Some work I did a little while ago to create a migration
script from SimpleBlog to Quills got some recognition from Brian Skahan
the other day. It felt good to have a virtual ‘pat on the back’ -
thanks a lot Brian!
First of all, this is an old news item (from 2003!) but it warmed the cockles of my heart to see that two open source applications I use and am jealousy attached to featured as the two most popular open source projects - Plone and KDE.
Further, I’m not a Zope Security expert but security is not easy to setup in Plone; this quote from Jim Fulton (chief Zope architect) puts it in persective ;-) For instance, today I created a role, which I wanted to have basically the same rights as the ‘Manager’ role but without the ‘Manage Portal’ permission. Sounds simple enough? Wrong, as the ‘Manage Portal’ permission is set to ‘Acquire permission settings’ by default so I couldn’t work out how to revoke this permission for my role. Even after I managed to somehow achieve what I wanted, other strange things were occuring when managing the site. In the end I just did a bit of a hack to resolve my issue. I think I need to invest some time in learning to use the VerboseSecurity product.
It’s true that when you’re looking for the bad in something you will find it but these admissions came from Drupal users! I did read about the whole Drupal vs Plone argument via a post on Sidnei da Silva’s website. and basically it came down to Plone is more of an enterprise CMS whereas Drupal is more suited to smaller scale implementations (I stand to be corrected on this - I really should turn on Anonymous commenting ;-)
The thing that started me comparing the 2 systems was an email from a client that pointed me towards a new Pasifika community website in Christchurch. We’re starting to get heavily into internationalising Plone and coming across this website that’s specifically targeted at the Pacific Island people in Canterbury was a project that screamed “Plone”. I discovered after a bit of digging that the website is based on Drupal and thought I’d do some further digging to see what Drupal’s i18n-support was like. I discovered that Drupal has around 28 translations in progress, whereas Plone has 43. The real distinguishing factor, though, is Plone’s multilingual content support, which means you can have content available simultaneously in multiple languages. Imagine being able to simply view the same document in the language of your choice, whether that’s Samoan, Tongan, Fijian, Maori, English or whatever other language you like - that’s the kind’ve functionality Plone provides! I hope I can convince others about this amazing feature that Plone has..
Yesterday I was implementing a solution for a customer based on a howto at plone.org, and I was struggling to get the thing to work. In the end the problem was related to the fact that I had created the CMFPhoto content through the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) rather than through the Plone Management Interface (PMI) - bad mistake. I was told this lesson long ago but had to learn it again the ‘hard way’. When you add stuff through the PMI it does a whole lot of other workflow-type stuff/etc in the background.
Also I learned a cool command in google today - allinurl:my_url. For e.g. type allinurl:weblog_view in the google search box and it will find all urls that contain ‘weblog_view’ - which just happens to be all Quills weblogs. Cool ay.
I spent all of this morning creating a workflow script that would email a pdf, which was attached to a CMF File. A snippet in the zopewiki really helped, especially the DTML Method called sendresume.
Another time saver for zope developers is the External Editor. Until today I was unsure of how to set which editor it would choose when opening a file in zope (so I was editing stuff in all sorts of weird and wonderful things). I then had a proper look through $HOME/.zope-external-edit and worked out how to set editors for different file types. The only remaining problem is that OpenOffice.org detaches itself from External Editor when it runs, therefore not allowing you to save changes back up to zope! This helpful link (courtesy of paul from TheVirtual) solved this problem :-) .. Remember standard disclaimer regarding use of this howto applies ;-)
And finally another helpful tip I discovered today which is going to prove very helpful for my future blogging is that by using the CMFPhoto
product you can then create urls of the form
http://mysite.com/mypicture/variant/xsmall and it will automagically
resize the image to a sensible size for use in my blog entries. This
saves lots of time and hassle using a imaging program to resize it all the time. HTH.
I’ve finally given a much needed face-lift to my company website! It also makes use of
some great Zope and Plone technology called i18nlayer, i18nfolder,
and PloneLanguageTool which are available at the Collective (i18nfolder
is available at the
Ingeniweb Products section on sf.net). This technology enables you to
very easily create and edit website content in many different
languages and also allow visitors to the website to easily navigate the
website and view content in either language (there is an excellent tutorial
on Tom Lazar’s
website - BTW he’s a really good guy too). As a developer it is very
easy to use and as a visitor it is easy too - a win-win situation :) The
site is still a work-in-progress so I will be sprucing it up a bit more in
the near future. Keep tuned.
As you can see I’ve also updated the look on kokorice too. It now has a
little more of a cocoa / caramel feel to it. It was also inspired in part by
our new chihuahua puppy who is a caramelly colour too :)
Just a last rant regarding Internet Exploder, the bane of my existence. One
issue I discovered when trying to finish off emergetec.com was that in
Internet Explorer 6 there was a gap above and below the image I had set as a
background on the top banner section of the site. It looked fine in mozilla (and why wouldn’t it ;) I found that
when I removed the height attribute
the problem disappeared (go figure). Dunno what the reason was but I’m just
happy the problem is resolved. Hopefully someone else can benefit from my
headache ;)
Michiharu heads his own company called 
You can’t really make it out in this
photo but I’ve magnified the price. It reads 63000 yen, which in New Zealand
dollars is about $1000!
I hope our one is as cute :)
