Popular Products for Video Management in Plone

1. Plone4ArtistsVideo

• Plone4ArtistsVideo lets you upload a normal File to your Plone site. The file is auto-detected as a video file, metadata is auto-extracted and an appropriate view is rendered (depending on the file format).
• Plone4ArtistsVideo supports embedding of videos that are already hosted on popular video sharing sites such as Youtube, Google Video, Blip.tv or Revver.com. Simply add new Link object, paste in a URL from the remote source, and the video will be added to your Plone site complete with all the metadata.
  

2. Plumi

Author: EngageMedia
Example: http://screensessions.com, developed by bürosterngasse*

Plumi is a package of Plone products that enable you to create your own video sharing site. By adding it to an existing Plone instance you can quickly have a wide array of functionality to facilitate video distribution and community creation. Plumi package includes: ATCountry Widget, ATVocabulary Manager, Vaporisation, qRSS2Syndication, VPIP, Indytube, Content Licensing, qPloneComments.

File Storage

1. ZODB's FileStorage (Data.fs)

for ZODB versions < 3.8

2. Plone FileSystem Storage

3. Storage at External Servers

Besides, most of available Plone themes were developed for previous Plone releases and they are not compatible with the latest Plone 3 release. The reason of such small number of Plone 3 themes is that their development in Plone 3 became a bit more complicated than it used to be in previous Plone releases. This has slowed down theme development process. As a result, the amount of themes, available for Plone 3, decreased to only 13, three of which are not stable releases, just in alpha development state.

There are such Plone themes developed for Plone 3 by:

• Quintagroup:
  
  • Techlight Plone Skin
• Whiteblack Plone Skin
• Schools Plone Skin
• Lite Plone Skin
• Oberon / Tom-Wilkin Martinussen
• Darkness
• Wilkin
• Alexandr Limi / Cornelis Kolbach
  
• NuPlone
• asigot
• Peacefun Skin for Plone 3
• David Convent
• DIV Plone Style
• Grieg Medialog / Espen Moe-Nilssen
• Subskins
• Alteroo / David Bain
• Busy City Theme (alpha)
• redomino / Fabrizio Reale
• Italian Skin (XHTML Strict) (alpha)
• Simon Kaeser
• Plone Tableless (alpha)

• plone.org visual themes category should be restructured, a dedicated theming section should be created
• available themes should be divided into 2.5 and 3.0 only, while a link to other theming resources should be in the docs section
• visual change should be done, so that thumbnails illustrating what the skins look like appear on theme listing.
  

There was a special project initiated on OpenPlans - OOTB Plone Themes, aimed to increase the number of themes that ship with Plone and track additional ideas that might improve the Plone Theme story for implementation at the same time or a later date.

We hope that the situation with Plone themes quantity and, that is even more important, their quality will improve soon.

Apart from content and summaries of each chapter from the book that are now available on 'Professional Plone Development' Free Online Edition, you can also see a list of the latest updates for the book.

It is really very good that there is a possibility to gather all the improvements together. Readers all over the world can improve the book all together. The editors could collect all the improvements and release, at least, e-book with corrections.

Quintagroup has contributed to Martin Aspeli's book errata correction as well. For example, Vitaliy Podoba has noticed and posted the following misprints from the book:

1) misprints:

• page 242 Contains a typo in the third paragraph, the first sentence:
  

  'The code in activityreport.py is similar to thaat of the other views in the browser sub-package...'

  mistake is in the word 'thaat' - double 'a' should be deleted.
• page 176 Second sentence in the first paragraph in 8 section (Views and Other Presentation Components) contains the word 'outlned' instead of outlined.
  

2) broken code:

• page 66 Code example line at Class declaration TestDocuments, method definition testSetTitle :
  

  self.assertEquals("New title", self.folder.d1.Title()

  assertEquals method called without close parenthesis. The correct code should be:
  

  self.assertEquals("New title", self.folder.d1.Title())

• page 202 Last three rows of code example:
  

  # This turns a list of title->id pairs into a Zope 3 style
  
  vocabulary return SimpleVocabulary.fronmItems(items)
  
  directlyProvides(CurrentFilmsVocabularyFactory, IVocabularyFactory)
  

  'vocabulary' word should be in comment line, and the second line should begin with 'return' word, and the last line: directlyProvides... should begin with decreased line indentation (out of function body)
  

    def CurrentFilmsVocabularyFactory(context):
        """Vocabulary factory for currently published films
        """
        catalog = getToolByName(context, 'portal_catalog')
        items = [(r.Title, r.UID) for r in
                    catalog(object_provides=IFilm.__identifier__,
                            review_state="published",
                            sort_on='sortable_title')]
        # Turns a list of title->id pairs into a Zope 3 style vocabulary
        return SimpleVocabulary.fromItems(items)
    directlyProvides(CurrentFilmsVocabularyFactory, IVocabularyFactory

Thus, the changes to make are the following:
1. make the comment shorter so that it fits on one line
2. second-to-last line should start with 'return'
3. outdent the last line so that it is aligned with the outermost "def".

• page 204 In 'Field and Object Validation' section third paragraph, second sentence:
  

  'It is not very hard to register your own generic validators - see Products.ATContentTypes.validators for several examples ...'

  path to 'validators' module is good for importing but actually validators code are placed in 'Products.ATContentTypes.lib.validators'.
  

The correct line should be:


    - see Products.ATContentTypes.lib.validators

• page 229 Third piece of code first line:

>>> from Products.PloneTestCase.setup import portal_owner from

word 'from' at the end of the line should begin second line of session.

There are Quintagroup's Plone-developers impression of Martin Aspeli's book listed below.

Besides defining ":opener-init" even that initializes opener, developer has ability to extend/override open/close events:

.term:opener-init{
  evt-init-elementSelector: '.details';
}

.term:opener-open{
  action-client: executeCommand;
  executeCommand-commandName: replaceInnerHTML;
  executeCommand-commandSelector: '#status';
  executeCommand-html: 'expanded';
}

.term:opener-close{
  action-client: executeCommand;
  executeCommand-commandName: replaceInnerHTML;
  executeCommand-commandSelector: '#status';
  executeCommand-html: 'collapsed';
}

and HTML for the samle is:

<hr />
<div id="status">Current status</div>
<hr />

<div class="term">
  History
  <div class="details">
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vestibulum
    iaculis eros eu purus. Integer accumsan leo id lorem viverra vulputate.
    Donec feugiat nunc molestie massa nonummy pulvinar. Proin porta pede
    sit amet lectus. Duis leo urna, tempor non, condimentum condimentum,
    commodo non, libero. Integer feugiat, pede at.
  </div>
</div>

The resulting behaviour on page is:

If you do not see a flash movie above, see original post.

The important thing is that on open and close you can have client-side or server-side actions. You can disable default expand/collapse behaviour, with preventDefault parameter:

.term:opener-open{
  preventDefault: true;
}

In the case you need your opener controller to be inserted into specific place, you can use pair of controllerPlacementSelector parameters:

dl:opener-init{
  evt-init-elementSelector: '> dd';
  evt-init-controllerPlacementSelector: '> dt';
}

if the above sample is applied to following HTML code:

<dl>
  <dt>History</dt>
  <dd>
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vestibulum
    iaculis eros eu purus. Integer accumsan leo id lorem viverra vulputate.
    Donec feugiat nunc molestie massa nonummy pulvinar. Proin porta pede
    sit amet lectus. Duis leo urna, tempor non, condimentum condimentum,
    commodo non, libero. Integer feugiat, pede at.
  </dd>
</dl>

And the result is:

If you do not see a flash movie above, see original post.

The whole definition list has opener assigned. Controller (clickable handle) is inserted into <dt> element, not in root of list (that can confuse some browsers). This is why I avoided dl/dt/dd example in my introduction post.

After installation product offers following event:

opener-selector:opener-init {
   evt-init-elementSelector: element-selector;
}

All elements that matches opener-selector will get controller that will offer expand/collapse functionality with mouse click.

Real-life example is:

.term:opener-init {
   evt-init-elementSelector: '.details';
}

and having HTML code:

<div class="term">
  History
  <div class="details">
    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Vestibulum
    iaculis eros eu purus. Integer accumsan leo id lorem viverra vulputate.
    Donec feugiat nunc molestie massa nonummy pulvinar. Proin porta pede
    sit amet lectus. Duis leo urna, tempor non, condimentum condimentum,
    commodo non, libero. Integer feugiat, pede at.
  </div>
</div>

will produce into something like:

If you do not see a flash movie above, see original post.

November 7, 2006
Internet Explorer has deprecated the implementation of the XmlHttpRequest object in MSXML 5.0, resulting in security warnings for things like LiveSearch and Kupu — but only if you have Office 2003 installed on the computer where you use Plone (or if you have installed MSXML 5.0 separately). Plone relies on an external library called Sarissa, which needs to be updated to check for the new native implementation of XmlHttpRequest in IE7. It's likely that we will ship a new release of Plone with these included during the coming days, but at the moment there is unfortunately no easy way to fix it yourself.

Here are some comments from Plone-Users mailing list:

Nicklas:

I do not know exactly wich parts of plone that uses it, but kupu is one of the
instaces where you could find this file.

This is the instances i found:

Products/kupu/common/sarissa.js
Products/validation/kupu/common/sarissa.js
Products/validation/CMFPlone/skins/plone_3rdParty/sarissa.js
Products/CMFPlone/skins/plone_3rdParty/sarissa.js

and i changed these lines to this:

    _SARISSA_DOM_PROGID = pickRecentProgID
(["Msxml2.DOMDocument.4.0", "Msxml2.DOMDocument.3.0", "MSXML2.DOMDocument", "MS
XML.DOMDocument", "Microsoft.XMLDOM"], [["SELECT_NODES", 2],["TRANSFORM_NODE", 
2]]);
    _SARISSA_XMLHTTP_PROGID = pickRecentProgID
(["Msxml2.XMLHTTP.4.0", "MSXML2.XMLHTTP.3.0", "MSXML2.XMLHTTP", "Microsoft.XMLH
TTP"], [["XMLHTTP", 4]]);
    _SARISSA_THREADEDDOM_PROGID = pickRecentProgID
(["MSXML2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument.4.0", "MSXML2.FreeThreadedDOMDocument.3.0"]);
    _SARISSA_XSLTEMPLATE_PROGID = pickRecentProgID
(["Msxml2.XSLTemplate.4.0", "MSXML2.XSLTemplate.3.0"], [["XSLTPROC", 2]]);

Duncan Booth:

Have you installed kupu 1.3.9 from plone.org/products/kupu? That should
replace sarissa with an IE7 compatible version.

Now I see Andre Nogueira comment

December 4, 2006
Sarissa team released a new script version
I just put the new version of sarissa.js in my custom folder to solve the script problem.
I still testing, in plone, but looks ok.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/sarissa

So it would be nice if people post comments if they have some issues with new sarissa.js in Kupu 1.3.x or 1.4 beta.

Plone Skin Dump (qPloneSkinDump) allows to create Plone product based on some ZMI located skin folder (eg "custom") from portal_skins. So you can easy create Plone product with skin based on folder with new styles and page templates. Plone Skin Dump take into consideration positioning of portlets and styles in portal_css tool.

metal:use-macro="here/portlet_foo/macros/portlet"

• The workspaces at members.plone.org are they the same as teamspaces?if not, how are they different?
• What is the great benefit of workspaces versus ordinary member folders?

To be honest I've had more success with Teamspaces than Workspaces (I've used both).  Teamspaces does bring a slightly new concept to the table (teams) for Plone but is worth it in my opinion.  I've ran into issues when using workspaces with CMFMember, for example.

Also, I'm not entirely sure workspaces has been updated to work on Plone 2.1 (I haven't used it on any plone 2.1 sites yet) but I know there's a beta or final release of teamspaces that does.

i'm pretty sure they're completely different.  teamspaces are containers that allow for heightened priveleges for certain users (i.e. team members).  it was designed for flexibility, to be able to model complex organizational structures.

workspaces, which i know less about, i believe are a type of virtual folder, where users can add content that will then end up in another location.  you'll notice that when you add a news item in your workspace on plone.org, it actually ends up in the 'newsitems' folder.  this allows multiple folks to contribute to a central location, but it does so via a "window" into that location rather than by managing security in that location.


"great benefit" is subjective.  for some use cases member folders might work better, for others workspaces.  i've not used workspaces at all, am not even sure my description above is 100% correct, so i won't try to answer this.

For all new users you can set it in portal_memberdata->properties
for all existing users you have to run a script that sets this property (*I think*)

In addition to that you can always customize the wysiwyg_support script in
plone_wysiwyg to take precendence for your preferred editor if the user in
question has the default setting.

That is unlikely to have any effect.

Kupu and Epoz define their own wysiwyg_support template which overrides the
one in plone_wysiwyg. There are instructions on Plone.org for defining a
suitable template for FCK Editor, although if you are using Kupu 1.3.x the
support for FCKEditor is already included in Kupu's template so you can
ignore the Plone howto.

If you want to customise wysiwyg_support you will need to find the
appropriate version and customise it.

There are no special steps. There are a few gotchas that people are  running into along the way regarding third-party products (that's always  hard to predict), and we're working on collecting these in a centralized  location.

The procedure is the normal one:

1. Make sure the third-party products you use have been updated or verified  to work on Plone 2.1
2. Install the new Plone version
3. Move over your Data.fs and any Products / External Methods
4. Start the new Zope/Plone
5. Go to the ZMI
6. Go to portal_migration
7.  Click the migrate button

My estimate would be: never  :-(

Individual situations are so different that I'm afraid there
will be no general answer to this.

•   it may not work to upgrade Plone and some 3rd Party product  in one step (example: my CMFBibliographyAT in it's most recent  version needs its own migration when you have content generated  using an older version of it. This is usually meant to be  triggered by reinstalling it - so you either upgrade it before  migrating your Plone or afterwards. Maybe other products have  similar implications.)
•  For reasons I won't get into here, I had a site with some content  items where the executable ownership was broken  (the path to the user folder where the account was defined was wrong).  This prevented the in-place migration to fail completely  (even if 'force migration' was selected).  Fixing the ownership in the original site resolved this.
• For reasons I don't know, it may help to do the ATCT migration first  in some cases! That is, update everything on the file system, copy  Data.fs, restart Zope and then access the site's quickinstaller to  install ATContentTypes.  Then go to the the portal_atct tool, do a 'version  migration' followed by a 'type migration'. Now a 'portal_migration'  migration (!) might have more chances of getting through.  (I was really surprized about this. It was just last week that I  had this situation with a site where the migration from the  migration tool couldn't even be forced but everything was nice and dandy when decomposed as outlined above. Again, I have no idea why.)
  

Because products can do *anything* to an existing instance (even down to  monkeypatching Zope and overriding behaviour there). There is no way we  can guard against this.

It doesn't. Plone changes, is improved, refactored, deprecated methods are  removed - and the responsibility of keeping up with this rests on the  Product author, not the Plone Team.

Then it's probably putting in some structures that the migration can't  handle. The migration code has been made more robust, but in 95% of the  cases it's something wrong with the way that product does things. In the 5  remaining percent, we fix the migration.

Testing migrations is a time-consuming process, and if you're not  responsible enough to test migration during the beta and RC releases, we  can't predict what will go wrong in your specific case.

• Need help with installation of Plone
• Need help migrating a Plone instance
• Need help with setting up caching

• Want to help others with the above!