Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

The Plone Content Management System is one of the best open source CMS, because by using Plone's development framework you can extend its functionality according to the specific requirements of your website. The Plone framework has lots of components that can be used to create add-ons or extensions called Plone Products. You can optimize your site for improved usability, accessibility, and security by creating custom Plone products.This book covers recipes that will help you create custom Plone Products and implement them on your website. Every topic covered in this book is accompanied by essential fundamentals and step-by-step explanation that will help you understand it better. With the help of this book you will be able to create custom Plone products that are well suited for your website.You can read the whole book or just pick recipes relevant for you; cross references help you understand the recipes even if you do not read them in order.If you work through the book in order, you will start by setting up an example project of a news website that will be developed throughout the book. You will learn about all of the necessary tools a Plone developer must have before starting any project. You will develop the website further by detecting problems and debugging them. You will be able to modify code on-the-fly or get help on how to do some tasks by installing and using special tools such as IPython, ipdb, and PDBDebugMode. You will then create a new content type, based on an existing one, and wrap the final product into a Python egg.You will set up automated testing to prevent errors in code that have evolved in the development stage. You will use paster to automatically create a new custom content type from scratch. You will improve the performance of your application by creating lightweight content types and following other recipes covered in this book. Key features such as usability, internationalization, accessibility and security are covered to make sure that your development and customizations will be at the level of Plone core and its most remarkable add-on products.You will improve your user interface by creating simple client-side visual changes and server-side manipulation of objects. You will learn to create and manage portlets by using Portlet manager and customize your website by modifying third-party products. Finally you will learn to communicate with an external non-Python-based system and make your products available for future use.

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Credits

About the Authors

About the Reviewers

Preface

Free Chapter

Getting Started

Introduction

Installing Python on Linux

Installing Plone on Linux

Installing Plone on Windows

Checking out code from a version controlsystem

Creating a Plone site

Using Development Tools

Introduction

Accessing an IPython powered shell

Taking advantage of an enhanced interactive Python debugger with ipdb

Discovering Zope/Plone APIs and docstrings with DocFinderTab

Opening an online Python shell on Plone using Clouseau

Debugging Zope exceptions with PDBDebug Mode

Applying code changes on-the-fly using plone.reload

Creating Content Types with ArchGenXML

Introduction

Installing ArchGenXML

Configuring ArgoUML

Creating a model

Generating code

Customizing generated code

Installing the product

Automatically installing products in your Zope instance

Prevent Bugs through Testing

Introduction

Working with paster-generated test suites

Creating a test suite with ArchGenXML

Creating doctests with iPython

Zope functional testing

Using Selenium functional tests

Creating a Custom Content Type with Paster

Introduction

Creating an Archetypes product with paster

Adding a content type into a product

Changing the base class in paster content types

Adding fields to a content type

Adding a custom validator to a content type

Modifying the view of a content type with jQuery

Creating Lightweight Content Types

Introduction

Creating a product package structure

Creating a folderish content type

Creating the user interface for Zope 3 content types

Creating content types with Dexterity

Improving Product Performance

Introduction

Installing CacheFu with a policy product

Improving performance by tweaking expensive code

Testing server load and benchmarking our code

Internationalization

Introduction

Adding i18ndude support to ArchGenXML

Installing i18ndude standalone

Using i18ndude

Using Placeless Translation Services for i18n support

Using zope.i18n approach

Overriding others' translations

Using i18n with ArchGenXML

Using i18n with paster-created products

Adding i18n support to any product

Translating content

Setting language options

Adding Security to your Products

Introduction

Creating a new permission

Adding a new role

Adding user groups

Testing security customizations

Protecting operations with permissions

Managing security with workflows

Adding configuration options in Plone control panel

Improving User Interface with KSS

Introduction

Preparing a form to take full advantage of KSS

Changing end user pages with client-side KSS

Submitting data via AJAX

Creating Portlets

Introduction

Creating a portlet package

Customizing a new portlet according to our requirements

Testing portlets

Assigning portlets automatically

Extending Third-Party Products

Introduction

Using skin layers

Overriding Zope 3 components

Customizing Zope 3 browser templates and files

Subscribing to others' events

Using the ZCA to extend a third-party product: Collage

Interacting with other Systems: XML-RPC

Introduction

Creating a configuration form

Registering a local utility

Registering a global utility

Getting our Products ready for Production

Introduction

Installing and configuring an egg repository

Submitting products to an egg repository

Writing a production buildout

Creating a Policy Product

Creating a policy product

Index

Customer Reviews

5 star

4 star

3 star

2 star

1 star

Creating a Plone site

We have no Plone site to play with yet (if you used the unified installer method, you should already have one though). A Plone site lives in the Zope Object Database (ZODB) and can be created by starting the instance and going through the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) (instructions for this a bit later). However, there is a better method to create a Plone site using the buildout automation process.

How to do it…

Edit buildout.cfg and add [plonesite] in the main parts parameter:

[buildout]
parts =
    zope2
    productdistros
    instance
    zopepy
    plonesite
...

And then add this new section at the bottom of the file:

[plonesite]
recipe = collective.recipe.plonesite
site-id = plone
instance = instance

Note

The new recipe, collective.recipe.plonesite, can be used to create or update Plone sites. We’ll learn more about it in the following chapters.

Now we’re ready to rebuild and start the instance.

./bin/buildout
./bin/instance fg

Finally, on browsing to http://localhost:8080/plone, you’ll see a Plone site.

How it works…

The new [plonesite] part makes the buildout process run the collective.recipe.plonesite recipe. With the correct parameters (site-id, instance, and some other ones that you might need), it will create or update a Plone site inside the Zope instance.

A particularly useful parameter is products, which automatically installs a list of products when buildout is run. We will use it in Opening an online Python shell on Plone using Clouseau.

For more information about this recipe and its options visit http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.recipe.plonesite.

There’s more…

As we said earlier, you can also create as many Plone sites as you need through the Web, that is to say, from the ZMI at the Zope root. This could be especially handy during development.

By going to http://localhost:8080/manage, you will be asked to authenticate yourself. Use the admin user you defined in the buildout.cfg file.

Depending on your Plone version, you will use different methods to create a Plone site:

Up to version 3.x of Plone, pick the Plone Site option from the combo-box at the top-right corner, and then click on the Add button (or just leave the combo-box). Then fill the short form and submit your changes. A new Plone site will be created with the ID you have specified.

With Plone 4.x, there is a new Add Plone Site button at the top-right corner, above the combo-box we have just mentioned.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, we’ll incorporate more configuration options to our buildout.cfg as we create products in the project. So keep an eye open or just go to the Index of the book and look for “buildout” to go straight to them.

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

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Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Creating a Plone site

How to do it…

Note

How it works…

There’s more…

See also