CMS.Info Blog

Add-ons for the upcoming Plone 4 release

Olha Pelishok — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 06:30:00 -0500

Long-awaited next major release of Plone - 4.0 is currently in its 3rd alpha release. Many new features and improvements have been discussed recently among Plone community members. Plone 4 is expected to be much friendlier and faster than its previous versions. I guess you have already tried it to feel the new design and features. If not - don't hesitate to do that, test Plone 4 alpha and be among those who make Plone better.

Even though Plone 4 is not ready to be used on production environments yet, several Plone products have already been upgraded to be compatible on Plone 4. There are Plone-4-compatible stable releases of such Plone products as: Kupu 1.4.16, Salesforce Base Connector 1.2, etc. Many other are still under development, going through alpha and beta stages. You can use our Products Search to look for the products available for Plone 4. For this use "CMS version" box at the left column to filter products by its compatibility with Plone versions.

There are only 17 products listed currently as working with Plone 4. Are there any other missing? Have you tried more add-ons on your Plone 4 instance? Have you developed any new product for Plone 4? Share your experience, let's make a complete list of add-ons for Plone 4 together.

Review of the Plone products updates

Olha Pelishok — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 07:45:00 -0500

Plone 4.0

The most welcomed and the most important release worth mentioning is the alpha for the next major Plone release - 4.0. Although Plone 4 is still in alpha, you can try it, see its new design, feel its new features. Hope it will not take long before stable (or at least beta) release is out.

WYSIWYG editors

Most popular WYSIWYG editors for Plone - Kupu and TinyMCE are constantly being updated to be compatible with the latest Plone versions. Being default WYSIWYG editor for Plone 3, latest 1.4.16 Kupu release is already compatible with the coming Plone 4.0 version. Latest version of default WYSIWYG editor for Plone 4 TinyMCE 2.6.4.2 is mainly a bug fix release.

Cyn.in

New version of out-of-the-box group collaboration software, cyn.in 3.0.5, was releases on November 17, 2009. Being based on the latest stable release of Plone, 3.3.1, cyn.in 3.0.5 includes lots of improvements and brings some cool new features:

added out-of-box support for publishing content to anonymous users,
enhancement within UI: user toolbar was introduced in the adder bar;
Google Chrome Frame support added

Megaphone

Initial stable release 1.0 of a new Megaphone add-on for Plone from Groundwire (concept by Jon Stahl & Drew Bernard; development by David Glick & Jon Baldivieso) has seen the world on Nov. 11, 2009. Megaphone is built on top of several Plone products: PloneFormGen, collective.z3cform.wizard, Salesforce PFG Adapter and Salesforce Base Connector. This is a tool for powerful online advocacy campaigns building in Plone. The following are main features Megaphone comes with:

allows sending letters to decision makers
allows setting required and optional recipients
allows saving data locally or to Salesforce.com
allows giving email letters to targets
allows thank-you letter customizing

collective.project

Collective.project package has gone through multiple improvements this autumn: there were 7 stable versions released. The latest one - collective.project 0.9.3 appeared on Dec 5, 2009. The goal of this package is to simplify project management with 4 (Dexterity) content types added to Plone: Client, Project, Iteration, and Task. It also includes a tool to automate creation of iterations. It comes with a project workflow for client, project, and iteration that contains active/inactive state(s).

Add-ons for Plone: review of the recent Products Releases

Olha Pelishok — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:05:00 -0500

Portlets management in Plone

Recent decade was rich for releasing Plone products that allows to add new types of portlets to the Plone sites as well as put them in different locations. Here are new portlets types:

Twitter portlet 0.5 - released by Sharkbyte studios on Sep 2009.
Gallery Portlet - provides a single portlet which displays serie of images using JQuery fade in/out animation.
Multilevel Navigation - a layer above Plone navigation portlet that can display the navigation tree with a configured level of deepness. Initial release - Oct 14, 2009 by Pilot Systems.

And here are the new products for managing portlets location:

ContentWellPortlets - first stable version of the product 2.0.1 developed by WebLion Group was released on Oct 13. It enables you to put portlets in places other than right and left columns, specifically, above the main heading of the page and/or at the base of the page, above the footer. In each area, you can add up to three columns of portlets.
collective.weightedportlets - Plone addon by Groundwire that adds the ability to tweak portlet ordering by giving each portlet a weight. First stable release was launched on Oct 12, 2009.
quintagroup.portletmanager.footer - allows to add portlet manager that is rendered in page footer. Initial release - Oct 7, 2009 by Quintagroup team.
Solgema.PortletsManager - enhances Plone default portlet management system by adding new abilities (ordering and blocking by portlet). First stable release - Sep 17, 2009.

Newsletter Products for Plone

One of the best-tested and best-documented newsletter products for Plone Singing & Dancing has one stable version released 0.8.13 on October 19, 2009 with multiple improvements and bug fixes. It seems like this product has a great future with such a support.

But now only Singing&Dancing is developing, one more newsletter product for Plone, initially created by Pilot Systems, now maintained by Radim Novotny, has recently seen several stable releases. Latest PloneGazette releases 3.1.1 and 3.1.0 (Oct 2009) are also worth looking at.

eCommerce Products for Plone

In this area GetPaid seems to have taken the leading position and this is quite obvious - such amount of word is being carried out to make this product better with every release. On Oct 28, 2009 1.8 GetPaid version has seen the world. This release came with more payment processors and add on packages available, plus fixes and usability improvements in the shopping cart.

Something completely new launched Raptus AG called pcommerce.core. This seems to be a new eCommerce solution for Plone, which provides a simple shop system which supports:

product variations
multiple prices per product to support special prices per user or group (over the sharing tab) and prices only available for a specific time (by using the expiration date)
multiple pluggable payment methods
multiple currencies by using Products.CurrencyUtility

See more information on the products home page at pcommerce.core.

Plone4Bio

BioDec has launched a new plone project: plone4bio. The rationale of the plone4bio project is to provide a web-based integrated environment where it is possible to manage and analyze biological sequence data. The plone4bio package provides the possibility by adding new content types to the Plone CMS. Find the first stable version 1.0.1 releases on Sep, 07 at plone4bio page.

New Free Plone Themes

There were also some new free Plone themes released during last 3 months:

SunRain Plone Theme - new Plone Skin from Quintagroup that was developed for blogging purposes specially.
Twinapex Theme - can give your Plone 3 site a professional corporate look.
heddex.tranquility theme - is Plone 3 visual theme from HedDex Design Studio.
plonetheme.aclark_twitter - makes your Plone site look like my Twitter page.

Portlet Cumulus for Plone

Olha Pelishok — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 07:50:00 -0400

Cumulus Portlet (quintagroup.portlet.cumulus) from Quintagroup allows you to add tag cloud portlets to display your site's tags, categories or both using a Flash movie that rotates them in 3D. It works just like a regular tags cloud, but it is more visually exciting. This is the WordPress WP-Cumulus plugin ported to Plone as a portlet.

When you add this portlet anywhere in the site it will display all site's tags. You are free to set cumulus portlet options so that it fits your site design, color scheme etc. Among portlet options you can find:

Width and height of the flash tag cloud portlet
Smallest and largest tag size
You can set main and optionally second color of the tags for creating multi-colored tag cloud; optional highlight color when mouse is over it and background portlet color
Possibility to enable transparent or compatibility mode
Rotation speed. Remember that clicking the tags might turn to be a little hard, depending on your speed setting :).

P.S. Click on the image to be taken to the page with portlet cumulus demo.

Portlet Cumulus is now on PyPi. Give it a go!

Review of the Recent Plone Products Releases

Olha Pelishok — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:43:02 -0400

PloneFormGen

PloneFormGen 1.2.7 release (Apr 22, 2009) - new bugfixed and updated release of the main addon used to build forms in Plone, providing fields, widgets and validators from Archetypes.

Poi

Most popular Plone issue tracker Poi has new 1.2 version, released on Apr 22, 2009. This is Plone 3-only release; Plone 2.5 is no longer supported. This product was eggified and Poi is now available as Products.Poi.

Poi 2.1 has changes in UI: the responses refactoring made it possible to have a reaction form at the bottom of each issue instead of needing to create a PoiResponse. So now the issue and all responses are displayed when making your own response.

Poi 2.1 has also gone through big refactoring: some logic from the content types and python scripts (in the skin) was moved into browser views and other adapters. PoiResponses (Archetypes objects) were replaced with Zope 3 style light weight objects.

Faculty Staff Directory

New improved release of personnel directory Faculty Staff Directory is now available which is 2.1.1.2, released on Apr 8, 2009. This is mainly a bugfix release with some new features implemented, such as:

A dedicated Committees Folder view (similar to the specialies folder view) added.
A Specialty has an extra schemata "Overview" with an image and richtext field. Both fields are used for the speciality_overview view.
Microformats for person_view's address block added.
Spanish and French translation added.

PloneSEO

Updated and improved version of major SEO-related tool for Plone - Plone SEO 2.0.5, released on Apr 7, 2009. New release includes some improvements and modernization of SEOptimizer product from Quintagroup. Adding of a new feature is worth mentioning here which is canonical URL, useful for search engine marketing purposes.

Plone Comments

Plone Comments 4.0.0 release, issued on Apr 6, 2009, is now compatible with Plone 3. Current release highlights:

uninstall configlet and skins added
i18n layout to a locales layout converted
use of the username as the comment creator fixed, necessary whenever the user is authenticated. This fixes the problems where commenters weren't receiving any notifications.

Real Estate Broker

New release of Plone real estate objects management tool - Real Estate Broker 2.1 was issued on Mar 26, 2009. New features that come with this release include:

French translations added
Allow access to the AlbumView.first_image; an Unauthorized error is triggered when using this in for example a collection portlet.
Floorplan filter bug fixed: the photo management page also filtered them, making them impossible to edit.
Floorplans from all the photo lists was filtered out.

Plone Get Paid

PloneGetPaid 0.7.5 version releases on Mar 13, 2009. This version has Brazilian Portuguese translation updated and the code was updated to make sure the site root is got when checking out, otherwise the store settings can't be got. More highlights include:

the inclusion of getpaid.payflowpro added if it is installed
viewlet provider on thank you page added

More information about PloneGetPaid updates can be found here - General Update on last 3 Months of GetPaid.

Singing & Dancing

0.8.9 release of the next generation newsletter add-on for Plone Singing & Dancing appeared on Mar 11, 2009. This release brought updated installation instructions for Plone 3.2.x buildouts. Support for overriding template variables in the "send as newsletter form" was also added.

Plone True Gallery

After a number of alpha releases in 0.7 series, a gallery/slideshow product Plone True Gallery has new beta release 0.7 issued on Apr 28, 2009. This version comes with the following improvements:

small picasa gallery size changed to 320*320
gallery type registration changed
gallery images is now always displayed even when there are subgalleries in the current gallery
dependency on simplejson and elementtree removed
flickrapi and gdata are made optional add-ons
support for slideshow 2 added, giving an option of what gallery type to use
pre-fetches gallery images to speed rendering time(especially for flickr and picasa).
sub-galleries design improved

Practical Plone 3: Book Review

Olha Pelishok — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 08:30:00 -0400

Last Friday I got a new book Practical Plone 3: A Beginner's Guide to Building Powerful Websites from Packt Publishing. This is the first Plone book aimed to reach beginners in Plone, who are willing to build websites with Plone 3. It teaches how to deal with Plone and set it up, not involving into programming or dealing with code. Covering everything from installation to site administration basics, content types development, theming with Plone and much more, it can be the perfect webmaster guide for Plone novices.

The book consists of 4 parts. I have already covered half of it - first two parts. So, I would share impressions they have made on me.

Part 1 - Background covers main introductory issues of Plone. Chapter 1 is a short, but well written chapter about Plone, its basic features, community and what Plone is and where it came from. Chapter 2 is all about installing Plone on different platforms. The explanations are really detailed and illustrated enough for anyone new to Plone. I should admit that I always needed help to install Plone on my Linux machine (even though I'm not a newbie to Plone, I have been working with it for more than 2 years). But with this book for the first time I successfully installed the latest Plone 3.2.1 version on my machine. So, for me personally, explanations on Plone installation for Linux were very valuable. Chapter 3 has the fine overview of Plone registration and logging in. All basic Plone site parts, such as logo, portal actions, personal dashboard, portlets and colophon are described here with particular preciseness.

Part 2 - I want to... has general content management issues discussed, such as how to add content to your Plone website, how to store and manage it. General workflow issues together with content rules explained in much details will help you create the necessary secure work environment. Chapters 4 and 5 are about creating web pages, news items, events, links and files within Plone. Although they provide very basic procedures for using a Plone site for keeping the content, it is really well written and suitable for the most newbie user level. Explanations are followed by multiple screenshots, making it very understandable and illustrative. Chapter 6 and 7 do a really good job on the structuring content on your website, displaying the basics of content architecture. Versioning was also described with precise details, thanks to Darci Hanning. As for newcomers to Plone this can be more than enough.

Chapter 8 is a great section on managing users and user groups within Plone. All basic roles and permissions were discussed on the basis of real example for High School members. Such living example really made it easier to grab the idea. What I liked the most is that one example project is discussed in several chapters from different perspective, making a connection between what a reader has already learned and a new material.

Chapter 9 talks in great details about workflow, states and transitions in Plone. At a first glance it seemed to be a bit confusing to get into Plone workflow engine, opening all multiple menus and tabs under portal_workflow in ZMI. This is the chapter I spent more time on than on any other chapters. Workflow has never been an easy issue to deal with, so I followed the provided step-by-step example about custom collaboration workflow creation (on p.161). I must admit that this was not so terrible as it seemed at the beginning. Matt Bowen, who is the author of this chapter, made his best to make such rather confusing issues well-explained and more clear. I would also add information on mapping states to this section too, now it is available in chapter 12 on Configuration. I think it would be better to collect all info about Types menu in one place.

Chapter 10 is a very useful how-to on portlet management in Plone. Everything beginning from default portlet management to creating new types of portlets was described (with TAL Portlet product). Much attention was paid to explaining how to assign portlets to specific objects on site, certain content type or users groups. Chapter 11 includes several examples on enabling rules on your website. Chapter 12 provides information about Plone Site Setup item. But some of it seems to be too much, for example: chapter 8 is devoted to users in groups in Plone, and I would combine information about creating new group and adding group into a group from this chapter to chapter 8. So that all info on user management is in one place.

To sum up, I should say that starting from the very basics, this book shows how to get a good understanding of Plone and use it effectively. The language of the book is rather easy, big amount of illustrative examples, step-by-step instructions and easy-to-follow how-tos make this book a pleasure to read. Overall, the authors have produced a volume that can be recommended for every beginner in Plone.

Reviewer: Olha Pelishok, content manager at Quintagroup

Content Management Software Info: Improvement

Olha Pelishok — Wed, 18 Feb 2009 06:07:52 -0500

Content Management Software Info website has gone through the next stage of reorganization and renewal. Following the changes that were made last year, we continued to improve our site.

Most attention was paid to making Plone Products section more useful and informative. What we managed to implement so far:

More Products Screenshots. Screenshots were added into products description pages for better understanding the product with the first look (e.g. Plone Tabs, Plone True Gallery).
More Themes Screenshots. Plone Themes and Skins section listing was expanded with skins screenshots. So now while searching for a necessary theme in this category you can see theme look immediately without need to visit every theme description page.
More Products Categories. Some product sections like Other and Development tools were reorganized: new product categories were added for better division of products, according to their featured. New Plone categories that have recently been created are the following:
- Import and Export - containing products for managing import/export operations in/out of Plone.
- Navigation and Menus - containing products that are used for implementing advantage navigation on Plone sites. These products make it possible to create drop-down menus, several-lines navigation tabs, extend navigation portlet etc.
- Rating and Evaluation - containing tools for rating and evaluating of content on Plone websites.
- Theme Deployment - containing products for creating Plone skins: tools that allow to inspect your Plone site, implement some special visual features, change colors or borders shape, etc.
- Third-party Integration - containing tools that allow integration of Plone with other powerful systems like Salesforce, Paypal, etc.
- Workflow - containing products for managing workflow process in Plone.
More Products Descriptions. Every Plone category now has a short description, in which it goes about what products are included into it and what purposes can its products be used for.

Hope you like and appreciate our work! If you have any comments on our work or suggestions on more cms.info site improvement - feel free to contact us any time.

Renovated contentmanagementsoftware.info

Olha Pelishok — Thu, 25 Dec 2008 07:09:14 -0500

Contentmanagementsoftware.info website has gone through a number of transformations during this year. Now it's time to sum up all that was carried out to improve this website usefulness and effectiveness.

Site Migration

First and the most important thing that was done to cms.info is its successful migration from Plone 2.1 to Plone 3.1. That migration case was a topic for Quintagroup's Plone Conference 2008 talk presented by Vitaliy Podoba in Washington in October. Such a migration from Plone 2.1 version to 3.1 version without intermediate major Plone 2.5 version was accepted as a huge step forward - quantum leap. Contentmanagementsoftware.info migration was the first, and still successful implementation of carrying out Plone sites migration to new Plone versions.

Advanced Product Search

After fulfilling the migration to Plone 3, it became easier to implement advanced product categorization and search, which was not supported in previous site version on Plone 2.1. New feature called Product search can be reached by selecting one of the site's top tabs. Faceted Navigation product was used to enable advanced product browsing by certain criteria. Products can now be browsed by CMS supported version, their authors and developers, or their software type.

Rating system

Site visitors can now rate products by 4 categories: Features, Reliability, Ease of Use, or Documentation. This is very convenient for situations when you first face a new Plone product. You might rely on other people evaluations to make decisions on whether use this or that product or not.

So, welcome to our renewed contentmanagementsoftware.info!

Large Files Management in Plone

Olha Pelishok — Mon, 19 May 2008 04:35:48 -0500

Plone is a leading open source CMS, that is well-suited for documents and files management. Plone is very flexible and allows to customize its configuration for work with large files. Unfortunately, for the time being default Plone has some problems with managing large volumes of PDF, media, video and other files.

There are solutions to these problems, it is possible to customize Plone to avoid any difficulties, but what concerns out-of-the-box Plone, it has limitation on work with large files. These are, first of all, Plone-beginners and ordinary Plone users that face default Plone drawbacks. That can be really frustrating when working with such a powerful CMS. That is why lack of a universal tool for managing big files successfully is really topical issue. A sophisticated CMS system, such as Plone is, should provide a transparent way to upload big files and handle them smoothly on the server side.

This is multimedia that often involves large files, so products are being developed aimed to manage large video files efficiently. The need is to improve the handling of multimedia files in Plone, which includes the uploading audio/video files process as well as their storage.

File Storage

There are several places, where files can be stored in Plone. These are:

ZODB (Zope Object Database)
File System
External Servers

1. ZODB's FileStorage (Data.fs)

for ZODB versions < 3.8

The first problem when dealing with big files is the upload procedure. Large files upload can cause RAM shortage, which in their turn involve performance failure in general. Due to the way the ZODB works (default Plone has all its object stored in Zope Object Database (ZODB) after upload), large files can be problematic to work with. There are solutions to this problem, which usually involve storing some content outside the ZODB.

2. Plone FileSystem Storage

Several Plone products were developed 2 years ago to handle external storage of files on the FileSystem. They are probably not as transparent as would perhaps be desirable, because they require the use of specific content types, but they appeared to work well. Although the following products aimed to solve large files management problems, they can not be suitable enough to overcome present default Plone drawbacks.

CMFExtFile
author: Stefan H. Holek

description source: CMFExtFile project page

CMFExtFile replaces the stock File and Image portal types with ExtFile and ExtImage respectively.
PloneExFile
author: ingeniweb

description source: PloneExFile project page
PloneExFile is a replacement content type for the usual File (ATCT or CMF) with additional features for the file types supported by AttachmentField (MS Office, PDF, OpenOffice):
- File content indexing
- File preview through the browser
ATManagedFile
author: Enfold Systems

description source: ATManagedFile project page

ATManagedFile stores files on the file system while keeping a content representation in Plone. ATManagedFile allows you to store metadata in the database while keeping File assets on the servers file system. Content is treated like a first-class citizen in Plone, it can be transitioned (workflow), edited, copy/pasted. Metadata for content can be described through Archetype schema's. A managed_files tool enables administrators to specify where content is stored, the deletion policy, as well as the stored filesystem naming convention.
ExternalStorage
author: Plone Solutions

description source: ExternalStorage README.txt

ExternalStorage is an additional storage implementation for Archetypes, to support storing the fields content outside the ZODB. It works in a fashion like ExternalFile or similar products.
FileSystemStorage
author: ingeniweb

description source: FileSystemStorage project page

FileSystemStorage (FSS) is an Archetypes storage for storing fields raw values on the file system. This storage is used to avoid unnecessary growth of the ZODB's FileStorage (Data.fs) when using a lot of large files.
z3c.extfile
author: Lovely Systems

description source: z3c.extfile README.txt

Filestorage package offers large file handling solutions for zope3. The first implementation is based on properties, the second on wsgi. The property implementation runs on plain zope 3.
This package provides a wsgi filter that upon upload replaces the content of the upload with the sha digest of the content and stores the file on the filesystem. Upon download it looks if it has a digest and returns the according file directly from the filesystem.
Tramline
author: Infrae

description source: Tramline project page

Tramline is an upload and download accelerator that plugs into Apache. Its aim is to make downloading and uploading large media to an application server easy and fast, without overloading the application server with large amounts of binary data.

Tramline integrates into Apache using mod_python. The application server is assumed to sit behind Apache, for instance hooked up using mod_proxy or mod_rewrite. Tramline takes over uploading and downloading files, handling these within Apache. Only a small configuration change in Apache should be necessary to enable Tramline.

The application server remains in complete control over security, page and form rendering, and everything else. Minimal changes are necessary to any application to enable it to work with Tramline; in fact it’s just setting two response headers in a few places in the code.

Even though these products were accepted as a right solutions once, now they are not good enough. Large files management problem remains topical and it was among other topics to be considered on 2008 Plone Strategic Planning Summit in Mountain View, California, USA.

ZODB Blob Support

As a result of the Summit, a ticket was opened, aimed to find a solution to the problem with large files management in Plone 3. This was 7822 ticket concerning file content type BLOB support - Make standard file content types use ZODB BLOB support.

It was decided to create an integration package for ZODB BLOB support for Plone aimed to handle large file more efficiently than it was in previous Plone releases.

The idea with ZODB blob support is not new, it was initiated long ago, and there are several solutions for present time:

blob
Authors: Christian Theune, Chris McDonough
This product is for Zope developers, not end users. It provides an alternative to storing large binary chunks of arbitrary data in ZODB, allowing this kind of data to live instead in files on a FileSystem. Unlike a "roll your own" solution, it provides transactional integrity while doing so. It also provides a simple UNIX-like API for dealing with file objects.
ATBlobField
Author: Enfold Systems
plone.app.blob
Author: Andreas Zeidler
plone.app.blob is supposed to provide a new content type that can be used as a drop-in replacement for ATFile. Plone.app.blob is a package integrating ZODB 3.8's blob support. This allows large binary data to be managed by the ZODB, but separately from the usual Data.fs FileStorage database.

3. Storage at External Servers

Files can be hosted on remote sharing sites (e.g. Youtube, Google Video, Blip.tv, Revver.com etc.), not in your FileSystem. This is the easiest way to deal with video on your instance. All you should do is to paste a piece of <embed> code into Plone. You can insert this code even into a usual document (for that you must have HTML filter disabled), or create a simple content type with the corresponding field for <embed> code. In this case large files are physically located in some external sources, not in your instance.
Example: http://www.bmctv.com, developed by Quintagroup.

Free Themes for Plone 3

Olha Pelishok — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 08:20:11 -0500

There are several tens of free Themes available in Plone, all gathered on plone.org under visual themes category. Although the number of Plone themes is rather big, their quality leaves much to be improved. Most of these themes seem to be too simple and not nice enough. There even exists a perception that the only thing that can be done to a Plone site theme is to change the color of the tabs.

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

Oberon / Tom-Wilkin Martinussen

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)

One more thing worth mentioning is a great number of Plone themes done for commercial purposes. It is natural that a lot of Plone development work is done for certain clients, thus a lot of nice and sophisticated themes are not available for Plone users for free. So, most Plone skins are more client-specific and are less able to be shared to the general downloading public. In this way Plone is a step behind other open source projects/communities.

These and other Plone 3 themes problems, raised by Veda in his Thoughts on championing OOTB themes, should undoubtedly be solved. The major suggestions concerning Plone themes improvement are the following:

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.

'Professional Plone Development': book improvements

Olha Pelishok — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 04:32:11 -0600

'Professional Plone Development' book written by Martin Aspeli was published by Packt Publishing. This company's official website has a special support section, where a customer can download the code or support files, view errata and amendments, send feedback. This is a place where readers can share their thought about the book. It is possible to send any feedbacks or suggestions concerning book improvement here. There is a special errata form to complete in case any drawbacks were discovered. Any kind of feedbacks on the book overall are also welcomed, any suggestions about how to improve it are also taken into consideration.

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.

If you have any ideas concerning 'Professional Plone Development' book improvement, or probably you have noticed any misprints or mistakes in code - share your ideas with Plone community. All together we could make this documentation excellent.

Martin Aspeli 'Professional Plone Development'

Olha Pelishok — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 03:56:37 -0500

Quintagroup has recently received Martin Aspeli's new book Professional Plone Development from Kshipra Singh, Marketing Account Manager at Packt Publishing. We are very delighted to have it and to benefit from its paramount usefulness. The book is of great importance especially for developers, as Plone CMS is explained here from a programming perspective.

Programmers at our company have acquainted themselves with Aspeli's book: some of them have already read it completely, others have just looked through the most topical issues. Nevertheless, all of them agree that the explanations provided give an in-depth understanding of the concepts.

Plone-developers often have to sift through bits of online howtos and other people's examples to understand how to do certain things. When any problems turn on, there is a need to look for necessary information on different programmers' forums. Such searches are in most cases time-consuming or even hit-or-miss. Professional Plone Development fills the gap between the inadequacy of online howtos and the need to read through someone's example to find out how a particular thing is done.

Both beginners and experienced developers can find lots of useful information in this book. Professional Plone Development is undoubtfully worth reading, taking into consideration the fact that new 3.0.x Plone versions include lots of novelties. Martin Aspeli's writing style is clear, to the point and neutral. The author uses many examples, case studies with explanatory notes which can help people to understand Plone development better. A list of concepts that the book covers is amazing and the material is relevant and up-to-date.

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

Vitaliy Podoba:

"Professional Plone Development has made a very positive impression on me, even though I haven't read it to the end yet. I think that everything described here is very understandable. The explanations are nice, and examples are really helpful. The book will be interesting both for beginners (especially 2-nd chapter) and for experienced Plone developers. That's because Plone 3.0 has lots of new features and not everything can be comprehended so easily, or found in new Plone code. For me, this book is a kind of a guide to development with Plone 3.0."
"Chapter 3 explains how to built development environment in a way, different from a usual one (downloading and installing Zope, then the same procedure being done to Plone, after that all necessary products installation). Development environment can be built with Python ZopeSkel package, that possesses all the necessary information in buildout.cfg file. Thus, having this file, we can have the same development environment automatically set to all developers. All the product installed will be identical, of the same version."
"What amazed me the most, is that in addition to explaining the concepts, and how to work with them, the author provides us with reasons for their existence, why they work this and not another way. For example, it has always been unclear for me why such text files as Products/CMFPlone/profiles/default/plone_various.txt are in GenerisSetup folders, what their role is. I couldn't find any information about this online, but now I have the answer to my question form Aspeli's book: we need such files because of the way GenericSetup executes import steps. If an import step handler has been registered and run once, it will be called for any subsequent profiles (even from different products) that are imported."
"Another interesting fact is that portlet customization can be achieved through <plone:portletRenderer /> directive, that I have never tried earlier."

Summing up all written above I should state that our programmers have gained a lot of relevant information. And there is a countless number of examples that can be provided here. They will definitely get even more trying all described in the book in practice working in Plone 3.0.

KSS Opener: Events

Myroslav Opyr — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 04:55:05 -0500

Ability to add own reaction and/or prevent default reaction is described in KSS Opener events post:

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;
}

KSS Opener: Controller

Myroslav Opyr — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:52:35 -0500

There was a discussion with Geir and Alex regarding the non-semantic example. Newer post addresses the issue with semantic KSS Opener albeit with a bit of complexity more:

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.

KSS Opener: Introduction

Myroslav Opyr — Wed, 14 Mar 2007 11:27:23 -0500

Plone-3.0 is knocking our doors. KSS is coming to shed some light upon Ajax for Plone Community. Myroslav Opyr of Quintagroup in his Introduction to KSS Opener post is revealing KSS component that can help Plone Application developers:

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.