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!

Jon Stahl, Marshall Mayer:

Like many of you, we have long been frustrated with the lack of a solid,
moderately-featured forum product for Plone.

With the release of Plone 2.1 and Ploneboard 0.1 beta 1, we believe that the
time is ripe for the Plone community to pull together the technical, human and
financial resources needed to help grow Ploneboard from a promising first
release into the best-of-breed forum solution for Plone.

With that goal in mind, Marshall Mayer of LiveModern.com and I have started
pulling together some ideas for community-oriented process that we hope will:

-- Catalyze the development of a requirements document that defines features and
capabilities for future releases of Ploneboard
-- Pulling together the funding necessary to support Ploneboard development work

We've written up our initial thoughts at
http://www.seattleplone.org/Members/jonstahl/ideas-for-ploneboard. 

We're only just getting started; everything is open for discussion.  Our first
task is to find out who else is interested in joining the conversation, and to
get the process underway.  We invite you to read our initial thoughts,  identify
yourself as someone who's interested in this topic, and to contribute your
comments, ideas, etc. 

Our vision is of a community-driven process that builds on the great start that
Ploneboard already has. We're not hardcore Plone developers, and we're not
interested in in starting yet another forum project.  We're power-users and
Plone-powered website developers, and we feel that the best way we can "scratch
our itch" is by attempting to jump-start a process that will aggregate the needs
and resources of the Plone community and allow the many talented folks who've
already gotten Ploneboard this far to do even more great work --  and to
continue plugging new people (including users!) into the process.

Our friend and colleague Brian Gershon of RagingWeb will be attending the Plone
Conference this weekend -- he would love to talk more in person with anyone
who's interested.  (We wish we could join you all in person, too!)

Very nice idea. I have a lot of problems with CMFBoard (empty titles, unable posts for anonymous, etc.). I'd like to add Forum to ContentManagegementSoftware.Info but CMFBoard is not suitable for me. It's really great initiative.

The problem is even in basic functionality that is important for standart website: WYSIWYG editor, Poll, Blog Newsletter, Forum, Contact Forms, Photo Gallery, Events, News, etc.

I see that there is a problem with Forums and contact forms (PloneFormMailer is a good tool but it is unusable for users),  for Plone. Plone 2.1 solves a lot of problems for WYSWYG editing and Photo management... I hope after several months we will have such polished products that  users will not be able to say that some PHP based CMS (Typo3, Mambo, Drupal, Xaraya, etc) has better (more featured)  addons then Plone. Well, tay be PloneMall will take more time to be complete then OsCommerce :-).  Yes! Plone is used  as Enterprise solution, but it is also very good for simple websites. I suppose that it's  important in marketing purposes.

Ben Lobo:

I've got a client who wants to develop a kind of work pool website where employers seeking skilled and/or manual labourers can search a database to find available workers.

This will involve enabling people seeking work to register on the site and, for a fee, add details of their skills, etc.

My inclination would be to develop this site in PHP and MySQL because that's where I've got most experience and I don't know enough about Plone and its database management capabilities to convince me that it would be as easy to manage and maintain the data as I know it would be in MySQL.

On the other hand, I really like the idea of using Plone because it's got the registration and membership side of things all covered and it's so easily extensible.

I'd like to hear anyone's opinions about whether or not Plone is suited for such a project (bearing in mind my limited Plone knowledge).

Martin Aspeli

There are a lot of issues here. I'll try to list some of them in bullet  form; feel free to reply on the list if you want more detail.

 - Zope/Plone is a very different model to PHP/MySQL. That means there  will be a learning curve, and you'll have to un-learn some of the things  you take for granted in PHP/MySQL.

 - However, ease code re-use, usability, the add-on products  (plone.org/products) and many other factors make Zope/Plone a powerful  platform that may help you get up and running *quickly* (if you can manage  the learning curve)

 - Zope is an object oriented system. You have content objects, organised  in a hierarchy of folder-like and document-like objects, inside the ZODB  (Zope Object Database). This is very good for storing unstructured or  loosely structured content. It's less ideal for storing a lot of  standardised data you want to cross-reference and analyse in different  ways. For this a relational database is probably better suited.

 - However, you can connect Zope to a relational database, including MySQL  and PostgreSQL. Look into ZSQL Methods for some information on this.

If it were me, I'd probably use Plone for the UI and member management,  turning off the things that didn't make sense, and store the jobseeker  data in PostgreSQL (or MySQL) and use ZSQL methods to analyse/match/query.  For the member management, CMFMember may be a good place to start. You can  use something like SQLWindowStorage or SharedSQLStorage to get the  standard member data to be stored in an SQL database instead of the ZODB  (I wrote SharedSQLStorage for a customer project where we had most  membership data in an SQL database, managed via CMFMember exactly in this  way). Then you can write some ZSQL methods to do the matching and some  page templates to display them.

Dave Zoltok asked:

I've noticed in a few places (such as the Preferences page) that the right portlets are not displayed. I found the code to do that, but I also noticed that even though no portlets show up, the space where they would be is still present. Is there a way to hide not only the portlets, but the entire column, in a page template?

<?xml:namespace prefix = metal />
<metal:override fill-slot="column_two_slot">
</metal:override>

Which is what is done for prefs_main_template.pt, seems to work fine for that here, it even gets rid of the entirely (or the div if you are using tableless).

You could use CSS to hide the column altogether by including something similar to the following in your page template as an inline style.
#portal-column-two { display: none; }

Or, you could use the Properties tab in the ZMI. Navigate to your page template in the ZMI, click the Properties tab, add a new property named right_slots (type = lines) with an empty value. Note: You could also use the latter as a method to hide the left or right column on a folder-by-folder basis.

I can't find in Plone 2.0.5 where I give permission to user to published Events. In my Plone site I want that user can published event without confirm. Is it possible?

Go to the workflow tool's "Contents" tab and create a new workflow by copying and renaming the 'folder_workflow' (it doesn't have a review step). Call it 'event_workflow' or something. Go to the "Transitions" tab, the 'publish' transition, and remove the "Review portal content" permission requirement. Now go back to the "Workflows" tab and assign your new workflow to the Event type.

As previously mentioned, the only real hiccup I had when migrating this site from Plone 2.0.5 to 2.1 was dealing with CMFPhoto. Since I couldn't find any information regarding this issue (and was too lazy to ask the respective authors...) I simply did what I always do in such cases: make guesses and apply the good ol' scientific approach known as Trial & Error...

So, what I've learned is this:

1. CMFPhoto is broken under 2.1 in such a way, that you can still access the actual images (by entering the complete URL, or via WebDAV) but photos linked to using the <img src="..."/> won't show up and accessing scaled versions using the /variant/xxx scheme are also broken.
   
2. The default Image type in 2.1 (ATImage from the ATCT Product, actually - three cheers for ATCT, everybody! Thank you...) is capable of scaling but uses a different naming convention. Digging in the source revealed the following sizes:
                  sizes= {'large'   : (768, 768),
                       'preview' : (400, 400),
                       'mini'    : (200, 200),
                       'thumb'   : (128, 128),
                       'tile'    :  (64, 64),
                       'icon'    :  (32, 32),
                       'listing' :  (16, 16),
                      },

3. To access these sizes, append /image_XXX to the URL, where XXX is one of the above sizes.
   
4. To migrate existing Albums and Photos you can download a folder via WebDAV, delete the Album on the server and re-upload the album (which is now a folder). You'll still have to adjust any old-style references to scaled versions, but hey... it's a start....
5. Choosing 'photoalbum view' in the new 'display' menu when inside a folder containing images will result in the good ol' PhotoAlbum view from the CMFPhotoAlbum product.
   

• del.icio.us Plone
• del.icio.us Zope
• Plone products section on Plone.org
• Planet Zope

Few weeks ago I found out that Technorati tags can be very helpfull because of

• Technorati Plone tag
• Technorati Zope tag

So I'll try to collect some information from other blogs and mailing lists and publish it here.

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