Living Statues Sprint

My trip started in August (25.8. 2010) when I jumped on the plane to Living Statues Sprint in Arnhem hosted by wonderfull people from Four Digits. Upon my arrival (I was half a day late) I was greeted by wall of tickets.

I quickly got "dirty" and start working on ticker #10995 (sitemap / navigation tile). After initial introduction into Deco / Blocks infrastructure I already got some results and first problems. Navigation portlet and Sitemap page can be now successfully replaced by navigation tile, yaaay.

I must admit that sprint was incredibly organized, tickets prepered beforehand and delagated to sprinters. So number of closed Deco / Blocks / Tiles related tickets is definetly reflecting great preparation from Rob Gietema. More on results with videos you can check on this link and judge it for yourself.

"mrs.developer" Sprint

You know the feeling when you have to rerun the buildout for the 2nd time in a row? And just because you want to add new source deactivated by default, but activated for you. Or when you simply want to hack on some code which is laying in some egg (in buildout), while keeping it sane and to create paches and apply them on production later on.

While hacking on Deco at Living Statues Sprint there was a lot of ideas flying around how to address common issues we developers have currently. Especially me and Florian Frisdorf were so much bothered by this issues that we decided to act upon. After Living Statues Sprint we headed to Munich to offices of Syslab.com Gmbh and Starzel.de to continue on this ideas.

For that reasons we started a thing called mrs.developer. mrs.developer provides buildout extension as well as comand like tool called "mrsd". For now its prove of concept that you don't have to rerun buildout if you start working on some code. Right now I can say mrs.devloper is a working patching solution, but might soon step into the area of mr.developer and also took care of handling sources. I wont go into details how it works since this is a topic for other blog post after initial phase of development is done, but more about it read on PyPi page.

But you probably didn't know that mrs.developer can dance right?

German Zope Usergroup Conference in Dresden

I was a little sceptical wheather I should go to such event since I dont speak german that well, but then again I didn't spoke spanish and I moved here for even more irrational reasons. Soon after visiting Munich I did a little tour to visit my girlfriend in Gdansk (Poland) then I was already on my way to Dresden.

I also gave a talk "Migrations with transmogrifier" (which I will soon turn into tutorial, wait for another blogpost or just contact me) which turned out to be quite well accepted, especially now that we have Plone 4 out, we (as developers) are more and more faced with a task to migrate Plone 2.X (not even Plone 3) sites to Plone 4. You might think its hard, but with tools (blueprints) developed in last months this can be not so frustrating experience.

Zope Cummunity
There was also a lot of talking about Zope community in general, especially after that Zope summit which was held few days before. There is definetly a confusion about identifying yourself as a part of Zope community, since everybody is more involved in "sister organisations": Zope2/Plone, Grok, Bluebream, repoze.bfg, ... But with ZTK 1.0 out this is starting to improve and soon we might see projects like Pylons using small parts of ZTK. Maybe even frameworks like Django might found ZTK or parts of it usefull, especially since they are trying to address similar problems which Zope community had to answer 5 years ago (I'm talking about "Making Django Apps reusable" which was broght up in last DjangoCon). repoze.bfg might be a nice way to see how ZCA can be used in non-scary way. There is a bright and exciting future ahead of us ... thats for sure.

Opengever - future of Swiss goverment

After Dresden I head back to Sevilla (via Gdnask, picking up my girlfriend) and we took well deserved week of vacations. I finally took time to visit other cities in Andalucia, after living here for a year I really haven't had that much oportunities to travel around. So I packed my car (yup this is another story, coming in a blogpost after this) and drive with my girlfriend to Cadiz, Cordoba, Huelva and just enjoy the nature and being offline for a week.

Then I got an call from guys at 4teamwork and I was already on my flight to Bern (Swiss). They are working on a goverment project for one of Swiss cantons, canton Zug. Being part of project of such size and importance is just fun from the start. They are using Plone and other future tools from Plone's future (like Dexterity, Diazo) so you will definetly hear from them some more about this amazing project.

Ljubljana, my sweet Ljubljana

After my work being done in Swiss I headed to Ljubljana. Anything I would say wouldn't be enough. Meet a lot of friends, went to all those parties I was talking people to go to and spend some time with my sisters. I guess my next visit will be next year ... and until then: "Friends its time for you to visit me. We don't have snow here. Snow is bad for you... well for sure its bad for me."

I also did some preparations for what is waiting for me the week after visit of ljubljana, and that is ...

Plone Conference 2010 Bristol

I was already on the train from Ljubaljana to Venice, taking a flight to Bristol. I met some Slovenian Plonistats in line waiting for drop-off-ing luggage. We spend all trip talking about Plone, our expectations for Plone Conference and I was more then ready for fun to begin.

I could do a whole book about Plone Conference behind us. Any word would not be enough to describe it. I think Plone community with its maturity and profesionalism, while still keeping it fun, is just a starting line how I would describe it. To keep it short i will only write something little about parts where I contributed.

If you want to see all Plone Conference's videos ... click here. Amazing video coverage.

Funny... whole Plone Conference I haven't written a line of python code. Javascript hacking all the time. Don't know if i should be proud or ashamed :)

Giving light to dark corners of z3c.form

z3c.forms everybody working with Plone use then and in the future we will use them even more (they are part of Dexterity). There is definetly a part of z3c.form which is "ugly" and "overcomplex", still its a lot better to choose some form framework which is a lot nicer, but does not provide you all of the fancy stuff that is possible with z3c.form. Also in a last year a lot of this issues were addresses and nowdays working with z3c.form can be a real pleasure. More about it you can read in my talk published on github (I'm playing with idea to actually turn/extend it into a tutorial, we'll see how I'm doing with my time) or just watch the video from the conference.

plone.app.event - final chance of recurrence events in plone

This is one of those features in Plone which nobody really want to spend a lot of money on, since its possible to move your workflow around it, but if it would be there it would definetly be used. There some atempts of succiding this in the past, but all more or less failed to bring this functionality into Plone's core. This PLIP is leaded by fearless Johannes Raggam which put on himself to bring this unpleasent task down. Plone community showed big need for it since a lot of people step up and join us coding at Plone Conference Sprint time: Tom Gross, Mike Rhodes, Dorneles Tremea, Simone Orsi, Vitaliy Podoba, Philip Bauer, Ryan Northey and me.

We are 5 days before PLIP deadline for 4.1 series of Plone. Everything looks really good and we might finish it on time, but there are still some task with which our PLIP won't be accepted. Nevertheless it was a pleasure to work with you guys and I hope in next days we bring our code to Framework team for evaluation.

github/collective - experimental (repeat after me: experimental) for possible enhancement of svn/collective

Recently (2 months ago) we started organization on github called "collective". You could consider github/collective as evaluation area for possible enhancement of current svn-collective.

Keep in mind this is experimental, experimental and once again experimental.

I'm not sure how best to emphasis this, but this is nothing officially supported or started from Plone Fundation, but they probably appreciate any effort to make development processes easier. We are just bunch of git enthusiasts who think service like github could bring some order in the mess we have in svn-collective. And instead of working in our own github accounts, we bring the spirit of Plone collective to github.

Who this evaluation are for?
github/collective is ment for:

• developers who are already familiar with git or the not feeling afraid
• their companies are already using git or even github for their work
• and for those who are aware that in case of not using github for collective this organisation might be turned off and they will have to move their code to their own user accounts (2 clicks) or import it into svn/collective (3 commands)

Right before Plone Conference sprinting weekend we already had 24 projects and 26 developers using github/collective, today I must say we are happily serveing home for 34 projects and more then 50 developers is part of it.

Why we didn't ask wider Plone Community and raise debate on mailing list first?
Main reason is that I tried to talk with many people about this and what I got back was speculations "Git is too hard to learn." and some more speculations "Github can not fit into the collective way of working together.". And I don't blame them ... really I don't. So I'm on a missing to collect some facts. Facts about wheather we could use service like github in spirit of collective and improve our way of working together. This reasies a number of different questions, from administration point of view, to documentation point of view ... since this is impossible to predict and to explore in advance we need to take this steps slowly and have some "experimental group" doing this for us.

Join us now. Send PM to garbas (on github) or just scream github/collective on #plone channel

But I don't like git, I think X (place your favorite VCS here) is better and easier to learn?
Ok heard that a lot of times. Maybe you did't notice but in text above I was not mentioning git at all. Yes I was always talking about github. But why is that different? I'm not on a mission how to convert all of you to use git, I want to explore how "social coding" might benefit us. If you don't want to use git you can also use Hg with github or you can even use svn to checkout and commit to github project (this is only limited to master/trunk but this might change soon). But why github and not bitbucket for example? I might be a little bit biased here because I'm a git user myself, but some facts are not to be missed. The only real "social coding" is actually happening on github, at least thats why numbers (of users) say. Well if not real at least more of "social coding" is happening at github and we will see our results faster.

And after evaluation period?
We'll try to investigate github for a bit, see how it fits our "collective-ness". If I say we some time frame after which we will bring this into discussion to plone developers / users list, I would be shooting blank. It might be one or two months from now, it might be more ... I certain that we will all know when time will come. Right now I wont focus on any date, but I will try to make github/collective a friendly place to share code.

Final thoughts

I had a blasting 2 months behind me. I learned a lot, met a lot of great people and there are exciting time ahead of me.

Since I'm a freelancer and there is no big project waiting for me in short future, please contact me if I you might need some help. Maybe my blog is not saying much about what I'm good at (need to change this soon), but I'm mastering lots of Plone aspects:

• Migrations from Plone 2.X to Plone
• Newsletters via Singing & Dancing
• Diazo(xdv) / Deliverance
• Archetypes / Dexterity development and all that comes with it
• z3c.form: I can convince them to do (almost) anything

Happy Plone year...

In the past I've wrote an article about "How to use git with collective (svn)". This is something like that post, but a little more tricks.

Lets first repeat what we "already know"

1. get first revision

$ svn log https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.vdexvocabulary
....
------------------------------------------------------------------------
r99681 | garbas | 2009-10-17 01:05:29 +0200 (sáb 17 de oct de 2009) | 2 lines

initial code, no tests ... todavia

------------------------------------------------------------------------
r99678 | garbas | 2009-10-16 21:58:02 +0200 (vie 16 de oct de 2009) | 2 lines

vdexvocabulary initial commit

------------------------------------------------------------------------
$

2. pull out the code from collective

$ svn clone https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.vdexvocabulary -s -r 99678:HEAD

3. commiting to collective and updating from it

$ cd collective.vdexvocabulary
$ echo "#useless code" >> README.txt
$ git commit
...
$ git svn dcommit
...
$ git svn rebase 

4. tagging for release

$ git svn tag 1.2

5. stashing

$ git stash
...
$ git stash apply

6. working localy with branches

$ git branch -r
1.1
1.2
stripped
tags/1.0
tags/1.0rc1
tags/1.0rc2
trunk
$ git branch
* master
$ git checkout -b fix-strange-1.2-bug 1.2
$ git branch
* fix-strange-1.2-bug
master
$ git checkout master
$ git merge fix-strange-1.2-bug 

That was quick review of previous commands. For more detailed explanation look at my previous post.

Working on remote branches

1. first we create remote branch

$ git svn branch plone4-compatibility

2. create local branch from remote branch

$ git branch -b plone4-compatibility remotes/plone4-compatibility

voila!. now when you do "git svn dcommit" it will actually commit to remote "plone4-compatibility" branch in collective.

Show me your .gitconfig

I'll share my .gitconfig here, I hope I'll get some feedback how even better configure my git.

[user]
 name = Rok Garbas
 email = rok@garbas.si

[color]
 diff = auto
 branch = auto
 status = auto
 interactive = auto

[diff]
 renames = true

[alias]
 merge = merge --no-ff
 s = status
 d = diff
 ci = commit -v
 cia = commit -v -a
 co = checkout
 l = log
 ll = log -p
 b = branch
 cis = svn dcommit

[github]
 user = garbas
 token =  XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

[core]
 editor = mvim

[merge]
 tool = opendiff

Gitify

I know I'm not the only one struggling with this question. Since some Tom Lazar was working on his own tool called gitify, which should make usage of git-svn, a little easier. And it actually does. For more you can read here.

Nice to see another Plone book landed in my mailbox. This time is Plone 3 Multimedia, writem by Tom Gross. There is also a sample chapter avaliable on packpub site.

Whole book just about Plone and multimedia. Are there really so much to talk about? Is there more aspects to cover then Plone4Artists packages and maybe Plumi? Book is targeting Plone integrators, which are the biggest part of Plone community, so there is definetly a market if the book explains the topic right ofcourse. With Plone 4rc1 out just few days ago I fear book is a little outdated, but lets see ...

Chapters 2-5: Image, Audio, Video and Flash

After introductiory chapter you dive streight into dealing with why this book is all about. Multimedia. For each multimedia type it shows how core Plone is handling it them and then how and with which addon can you extend the Plone's default functionality. At the end of every chapter it also shows how to represent multimedia in HTML5. To quickly recap the addons mentions in this chapters, I'll just draw the listing:

Personaly I don't have much experienced with audiio and video, but for images I have some. I'm suprised that product Products.ImageEditor was missed out. Well, I understand not everything can be in the book. Also chapter on Plumi - which is receiving quite some attention lately - could be more extended, since Plumi provides quite rich and useful set of features.

Chapters 6-10: Categorisation, Syndication, Mass upload, Storage, Caching

Multimedia in Plone is not only multimedia as content type, but also all the things around it. Again for each section it describes what comes out-of-the box with Plone and then shows how to extend this functionality with addons. Again, like before, I'll list them:

Conclusion

If you are infront of the task to integrate multimedia with Plone then this book will definetly give you a boost in your project. There are ofcourse more products then the one listed above, but you can quickly find yourself lost among them. That's why goal oriented guides like this will definetly make your job easier. A lot of things explained in the book are also true in upcoming Plone4 and also with there is a initiative to make plone4artists pack ready for Plone4.

Overall the book is not that nicely written, but to be honest I really don't care about that. Example and links that it provides, tougth me some new stuff and help me remember some which I forgot. Book will also give you valuble examples and how to easily adjust Plone. If you are integrator, you should definetly make a room for this book.

P.S. This blog post was written using Firefox 4b2 and its the shit. So if I didn't convince you to buy a book, then I dare you to leave your slow Chrome and reclain the web again :)

Since I couldn't comment on last Martin Aspeli's blog post (couldn't login with openID, maybe its only me, but i think something is not working right there) I decided to write my response here. There are many arguments that don't hold and a lot more is not being covered and should be mentioned.

As first I'm excited that Github is becoming so popular. I'm git user and just having git in the name of Github makes me happy. No joke, really. But all of the talk Martin did in his post should go in direction of "social coding portals" like: github, bitbucket, ... and probably some more ... not only Github itself, but this you probably know.

Lets go line by line...

from Martin's blog:
Someone else forks my repository and tinkers a bit. They then email me to ask me to pull their changes into my repository. If I have the time and inclination (and read my email), that may bring us back to one canonical version. However, in time, there is a single point of failure on me as the maintainer. At some point, I may stop caring or get too busy to follow up.

I agree with this, but the same problem you will get with most of the projects out there. In Plone world we have collective where almost everybody has commit rights, so we kinda got spoiled that you can simply commit to some repository. With all other projects you still need to contact the author to get your patched in. Its been like this since ages. Just with git this is done with one or two commands, while applying patch takes a little more.

from Martin's blog:
Here, Git has an answer: anyone can fork my repository and take over ownership. This is powerful and adds fault tolerance to the "single maintainer" model. But socially, it is dubious. Who really controls development? Who has a right to publish a new release? What if I come back after a few months and decide I wanted to own the project all along? We now need to reconcile the two forks. This may be tricky. Perhaps we don't do it. People now have to figure out which one of two versions of the software to "bet" on. This is onerous, and likely to deter other contributors.

Normally you check pypi page or home page of software you want to use, there you get direction where to start looking for source code. So once you found a place, then here is where Github shines. All forks which are done through the web are considered friendly forks, since its easy to commit back. Its even possible to look the history of forks and where they split. And now the "porn" part, you can actually diff different forks in Github, to see the differences. You hate/love me already? :)

from Martin's blog: 
Let's say we bring the main line of development back to "my" repository. Once again, I have to commit a lot of time to reviewing and pulling in changes. Maybe I fall behind. So another user comes around and wants to work a bit. Which one of the two trees does he fork? Which ones does he pull in updates for?

Look the link above. With Github is easy to look friendly forks and compare changes. Its all just few clicks away.

from Martin's blog: 
Perhaps I decide to relinquish control to another developer. I let my GitHub fork die, and expect people to use another one. But how do I manage this? How do I hand over ownership to someone else's account without confusing people who've been using my repository? Or people who stumble upon it in the future?

Now for every little project you start and you start your own project in some of the tools. its kinda silly, makes its hard to maintain. since you will probably use it only you. but if the project overgrows you then best way is to create new github user as you would do with any other project oriented system out there.

from Martin's blog: 
Here's a cautionary tale that happened to me today: I've been using Soaplib, a Python library for building SOAP servers. There was a release on PyPI, but it had a bug that meant I had to get a checkout. The PyPI page listed a GitHub URL, so I used that to clone the repository. A few weeks later, all our builds suddenly broke. The remote repository was gone, deleted from GitHub. Turns out, the original maintainer had given owner responsibility to another person, who has his own GitHub repository. Development had gone on there for months, unbeknownst to me. One day, the original maintainer decided to delete his repository to not confuse people. Noble, but rather inconvenient.

This can be easily solved by you friendly forking Soaplib, for the time of development. Then in production you of-course wont use any url dependent resources, right? Then even if the project is moved you can easily friendly fork it again or just use the version. I never ran into a product that was discontinued while developing. But as also Martin said, this is rather minor thing (inconvenient).

from Martin's blog: 
Again, there are lots of solutions to this problem. However, I think that fundamentally, as a user and potential contributor to a library, I want to find "the" repository and commit my changes there. A personal fork is a good idea until I can get access, but there has to be a path for me to get repository access and become a recognised, trusted contributor. Open source projects have used this model for years, as a way to encourage, recognise and empower contributors and build a shared sense of ownership around the project. I expect the project to be bigger than any one contributor or owner, and I expect the infrastructure to be able to outlive their involvement.

I think this is a feature of Github that you missed out. Organisations. For quick example look at MongoDB.

from Martin's blog: 
This is why, for things that are a bit bigger than one person, and a bit smaller than a major open source project, I've got mixed feelings about GitHub, and even mixed feelings about Git itself. They are great tools. I find myself wanting to use them. But I also worry that they are too flexible for their own good, and that the most obvious way of using GitHub is not a good one for open source projects.

I dont see such problems there. Since others can work under your github account or you create its own project github account. Now saying that Git is "a little to much" for small projects. You can also give your contributors possibility to use Hg or Svn ... AT THE SAME TIME and commiting to the same codebase. (more in next comments)

from Martin's blog: 
I think Hanno Schlichting put it well: With Subversion, you get a development model, which, whilst not perfect, is easy to understand and has worked out very well in practice for numerous projects. With Git, you're expected to make up your own model. I don't think people are very good at that, and rarely plan ahead for when their code outgrows them.

I know it's possible to use Git like Subversion, with a central repository. But I'm also not seeing a great many people doing that. We have to remember that Git was first built for the Linux kernel, which has a development model unlike most other projects, where it really is up to a set of core maintainers to review every patch and selectively pull it in. They need the kind of flexibility and power that Git offers. For many other projects, I'm not sure this flexibility is always a good thing.

While waiting for my flight in Fankfurt Hahn i received italian translation to my inbox and make release. And since this package is used by Dexterity it would be nice to have translations in as many languages as possible.

There is really nothing much to it. There are three strings that needs translations. Here is pot file:

# --- PLEASE EDIT THE LINES BELOW CORRECTLY ---
# SOME DESCRIPTIVE TITLE.
# FIRST AUTHOR <EMAIL@ADDRESS>, YEAR.
msgid ""
msgstr ""
"Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
"POT-Creation-Date: 2010-06-30 13:17+0000\n"
"PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI +ZONE\n"
"Last-Translator: FULL NAME <EMAIL@ADDRESS>\n"
"Language-Team: LANGUAGE <LL@li.org>\n"
"MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
"Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8\n"
"Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
"Plural-Forms: nplurals=1; plural=0\n"
"Language-Code: en\n"
"Language-Name: English\n"
"Preferred-Encodings: utf-8 latin1\n"
"Domain: collective.z3cform.datetimewidget\n"

#: collective/z3cform/datetimewidget/interfaces.py:69
msgid "Please enter a valid date and time."
msgstr ""

#: collective/z3cform/datetimewidget/interfaces.py:65
msgid "Please enter a valid date."
msgstr ""

#: collective/z3cform/datetimewidget/widget_date.py:133
msgid "Today"
msgstr ""

LANGUAGES= ['hr', 'sl', 'sr', 'sr_Latn', 'en', 'es', 'pt', 'de', 'fr', 'it']

So send me email, commit to collective or write in comment bellow ... gracias!

Poor me I could not reuse existing stuff which are already out there:

• Products.ATVocabularyManage - missing relations, hard to edit +10.000 terms, don't even want to imagine creating 30.000 terms

At the same time I was amazed that nobody before me didn't provide some solution since creating vocabularies is quite common task when working with CMS-es. Well why cry. Inspired by freelance work I did for Seantis start working on collective.vdexvocabulary.

For format I didn't chose csv or similar, but I decided better to use IMS VDEX which is format that defines vocabularies. It supported all my requirements and for sure i don't want to come up with yet another way to do things.

How you can use it?

In your configure.zcml add:

<configure
    ...
    xmlns:vdex="http://namespaces.zope.org/vdex"
    ...>

  <include package="collective.vdexvocabulary" />

And to register a vdex vocabulary simply add line bellow pointing to file containing vdex vocabulary:

<configure
    ...
    xmlns:vdex="http://namespaces.zope.org/vdex"
    ...>
 
  <vdex:vocabulary file="path-to/very-interesting.xml" />

To make registration of vocabularies even easier you can also register several vocabularies and just point to directory:

<configure
    ...
    xmlns:vdex="http://namespaces.zope.org/vdex"
    ...>

  <vdex:vocabulary directory="path-to/my-vdex-vocabularies"

Need more?

Currently collective.vdexvocabulary supports i18n, relations (iso2788_relations.xml) which were needed to finish the requirements for the project. Ofcourse there is many work left, check todo list for that.

If you have any quiestion / problems dont hasitate to contact me. Or hire me as contractor and we'll get job done together.

First thanks guys from Abstract for organizing such a lovely event. And yes i survived it althought few people were questioning this because I was driving from my hostel (up in the hill) down to sprint place (at the beach) every day with my longboard. Few bruces and that's it :) Oh ... maybe i had luck, but my phone (Nokia E71) didn't. Screen is now in as many parts as there are people who think that Django pony is cool, hehe. Admit it ... zebra would be far better.

Deliverance / XDV

One part of my sprint time I spend on doing benchmark between the 2 of them and getting familiar XDV code. Other time I spend convincing Laurence that XSLT is evil! To be honest we were trying to find easy, non-obtrusive ways to combine the speed of XDV and the flexibility of Deliverance. Well benchmark will come this weekend when i have a little more time to finish it up and present it with some nice graphs. so stay tuned up in next days...

Presentations

I also gave 2 talks which you can see bellow.

also code from presentation can be found on my github account here.

As i promised quick and dirty. Happy Ploning!

I started with blogging on Blogspot. At the time I also tried Wordpress, but I settled on Blogspot for some reasons. Then i realize that blogging can actually be fun or at least easy to do. I heard many things about plone not being best choice for blogging and i think at the time maybe people were right (at least partly), so I search for some simple blogging solution to also offer it to my clients. It came down to Zine vs. Wordpress. Since Zine is python based solution this was a clear winner for me. I really didn't have the time nor the will to dive into PHP.

So last year i was running Zine and was pretty happy with it. I used reStructuredText for writing blogposts and for the time i was happy. But then things - which are trivial in Plone - become difficult or even impossible to do in Zine. Simple example is creating a gallery for people to see. This reasons got me thinking about using plone as blogging solution.

In the meantime i was actually thinking of doing my own - static html - solution, but give up on it because didnt have the will to devote time to it, if Plone, which i also provide hosting for, can do the same thing. And i start looking into.

Right now you are looking at the brand new Plone site. I use only to addons:

• collective.disqus - to provide reach commenting solution, since plone.app.commenting is still way behind this, but is improving a lot lately.
• PloneFormGen - to provide contact form (and later also other forms). I can only hope PFG will be in part of Plone 5

For RSS feed i use Plone's default syndication. Will see how well this works. But since i'm a Plone developer it would be pretty simple to adjust it to my needs, if needed ofcourse.

Theming was done with Deliverance which took me less then 1h to style. Theme was taken from some site which i dont remember, but was offered for free and it also looks clean and really nice - at least by my opinion. One really interesting thing i notice when i was doing quick benchmarks with ab, was that final page was 30-50% faster then original plone site. Strange a? well "secret" is that i strip all plone styles and use a lot less css/js then Plone is using. Here we clearly see how important weight of the portal is. In my case I do all of the editing from non-themed plone so i can afford to do this separation. It was quite a surprise that process time of Deliverance was actually hidden behind the download resource time. It might be i'm doing something wrong, but for sure is an interesting thing.

well now lets see how this will motivate me to write more ...

If you are an old svn user and want to give git a try here is a nice tutorial with comparison to svn commands (http://git.or.cz/course/svn.html). there are also other good tutorials on the web, uncle google is the guy to ask.

there were some cool changes in plone-coredev/trunk lately so this is a reason more to give it a try. but ofcourse i'll use git. there are many svn:externals which git-svn does not support but there is a workaround ofcourse. so lets start...

rok@bestia ~/Projects $ git svn clone https://svn.plone.org/svn/plone/buildouts/plone-coredev --trunk=trunk --branches=branches --tags=tags --revision=21212:HEAD
rok@bestia ~/Projects $ cd plone-coredev

this only pulls buidlout from svn, svn:externals are not pulled out. now we use git-externals script which will pull svn:externals.

rok@bestia ~/Projects/plone-coredev $ ./path/to/git-externals
... fetch a coffie/tea/beer this will take time ...
rok@bestia ~/Projects/plone-coredev $ virtualenv-2.4 --no-site-packages ./
rok@bestia ~/Projects/plone-coredev $ source bin/activate
(plone-coredev)rok@bestia ~/Projects/plone-coredev $ python2.4 bootstrap.py
(plone-coredev)rok@bestia ~/Projects/plone-coredev $ buildout -v
(plone-coredev)rok@bestia ~/Projects/plone-coredev $ instance

and you have plone-coredev/trunk running... from first tast ... its fats :)


so what that does that git-externals script do?
its a script i wrote today, probably is buggy as hell but it works for now. it clones svn:externals in place they should be. in every package that has svn:exernals, .svn-externals file is created. reason i created it is because i didnt found any that can handle svn:externals recursivly. so here it is, ... http://github.com/garbas/garbasgit.svnexternals/tree/master/git-externals

if you have any ideas, wishes, suggestions just write on rok-dot-garbas-at-gmail-dot-com.

My obstacle today/tonight was z3c.form+viewlet coctail. after 2h of testing and optimizing i got quite nice peace of code:



and layout_viewlet.pt



now instead of wrapping with FormWrapper we wrap with our new ViewletFormWrapper, like:
OurViewletView = wrap_form(OurCustomZ3CForm, __wrapper_class=ViewletFormWrapper)

all that is left to do is register OurViewletView with browser:viewlet directive and form is ready.

i found this wrapper really usefull and i hope it can get into plone.z3cform. or is there any other way of doing this?

• everything is a folder (no folder content type)
  idea is not new, its taken from limi's blog, but everything (except File, Image) content types should be folderish.
  
  
• no Image content type
  well Image is nothing more then extended File content type. what i saw in past was that users were confused that there are so many content types. by having only one content type it make plone even easier and close to file-like-system.
  
  
• small/tiny/micro plonecore code base
  when plannning next release please also consider developers happiness not only end-users. we are ppl too you know :P. what i mean is that 90% time i work with plone i really dont need all those features that are builtin. 90% time i need only 2 content types (Document, File) which i extend, superclass, ... this is again subject to argue about, whether plone is framework or software. why it couldnt be both? having light plone core which developers could use to build on it, and end users ready packages like plonefor.community (curent plone), plonefor.getpaid, plonefor.goverment, plonefor.education, ...
  
  
• link content types, wtf?@#$%
  maybe i should read some more end user doc but i just dont get what with link content types all about. just to store link to some page. i would expet form it to show content inside plone (like Windowz product), redirect to that link or even both options. but ofourse this is something that should not be in plonecore (menitoned above).
  
  
• portlets+viewlets=widgets (or call it as you want)
  again idea is nothing knew. all i would ask from plone4 is that it provides rock solid UI to manipulate with them. draging and droping please.
  
  
• no XML please
  i use genricsetup in day to day basis and writing all that xml is just not fun you know. we use perfect language - python - if you forgot. use it. it can do more then just magic. sonce XML is only computer friendly and if we really must use xml then an UI tool must be provided or if not next plone book should be "pistol for developers included - for self puprose only"
  
  
• unified plone registry
  this has nothing to do with windows registry so dont panic. its just some centralized way of storing site configuration that can be also (ab)used by add-on products. now we have a mess. every configuration is stored in its own way and place.
  if i may dare this could also be next-generation of genericsetup (with no usage of XML ofcource).
  
  
• no kss in plonecore, ship only with jquery
  50% of time i disable kss since it slows down the site. yes kss is usefull but not in all scenarios. make developers choose whether they would like to write javascript or use kss.
  
  
• developer reference documentation
  this should be killer feature of plone4. currently there is no - or is really in bad shape - reference developer documentation. Christopher Warner few days ago wrote "If core code is undocumented it's broken". but who should be responsible for this? core developers. when there is new feature added/removed documentation should be alsoo updated. sphinx here offers a great way to document our code. it can be api, doctests, docstrings all in one. and can be done from the code ,so all those doctests, docstrings that are already there will be used.

--- after a while i found some more ---

• plone theming
  deliverence promises a lot, but still plone itself must provide easier theming expirience. something as easy as old zope2 skins and scalable/reusable as zope3 resources.
  
  
• wsgi out-of-the-box
  this is a must, repoze middleware that is availiable now looks so usefull i'm just wainting for some project to try it out.

well this is it, for now ... i'm exited with plone4 release and now its time for me to go back to bed. i think by the end of this night i'll come up with few more.