re-saved. To make sure these objects picked up the default value I created a skin script, which I proxied as manager (watch out for indentation here, really must find a better way to display preformatted code):-

catalog = context.portal_catalog

# objects are all in folder /directory/listing/

listing_folder = getattr(context.directory, 'listing')



for brain in catalog(portal_type = ['NameOfMyContentType']):

print brain.portal_type + ' ' + brain.id + ' ' + brain.Title



listing = getattr(listing_folder, brain.id)

#this gets the default vakue from the schema

order = listing.getOrderPriority()   #this sets it

listing.setOrderPriority(order)



return printed

I needed to be able to sort by this field in a catalog query/ Topic/SmartFolder/Collection so, so I then added the field as a fielindex in the portal catalog, reindexed the catalog (ZMI) and used the collection edit options in site setup to add it as a field

"Dexterity is a system to create content types in Plone based on Zope 3 schema interfaces and simple content classes, with z3c.form add/edit forms. It aims to explicitly supports both through-the-web type creation with a well-defined path to filesystem code (and back)."

I'm excited about this, cant wait to see it arrive in Plone.
http://martinaspeli.net/articles/dexterity-meet-grok http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-conference-2008-dc/dexterity

Something I always forget to do when I override the title attribute in an archetypes schema (plone) is to specify accessor=Title (with a capital T). Omitting this leads to odd results, such as the ID of the plone objects created from the schema not being created from the title field, but something else (hmm.. the parent object's title maybe?).

(updated 10/6/2008 - to reflect Dan's corrections below)
pdb has long been on my radar, but I had kind of dismissed it as something for "proper" programmers, rather than a web monkey like myself. However, i'm pleased to say i've actually finally used it during some plone development! The trick (for me) involves running the plone site in foreground mode so you can see messages in a terminal, and then with pdb you can interact with it. In your python script you need to add:-

import pdb
pdb.set_trace()

when the script reaches this set_trace() statement, you get a pdb prompt in the terminal allowing you to interact with the script and it's variables at that point. e.g. print myvar to get the value of a variable or myvar.__class__ to find out what type of variable it is. You can also use 'n' to step through the script or 'c' to continue to the end.

Up until this point I relied on adding print statements in the scripts to try to work out what was happening - a bit like i've done for all my web dev over the years - a common mistake for me is to leave these in, then get confused clients asking why the word "here" and "foo=[1]" keeps appearing on their website!

You can also use a similar tool to debug zope skin scripts. This uses a similar principle - run your site in foreground mode, and you can interact with the skin script from the set_trace statement.

from Products.zdb import set_trace
set_trace()

If you are anything like me, you might be nervous about installing the recent plone hotfix in case you either break something or are under the impression it involves some unix command line foo. Don't worry, it is much simpler than that - the hotfix comes in the form of a product - download it, unzip it (well actually untar/ gunzip it) ,and drop it in your products directory and restart zope. Of course you will need access to your products directory, and the ability to restart zope to do this. If you haven't then it is probably safe to assume that it isn't your responsibility, so go and nudge whoever it is that deals with that stuff for you ;-)

Hot on the heels of the Bristol Drupal Users group I set up recently, comes the Wessex Plone Users group, aimed at Plone users in the Bristol, Bath and surrounding area.

Even though I seem to have slipped off planet plone recently (design or accident? - must find out!), i'm fascinated by the current debate about Through The Web (TTW) support in Plone. I must admit I have noticed a general "TTW is bad" vibe from hardcore Plone developers - in fact i've heard it said outright on many occasions. As a Plone integrator/ general web developer I can see the pros and cons of TTW, but i've certainly seen it as a selling point of Plone - people commissioning a CMS, even for a large corporate site or intranet often get excited at the possibilities of being able to make customisations and additions themselves without having to get expensive developers in to make changes - and why shouldn't they? I've also been a position where i've taken on a few customisations of Plone sites where the most of the site lives in the custom skin layer, edited TTW and it is a great way to make minor amends on the fly, and something that i've always liked about plone, even though I am fluent with file system development.

Sadly I couldn't make it to Plone Conference this year, but I have just got off MSN from Matt at Netsight, and he said that there are no fewer than eight thirteen Plone people form Bristol, UK attending - representing Netsight, Team Rubber and IRLT. Can any other cities in the UK claim that many Plonistas?

I've just made a breakthrough in my perception of Zope and its object database. Despite the fact I have been working with Plone for over three years i've always struggled to shift my way of thinking away from relational databases and SQL queries, due to my previous experience of building sites and applications mainly with asp (classic) and php, hooked up to a relational database.
So what caused my Eureka moment? A combination of:-

a. Not developing with plone for a while

Since going it alone I have been doing an eclectic mix of work for different agencies and companies, who all have their own pet technologies and ways of working (so far I have slotted straight into them all with a minimum of fuss- Jack-of-all-trades at your service! Except Perl. I had to turn that one down).

b. Doing a bit of old school Zope

From the moment I started with plone, when I haven't been skinning/ templating, I have worked almost entirely with Archetypes. Archetypes generates forms for you and all the other "magic" - some lovely helpful magic, some dark voodoo that shouldn't be spoken aloud in front of non-programmers (like me). This means that with Zope I never learned how to do a typical build a form that posts to script, script writes to database, script pulls out of database and renders it back in the page/form routine, which is usually the first thing I would learn with any other web technology/scripting language.

c. Starting to think in objects

Once again, this had more to do with not working with zope for a while. Before zope I only had a basic understanding of objects and only used them where I was forced to because I was working with someone elses code. I would encapsulate functionality by sticking a load of php/asp functions in an include file with a meaningful name, but I never took the step of wrapping them up in a class and treating the piece of functionality as an object. Something must have sunken in during my Zope years, because now I find it difficult to not think of something as an object.

So, i'm rambling - what exactly was my moment of clarity? It was simply adding a few extra fields (wait - properties) to portal_memberdata and personalize_form in Plone. I went off searching for the python script that would take the data out of the database and pump it into an object for me to use again in a page template - but of course, being stored in the ZODB, it already was an object. Z.O.D.B. Zope Object DataBase - geddit?

So in summary, I think anyone new to plone development could do with learning things the "old" way before they move onto developing with Archetypes - purely for the sake of demystifying the ZODB, especially if like me you come from a php/asp background and have trouble understanding why you would use an object database rather than a relational database.

Next stop Zope 3 - I've read several reports about the large amount of boiler plate code needed to create something fairly simple with Zope 3, and a few solutions to speed up the process, but I will definitely make sure to understand how it is done "manually" before attempting to move onto using any shortcuts this time.

I once remember reading somewhere that leaving a steady job to set up your own business is the adult equivalent of running off to join the circus. But that's what i've decided to do - as of June the 1st I will be my own boss, as after a lot of deliberation and heel dragging I have decided to bite the bullet and leave my contented job at Netsight to go into business with a friend of mine. I have always wanted to start my own business, but for various reasons I haven't, and a business opportunity was put in front of me, that if I didn't take then maybe it would never happen. At this point I wanted to link to the website of my new web application development company, but embarassingly I haven't built it yet, so I'll post about that when I have done it, and talk more about the new company, and the products and services we will be providing.

A few people have asked me if I will be continuing to work with Plone and the answer is basically this: The core business of my new company will be packaged web applications and these will not be built in plone, as the applications aren't CMS-like, and plone wouldn't be relevant. The applications will be built using some* scripting language/framework plus a RDMS. Zope 3 is a contender, but I don't have the experience to hit the ground running with that, but i'll certainly endeavour to get up to speed on it when time allows. However, the company will also be offering bespoke and ad-hoc development services and these will include Plone. For larger Plone projects and implementations I will refer enquiries to Netsight, as beyond the Plone skinning and customisation expertise that I have built up at Netsight over the last three years, the new company will not have the resources or expertise to support large plone projects. I will also still be contracting/freelancing for Netsight on Plone work - intially a couple of days a week, until they change the locks ;-)

Anyway, new company website to follow, and more details about exactly what we will be doing.

* probably unpopular amongst plonistas - check out my previous commercial experience and fill in the blanks yourself!

Another Plone session for Bristol Skillswap - not me this time, Team Rubber are doing this one, but Netsight are providing the beer!

http://bristolskillswap.eventwax.com/rapid-prototyping

Netsight have been so busy recently that we haven't updated our portfolio for a while, but I wanted to mention this site, as it gave us an excuse to experiment with some nice visual features such as scriptaculous effects, flash galleries etc. The site has a plone back end for Content Management, but the front end was built from the ground up, so is a nice example of a "non-ploney" plone-based site. It helps that Architen had some excellent photography to use on the site - all maintained by themselves via plone including image resizing and cropping for the portfolio pages.

For more details on the project see the write-up here

A bit of an exaggeration maybe, but I thought I would blog this just in case anyone encounters the same problem. A client phoned yesterday to say that his Plone (2.0.5 on W2K3 server) intranet wasn't working and could see that the python/zope service was not starting. As it had been running fine for months previously (albeit a bit of memory leakage), my first question was if anything had changed on the server. Other than windows updates, nothing had changed. Not being a windows expert and having burnt through hours trying to resolve a previous plone issue on their old windows server, I threatened to go over there and install vmware and give him a virtual machine running linux or FreeBSD to run the Plone intranet on. At that moment, the unix-phobic client spotted that where he had previously set the IIS https/ssl service to manual startup, the recent updates had reset it to automatic. This was stopping Zope binding to one of the ports (or something like that), hence the service failing on startup.

This was a fairly obscure, but it just goes to show that sometimes the mere mention of unix can sometimes solve windows problems :-)

I recently stepped down from my voluntary role as one of the Administrators for a popular skateboarding web forum (for old gits), due to time commitments (i.e. I couldn't commit any). I thought I would share a few tips I picked up from that and other forums i've implemented. The forum in question uses phpBB, but I think some of my observations will be useful for users of other forum software.

Choose your hosting carefully
A high volume web forum requires more availability than your average website, as regular users accessing it around the clock can get pretty upset when the forum is running slow or timing out. Physical location of the hosting can make a difference too - the host of this particular forum seemed to be having routing problems, with the forum unavailable for days at a time for some people while fine for others. Users complained a lot, and people complained that they couldn't get to the forum to complain, and that sometimes the forum timed out while they were complaining, resulting in them posting their complaints multiple times!

Over xmas, the (windows) host was infected by a virus, which resulted in the server being rolled back with no warning several days to the point in time before it got infected. This meant that the forum lost all content in the meantime. I had my own nightly off-site backups (i'll touch on this later), but because this happened over xmas and wasn't keeping an eye on the forum, people came onto the forum and posted before I had a chance to restore it from one of my backups, so there wasn't really much I could do without a lot of gruntwork, to merge it all back together, as there would have been problems with duplicate id's.

I don't want this to be a "linux vs windows" argument, because a linux server could also be hit by a virus and/or hacked, but I suspect - wrongly or rightly - that it's much more likely to happen on a windows host. Apparently this one was infected by a customer with ftp access.

Server resources are also important for a forum, particularly if the server is on shared hosting. The phpBB based forum I administrated would frequently grind to a halt, with no real way of telling what the problem was without direct access to the server (as it is on shared hosting). The search index (mysql) table for the forum is massive (i.e. hundreds of thousands of rows) and this is searched everytime anyone hit the site, not just by people making searches, but to display things like "posts since last visit". This also sais something about the efficiency of the phpBB software - it would be interesting to compare the efficiency with other systems once the search index has reached this sort of size.

I didn't choose the hosting for the forum in question, but it was chosen by someone (non-techie) on the basis that they host several other (static) sites with the company and never had any problems. Running a web forum is a different ballgame to hosting static sites. People hardly ever complain when they can't reach a static site, and a static site is less likely to go down because there are less failure points, and less resources needed.

Forums often have email notification functionality, i.e. people can choose to be notified when something is updated - this is also another point of failure on an inadequate host, such as this one.

I wasn't going to name and shame the host, but they haven't been too helpful in resolving the problems so I think in the interests of the public I would advise people not to use this company for a high volume web forum.

If your host turns out not to be suitable, you will need to move it somewhere else which can upset forum users even more, as it inevitably takes a few days for DNS servers to settle down.

If it's not essential, block the forum from search spiders
This won't be suitable for every forum, but if you don't want or need the forum content to be indexed by search engines, use robots.txt to exclude the forum directory. I did this after being hit by the infamous phpBB virus which used google to search for phpBB based sites to take down. I reasoned that this alone would help hide it from repeat attacks. It has also proven fairly useful to hide from spambots that use search engines to find victims, and makes the forum less attractive to those seeking to improve their pagerank by having links on the forum.

remote backups
I mentioned before that the host server got hit by a virus resulting in the machine being rolled back several days - database backups stored on that machine would have been lost too. I used a mysql server client and cron job running on a linux machine to keep 30 days worth of remote backups in the form of date stamped sql dump files. If I had managed to disable posting on the forum as soon as it had been rolled back I could have restored remotely from one of the backups and only lost a few hours worth of content.

Don't make people think
As the majority of the users of the forum are non-techies, they can have trouble with certain features such as posting images and links etc. The more features you give them, the more requests for help you will get. Only enable what you don't mind supporting. A good example of this is enabling HTML in posts, then requiring people to select "disable HTML" for a post where having HTML could cause problems (e.g. the built in phpBB code that is usually used for formatting).

Avatar Size

One modification I did make was to use CSS to limit the area shown of an avatar. This was in response to people huge avatars and distorting the page, then either complaining, or not understanding when they were asked to limit the width of their linked (i.e not hosted on the server) avatars. Since I made this very simple hack, people tend to understand what they need to do to make their avatar display properly. On systems where avatars are uploaded to the host and resized, this isn't a problem.

Modification hinders upgrades
The more you modify a piece of forum software, the more difficult it is to upgrade and apply security patches.

Single sign-on and spam handling
On a seperate forum where we (we = netsight) have integrated the sign-on (and sign-up) for an Invision Power Board (IPB) and a Plone site, we have just started having problems with spam, because the default plone sign-on allows people/spambots to bypass the anti-spam measures, and the user management features built into IPB. I should point out that anti spambot mods are available for Plone.

Beware banning IP addresses, and especially ranges of IP addresses

Some users share blocks of IP address, i.e people using a particular ISP. Banning an IP address or range of IP addresses can have the knock-on effect of blocking a whole load of innocent users. As people without fixed IP addresses get a different IP address virtually every time they log on, and spammers are well versed in spoofing and changing IP addresses, using IP addresses to block individuals is largely pointless, unless you can identify a persistent spammer who happens to have a fixed IP address.

Spam, spam, spam
Spam is the biggest challenge in running a public web forum, and it is getting more difficult. Multiple guards (Captchas, email verification, javascript foo, concealed weapons and lie detectors) should be used where possible. The more popular your web forum software is, the more it will be targeted (but also patches and mods will appear quicker)
Anyway, just a few noteson my experiences. I'm keep to hear other tips on this subject and to hear tips from people using a recent version of PloneBoard which I am about to start using for a commercial project.

I am really pleased to say that the Plone Skinning presentation last night was a success! About 30 local web designers/developers and people interested in using Plone turned up - a much higher attendance than my previous "Plone Demo" talk. I used the Plone S5 product to create a simple set of slides with a few bullet points to keep me from jumping around too much, but it was mostly a hands on presentation demonstrating a bit of basic customisation via the ZMI, then the process for creating a filesystem based skin.

I ran plone locally and used dreamweaver (in code view with large fonts) to do ZPT editing to keep things familiar for those designers who may be scared by the idea of terminals and Emacs!

I also tried to dispell the "all plone sites look the same" myth by taking a random design I had knocked up as a static html page and inserting the minimum possible ZPT markup to make it function as a front end plone main template rendering the body content and portlets (with none of the plone CSS).

The Q&A was really good - it ranged from basic questions about templating to "can plone do....?" type questions. I think I managed to field them all fairly well - i'll have to wait to see the video (coming soon) to listen back for any clangers I may have made. I was disappointed however that all the free beer had gone by the end of the Q&A - a conspiracy maybe? "psstt... keep Rick talking while we drink all the beer - ask him if there is a cow-milking module available...".

The event was sponsored by Knowledge West (room/projector hire/buffet) and beer kindly provided by Team Rubber.

I have volunteered to give another Plone related skillswap at the Watershed in Bristol (UK), on 16th January. The previous one (a general plone demo) went down well, and this time I am going to cover the basics of skinning a plone site, from basic Through The Web (TTW) customisation, to creating an installable skin product. I think it will be streamed live - check here for details. If you are in the Bristol area come along (it's free)!

I am going to rig up a device that gives me an electric shock every time I say the word "umm..", to train me up abit better for this public speaking lark..

Netsight's interactive xmas card, bought to you using the technologies of Zope 3, Ajax, fairy lights and tin foil.

At plone conference I saw Andy McKay demonstrate his Clouseau product, but I have only just got round to trying it. Incredibly useful - I particularly like the way you can use it in context, i.e. when editing a plone page you can click the magnifying glass icon, type "context." and instantly get a list of the attributes and methods available via the Schema. For people like me who find the zodb a dark and mysterious place, this is a nice environment to use to explore. Cheers Andy!

A new term for my web buzzword vocabulary today: "splogger" - a term I just saw on scobelizer, apparently used for "someone who uses a system to automatically copy blog posts from other people". I am doing something similar with the "skatevine" page on dfr skate zine, but I prefer the term "news aggregator". I'm not profitting from this as I don't currently carry advertising on DFR - my reasons for doing it were basically:-

• make the site more useful, a source of skateboard news for people who don't use an RSS aggregator (or even know what one is)
• a platform to experiment with RSS aggregation tools in plone (currently using CMFSin, shortl^h^h^ eventually to be moved to feedfeeder)
• To provide links back to the sites it aggregates content from in a useful way.

I can see that some people might get annoyed if their content appears on other sites without their permission, especially if the site in question is passing the content off as their own and/or using it to drive ad-revenues. Site owners who carry advertising may also worry that people reading their content on other people sites aren't going to see (and click on) their ads, but the flipside of this is that if they do link back to the original content, this will boost the pagerank of the original content, therefore making people more likely to see it and click on the ads - this wouldn't happen if everyone used a personal news aggregator).

I can also see how it can be annoying if search engines rank the aggregated posts higher than the original posts (which was the point of Scobles post I think....), I guess if they got this sorted it wouldn't be such an issue.

This is not so much a "how-to", but more of a "is this how-to?", I post it here mainly to invite comment and expose my ignorance about the much cleaner method that probably exists.

OK, first my use case - in a skin I am building the title of the current level 0 node is always displayed as a section heading e.g. If you are viewing the page "eggs", a few levels down and the breadcrumb trail reads home -> foo -> bar -> eggs, "foo" is displayed as a banner heading, so wherever you are in the site you know what main section you are in.

so I have created a skin script called getLevelZeroTitle that has approximately this in it (with try/except statements, and a list of id's to ignore to handle errors):-

current_level0_path = '/'.join(context.getPhysicalPath()[:3])
section_id = context.getPhysicalPath()[2]
current_level0_title = context.portal_catalog(path=current_level0_path)[0].Title
return current_level0_title

Is this the way forward or is there something "built in" to handle this?

If you can get it back into version 2.5 then the data belongs to plone, otherwise it never belonged to plone in the first place..

I'm still undecided and a bit lost about how i'm going to get www.dfrskatezine.com upgraded from 2.1 to plone 2.5

To recap:-

• I can't really upgrade it in situ (although could be persuaded to try it if people think this is the best bet)
• portal zexp import didn't work for me
• smaller zexp imports left me with broken stuff.
• it is on a shared instance so the data.fs file is too big to move realistically (once again, still an option if encouraged)

so...I've started creating some zpts that I can use to dump content as xml files (e.g. all_articles.xml, containing title, content, url and any other data I need to move - kind of RSS on acid). Not quite XMLforest, but I haven't got my head round that yet as I live in the skin layer mostly. The masterplan is to then use some python foo magic to populate a fresh 2.5.most_recent_stable site from this XML.

Obviously I need to handle the images and other files seperately - so far I have used a skin script to generate a file containing wget statements for each visible/published image on the site and download the images with a mirrored folder structure, along with an accompanying xml file with the captions, descriptions and paths. I intend to rebuild my products from scratch (pop my zope 3 cherry even?) so I don't necessarily need my existing products to be 2.5 compatible.

Think i'm going about this the wrong way? Please let me know! Please also bear in mind that while I am a keen student, I am mostly a GUI guy (+ basic archetypes development), and am easily confused by your crazy python talk, and have been made weak by your excellent installers, to the point that I haven't got a clue how you would go about installing or upgrading zope if it requires me to do anything more than click buttons ;-)

Six simple steps to make the plone 2.5 navigation portlet get it's knickers in a twist:-

1. create a folder in the root of a plone site
2. in folder contents in the root, move your folder to the top so that it is the first item (after "home" if you have that enabled) in the navigation tree
3. in the new folder create a new page and set that page as the default view
4. in the ZMI enable "Folder" as a type that can be used for a default page (see this is where I should have known something bad was going to happen)
5. go to the root of the site and set your new folder as the default view of the portal (i.e so that the homepage of the portal is in fact the default page in your new folder one level deep - believe it or not I had a reason to do this)
6. Hey presto your new folder falls to the bottom of the navtree - no amount of reordering will persuade it otherwise! You can try swearing too if you like, that won't work either ;-)

An off-hand comment I heard about PloneFormGen while I was at plone conference has possibly just payed for most of the conference and travel expense to get to Seattle. I can't remember where I heard it, but someone mentioned that it was a nice product. I stuck it on my mental to-do list to try it out...

I'm currently working on a site that is close to going live and I had an email waiting for me from the client on friday, saying something like "by the way, can you change that join button so that it sais join our mailing list?" The conversation that followed let me establish that in fact what they wanted was a custom contact form with a few extra options. Usually I would then proceed to hack the contact form and mail script around to achieve this - knowing that I would have to be careful not to lose my customisations if I upgraded or reskinned the site, but this time I decided to try PloneFormGen.

Now that really was painless, really easy to figure out (i'm one of those people who you have to threaten with physical violence before I will RTFM). Thumbs up to Steve McMahon for a very useful product :)

I intended to do a comprehensive wrap up of our trip to plone conference in seattle (and stopover in new york), but it is still a bit of a blur, and i'm still jetlagged (ok, i'm just a lightweight, i'm always sleepy). I need to have a look at all the presentation material and my notes, so I promise to write something up and provide some feedback to the presenters in the next week.

The major insight (plonewise) to come out of this week is that resistance to Zope 3 is futile, in fact i'm quite excited about the idea now :-)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

zmi -> portal properties -> navtree properties -> (uncheck includeTop)

in case anyone is wondering why you want to do this, in this case I have a site where there is folder in the root called home. Next I have to figure out how to redirect the actual home page there and collapse the breadcrumbs so it doesn't show home twice, or .. hmmm.. maybe change the home item to display the site name, that would be nicer

UPDATE: to change the first item in portal breadcrumbs, customise global_pathbar.pt (in plone_templates), to set the default page of a plone site, use zmi-> properties tab (change default_page property)

From Plone 2.1 onwards you can choose to use a content item within a folder as the default view of the folder. By default all the usual suspects are available: page, news item etc, but if you have custom types they will not be available without some configuration. To configure the types that are available to be used as default use zmi -> portal_properties -> site_properties (add type to list in default_page_types)

Incidentally, it took me ages to find this and I eventually found the answer I was looking for by searching my own gmail archives of the plone users list. The post referenced this how to
(The information I needed was actually in the first paragraph!)

At the end of October, myself and two other Netsight Plonistas will be off to Plone Conference 2006 in Seattle. Looking forward to meeting up with some plone gurus over a beer or several.

As Plone becomes more and more mainstream, it has appeared on the radar of spammers. They are targeting community sites where people are allowed to sign up without moderation, and using scripts to create loads of false members. A weakness in the way user portraits are handled is being exploited to inject javascript redirects in, so that people visiting a profile page (or anywhere else where portraits are displayed?) are redirected to other sites. If you are affected by this, or don't want to be - here's how to sort it out

I always forget this - when doing a zope catalog query, you are searching the index contents not the metadata contents. If there is a field in your metadata that you want to be able to use as a variable in a portal catlog query, you need to add the field as an index and then reindex the catalog (or just the new field within the catalog).

For example I was generating some custom tabs for the contents of a particular folder within a plone site and I wanted the catalog query to exclude any items with the "exclude_from_nav" field set to True. It wasn't listening to me. The solution was to go to portal_catalog -> indexes and add a new field index 'exclude_from_nav' (i.e the field name needs to match the meta data field name). Tick the box next to the new 'exclude_from_nav' and hit the reindex button. Now the catalog is aware of this field and which objects in the zodb are set to true and false.

On a custom plone 2.5 skin we found that the livesearch results were getting overlapped by certain elements of the content including action menus and elements within a composite page, in IE6. After much trial and error this turned out to be because I had used absolute positioning on the search form, which obviously confused something somewhere along the line. I also had to remove position:relative from a couple of containing elements to get it to work. As this was a custom skin already fairly heavily modified (both css and template changes), I haven't narrowed down exactly what was happening yet, or if there is a better way to address it, but I ended up moving the form and using floats and margins to get it in position.

The plone livesearch template and CSS code seems a little over-complex to me, and I don't really like the use of an HTML fieldset to render the results, as this is always the first thing I break during a customisation so I may create my own version in due course (in private of course, before I go around claiming I have a better version than the one that ships with plone!).

this is the internet equivalent of trying to organise my CD collection - wait- that's not too difficult, i'm giving most of my cd's to a charity shop as I prefer digital only these days. I think my "readers" are getting a bit confused when I jump between posts about coffee and posts about geekery. no. those two go together perfectly. Anyway, i'm going to add some categories, and try to retro-categorise some of the old posts over time. RSS subscribers may see old posts reappaer for a few days/weeks/months/years

The more code you hide from me, the more horrible template hacks I will do! (I will elaborate on this later, i'm too busy doing horrible template hacks to get a project out of the door at the moment...)

I've recently being doing a bit of "old school" web development, manually creating HTML forms and (classic ASP) scripts to validate and process the forms. I was surprised at how much I have forgotten of my basic HTML, since I have been using a framework (namely archetypes in plone) to do all the form generation, validation and processing for the last couple of years. I even had to go and view some source code on another site to remind me of the correct syntax for an HTML select element (form drop-down).

Whilst doing things manually is very laborious, it does give me a feeling of control back, and I am confident about debugging and modification in a way that I miss when relying on a framework. Wouldn't want to go back to this form of development for any large projects though!

I'm experiencing a problem where the Kupu drawer used to select content when in design mode on a compositepack page gets overlapped by elements from the underlying page. I thought it was something I had done with a custom skin I was building, but when I switch back to plone default skin, the problem still exists. I don't think I have come across this before, so my conclusion at the moment is that this is something unique to Plone 2.5

I am seeing this on Firefox 1.5.0.6 (PC & mac) and IE6 PC. CompositePack 1.0 Final

screen shot here (Firefox)
If anyone has a fix for this please let me know!
UPDATE: Fixed

I have now fixed this (thanks Emyr!).

I applied the following to my style sheet:-

.kupu-drawer {

z-index: 3 !important;

}



#region-content .contentActions {

z-index: 1;

}

(the !important is only necessary because of a precedence thing somewhere along the line)

I've been using DIYPloneStyle to create custom installable skin products since.. err.. an early version, and the process always went like this:-

1. use the generator.py file to create a new product
2. install the skin product
3. Use the css_registry to deactivate most of the plone style sheets, so that I don't have to overide the styles in my custom CSS

The problem with this is that this can cause complications if there is any skin-switching capability, plus if you provide the skin to someone else to install you also have to send instructions to deactivate the appropriate stylesheets.

Today I downloaded the 2.1.2 version, and I was pleased to see that the blank skin product that it creates takes me to exactly the same starting point as I like to start from, i.e. all the plone default styles are deactivated. I say deactivated, but what I mean is there are blank public.css, plone.css etc files in the product, so when the product is installed, these have higher precedence than the ones in the plone layers. This is a much more convenient way to deal with overiding the styles, not sure why I didn't think of it before!

Anyone who has clicked through to dfr skate zine on my case study links might have noticed a holding page. This is probably a bit premature as the site is still running behind it. The site will shortly be upgraded from plone 2.1 to plone 2.5. I don't anticipate any problems, but having just gone way over schedule upgrading from a plone 2.0.5 site (with loads of custiom products) to 2.5, i'm being a bit cautious. I'm also using this opportunity to make some improvements to the site in order to make it better and attract some more contributors.

many moons ago, back in february myself and Matt Hamilton of Netsight did a plone demo at the watershed media centre in Bristol. This was the first in a series of "SkillSwaps" as part of the Bristol branch of SkillSwap based in Brighton. I've only just got round to blogging about it now due to my blogging hiatus!

The video feed is online here (note that this link skips forward a few chapters to where I actually start talking - before that is several minutes of people arriving and introductions etc).

so if all has gone to plan, my hypothecate.co.uk RSS feed should have burst back into life and anybody subscribed to my old RSS should now be reading the feed from www.rickhurst.co.uk, my new personal blog / portfolio site, running on wordpress.

so lets get this right , I spent hours and hours migrating hypothecate to plone then binned it and went for wordpress instead? yep. For the last six years or so I have always used (much appreciated) free webspace from people I know, but this always tied me to a platform - first ASP, then zope/plone. Now I have another personal project running on Plone (www.dfrskatezine.com - ironically currently offline while I migrate it from plone 2.1 to 2.5), I thought I would stump up for some paid webspace so I could run some php/ mysql stuff without relying on favours and harrassing people to install and configure stuff for me.

The new site has a bit of a portfolio on it, as I am pimping myself for a bit of non-plone freelance work (out of hours - i'm still happily esconced by day ploning away at netsight hq), so any bits of web development work you need doing, contact me and I might be able to help you out, and you might be able to help me replace my dying car :-)

Now I have working blog software again, I might even start posting a bit more often - still on the same theme - web technology with random inane drivel thrown in.

The old site will eventually redirect here, and I will do my best to not leave any dead links, by setting up some redirects. In an ideal world I would retro-categorise all the imported content on here.

As for quills etc have I completely given up? no - quills should make an appearance on the skate site in the near future.

Just a quick example of how to format a date in ZPT. DateTime is already available within the Plone environment, so you can do something like this:-

item_date item/EffectiveDate;
item_display_date python:DateTime(item_date).strftime('%B %d, %Y');

The above example formats the date in a US style e.g. 3 July, 2006

I discovered an annoying bug with plone 2.1 where when you added comments to a piece of content, they seemed to disappear, without throwing an error. It turns out they were turning up in their parent container.

It only occurred intermittently, and seemingly randomly (aren't they simply the best type of software bug?), but I eventually realised that it started occuring where a folder was set to Allow Discussion by default, and it was occuring where a content item hadn't previously had any discussion, therefore it was inherting the discussion properties of its parent..

Anyway, I sheepishly showed my head in the plone users IRC channel and was advised to (guess what!) upgrade to 2.1.2 to fix the problem. Got out of there sharp quick before anyone asked me to contribute anything useful.

As per usual simply upgrading to the latest version isn't always a possibility with a live site, particularly where there are several production sites running on the same zope instance and with no hugely convenient way to create an exact replica for a test run of a migration.

So I installed a fresh instance of 2.1.2 locally (gotta love that clicky button mac osx installer - that's my type of software installation), checked that the bug was indeed fixed in 2.1.2 and then did some digging, stepped through the code a bit and found that CMFPlone/DiscussionTool.py had changed slightly. (I'm sure I could have checked some sort of changelog or SVN repository, but without someone to spell it out to me, finding out what/where/when how to do such a thing would probably take me longer than it would to knock up my own commenting system from scratch.

So I swapped the file, refreshed CMFPlone and ...Doh!!! something bad..., swapped it back, refreshed and .. Doh!!.. still bad.. panic a bit, ask around if anyone else just happened to be doing something on that zope instance that might be causing the bad stuff, but no... so restarted the zope instance and it started working again, swapped the files again, restarted and lo and behold commenting fixed.

since plone 2.1 uses folders set to display as photoalbums instead of the CMFPhotoAlbum approach, I needed a way to list photo albums from a portal_catalog query (well, a smart folder actually, but the same thing really)

here's a solution:-

1. in the zmi go into portal_catalog -> indexes
2. add a new FieldIndex called "layout"
3. reindex the catalog

now you can use layout in portal_catalog queries so a query containing type = Folder, layout=atct_album_view will return a list of folders set to display as photo albums

This is the first time I've attempted to use my mini dv-cam to get some footage of talks and interviews at the snowsprint to use for video casting. Along with Nate Aune of Jazkarta/Plone4Artists, I have been shoving camcorders in people faces, positioning tripods precariously on ledges and bars and trying to get some footage. I've already managed to damage my camera when it fell off a chair at least once.

For future reference, here are a few notes:-

Hard disk space

An hours footage works out at about 11gb of disk space when dumped onto my laptop. I usually only have about 10gb free to play with so a large external disk is a necessity (I left mine at home).

Remote control

As I write this, my dv cam is positioned up on a ledge waiting for a talk to start - I have a remote control at home, wouldn't it be great if I had bought it so I don't have to start climbing up on chairs to set it recording.

Editing time

Don't underestimate how much you'll need, even if you don't take into account the time it takes to get the footage off the camera (real time) and compressing the end result.

Loads of spare tapes

If you haven't got the time or disk space to offload the footage, a stack of blank tapes would be useful.

NTSC and PAL

We need to share footage captured on both NTSC and PAL mini-dv cams - I'm hoping hi-quality quicktime exports in some intermediate format should be suitable for this.

Podcasting

Googling around it seems that the ideal format for a video podcast (i.e. suitable for iTunes and video iPods) is mpeg 4, 320 x 240 pixels, 30fps for good quality. AAC audio.

Screencasting

Snapzpro seems to be a good solution for mac osx, especially if you want the result to be in quicktime, so you can cut the footage in with video in iMovie - cheap alternative to camtasia (haven't tried it yet, although camtasia does swf)

iSight microphone works well for screencasting apparently.

Vnc snooping or screencasting software on presenters machine would be good so a presentation can be filmed with a human element to it and screen footage edited in afterwards, rather than just videoing a projected screen.

Data transfer

firewire cable useful, especially between two macs - one in target mode. USB key also v.handy for transferring smaller files where firewalls or other factors are stopping network file sharing.

Editing

Never believe the "time remaining" progress bar in the export dialogue iMovie.

(I wonder how fast a macbook pro will be in comparison?)

Part of the value of Videocasts is their timeliness - it is easy to get bogged down in editing. Before another event like this it would be a good idea to prepare opening screens, title and credit format etc, maybe in an empty project that can be copied and used as a template so footage can be dropped in, trimmed, titles added and exported quickly.

Using powerbooks for transcoding/ compressing is viable, but slow

i'm a few days into this thing now..

been frustrated at times at how much I have to learn, both with the ploning and the snowboarding. Both have involved a bit of trudging uphill, stationary, aching.... and some good stuff too....