Rick Hurst - Freelance Web developer. Bristol, England.

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!

This is just a mandatory “i’m just trying out another desktop blogging tool” post. I’ve just downloaded flock, mainly to see if the built in blogging tool is a suitable solution for OSX. So far so good - not sure whether this thing supposts categories, although I haven’t actually got any categories yet so…

edit: yes it does support categories.

I’m a couple of days into the Plone snow sprint 2006. Before we arrived at the sprint location, the netsight contingent took a couple of days snowboarding. After half a day of falling on my backside, I just about have basic control of the board now, at least I can carve down the slope quite comfortably if the run is wide enough - there were a few hairy moments on a narrow forest road where I couldn’t quite make the turns quick enough and wiped out at least one skier (luckily I don’t speak enough German to understand what they were shouting at me!). I’d definitely like to snowboard again, though it is an expensive hobby.

We then attended the opening party for the newly formed lovely systems in Dornbirn. Free bar, Live band, games involving hammers, ’nuff said.

I’ll be working on a few plone multimedia projects during the sprint. Myself and Tom Lazaar will be trying to sort out some kind of solution for blogging in plone. Currently we are examining the available options to see whether we are better off cherrypicking the best features from each and putting the together into something new, to “finish” one the existing ones off, or whether to work on a set of adapters (xml-rpc, trackback) and products to enable plone itself to be used as a blog application (using, say, news items instead of blog entries, and having a customisation policy to set a plone instance up as a blog).

I will also hopefully be working (or at least shadowing someone else working on) a flash media player (a bit like google video thing), including server-side video transcoding. This should be useful for the online skate zine i’m working on!

Hopefully I can also finish off what I started for ATAudio, tidying up the templates ready for a release, using so called “five views”.

example: python:context.REQUEST.get(’myvar,'’)

this can be use in zpt e.g. tal:define=”mypagevar python:context.REQUEST.get(’myvar,'’)”

One of the common hurdles I always encounter is that the title field is not suitable to be used for the sort_on criteria in a portal catalog search. This is because it is a textindex. To get round this you can use another index called sortable_title instead (at least in plone 2.1 you can, not sure about older versions…)

I had some trouble working out how to configure this - by default the configuration refers to the editor and visitor skins that are installed when you install the CMFUrlSkinSwitcher product. I couldn’t work out whether I was supposed to substitute the name of my skins (in this case ‘SkateItall” for visitors and ‘Plone Default’ for admin).

This is probably the case, but wasn’t sure so in the end I went to portal_skins - > properties and copied the layers from my skate it all skin to the visitor skin.

all I did then was substitute the ‘edit’ stuff in the mappings for the start of my own admin url.

there must be nostalgia in the air as recently I recieved some mp3’s from an old friend of mine, mark (aka dudley) of a musical collaboration we once had going under the moniker of "mogrove jo"*.

it was 1997. I was going through my mercury rev/ I wanna be a singer phase. Mark did the programming, I did the bass/guitars/vocals/rebirth wibbling. This recording was done on a crap pc using cubasis audio and was mixed to tape before being redigitized by mark’s mate kev, who had the last remaining copy stashed in a cupboard somewhere on C90 audio tape - the quality didn’t start great…

anyway, out of the 50ish songs I wrote when I had too much time on my hands, spanish sunshine and cheap wine aplenty, this is one of the only ones I still like.. and buried under all that fuzz/FX/echo my voice sounds kinda OK

*the name derives from being lost in the north of spain and finding myself in a tiny village in the picos de europas(?) with a name that I remember being at least similar to mogrove jo.

example

#mysqldump –host=the.remotedatabase.com -u yourusername -p yourdatabasename > /Users/rick/backups/foo.sql

Someone at netsight has just taken delivery of a nokia web tablet. It is a lovely gadget and we are all busy thinking up reasons to justify us all getting one. The screen is pretty amazing and having 800 pixel width means that most websites are very useable. It is running opera and I was pleased to see that my DOM-only javascripts (such as the menus on this site*) work fine. It also has a flash plugin (not sure what version or how good it is). It has built in wifi and bluetooth, and runs linux so the possibilities are endless. The downside is that it doesn’t have a hard drive, so using it as a video ipod substitute isn’t really an option unless RS-MMC cards suddenly get really hi-capacity and cheap.

* I’ve since done a better, less "obtrusive" version of the menu javascript similar to used on this site. It is on a clients site that isn’t launched yet, I may well hint in it’s general direction when it goes live.

seems that a few of the popular hosted services are having problems - typepad and del.icio.us have been down in the last week, and bloglines had a news item recently warning that they are struggling and are soon to be moving to a bigger datacenter to cope.

It’s to be expected really as these things get more popular, but it gets people upset, even if it only actually causes minor inconvenience (what? you mean I can’t get to my daily bookmarks today - how will I cope? gahh!!!.. I can’t get to my blog to blog how angry I am about it! etc).

For business services obviously the inconvenience is greater, and has a financial impact. (Don’t make me say "time is money"- it’s not - but that is a whole other rant). Anyway, not sure where i’m going with this…