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 policy product

A policy product is a regular product that can be installed as other Plone add-ons and will take care of general customizations to meet project needs.

How to do it...

Create a package boilerplate with paster: We have already created several product packages with the paster command. This time it won't be anything special.
To create the pox.policy product, run the following command inside the src folder of your buildout:
```
paster create -t plone
```
Provide these values at the options paster prompts:

Option

Value

Enter project name

pox.policy

Expert Mode?

easy

Version

1.0

Description

Policy product for PloneOpenX website

Register Profile

True
Add the policy product to your instance. In the main [buildout] section, modify the eggs and develop parameters:
```
[buildout]
...
eggs = 
...
    pox.policy
...
develop = 
    src/pox.policy
```
Optionally, if you want the product to be installed at building time, modify the [plonesite] section:
```
[plonesite]
recipe = collective.recipe.plonesite
...
products = 
...
    pox.policy
```
Create an extension profiles folder: In the package's folder, create this folder structure:
```
mkdir -p ./profiles/default
```
Note
In Windows, change the above command to this: mkdir ./profiles/default.
Build your instance up again by running:
```
./bin/buildout
```

Option	Value
Enter project name	pox.policy
Expert Mode?	easy
Version	1.0
Description	Policy product for PloneOpenX website
Register Profile	True

How it works...

Policy products are regular products with a special meaning, they configure the website with characteristics the project has and, sometimes, no other project has. Examples of these are the title and description of the site, the initial folders' structure (displayed most of the time on navigation bars), and installation of required products, among others.

Note

The <genericsetup:registerProfile /> directive (found at configure.zcml file) makes Plone aware of this product and turns it installable.

To understand how and when GenericSetup runs special installation scripts, you may find it useful to continue reading until There's more… or have a look at Installing CacheFu with a policy product. The key actions to keep in mind are:

Drop extension profiles (special XML files) you need in the profiles/default folder to let GenericSetup automatically install and configure anything you need.
If there's no XML-based import step for a specific customization, update configure.zcml with a <genericsetup:importStep /> directive as explained in There's more...

There's more…

In several recipes of this book, we trusted Plone's GenericSetup process to work as we needed: we dropped some special XML files in the profiles/default folder and everything worked as expected.

However, there might be times when we need special steps or actions to be taken when installing a product. For example, we may need to create folders or content inside the portal.

GenericSetup is aware of this requirement many developers have and it supplies a special procedure to get a hook at installation time.

Modify configure.zcml in your pox.policy package:

<configure
 ...
   xmlns:genericsetup= 
                     "http://namespaces.zope.org/genericsetup"
 >
 ...
  <genericsetup:importStep
      name="various"
      title="pox Policy: miscellaneous import steps"
      description=" "
      handler="pox.policy.setuphandlers.setupVarious"
  >
<!--    <depends name="other step's name"/>  -->
  </genericsetup:importStep>
  ...
</configure>

This will make GenericSetup call the specified handler after all of the dependent import steps (none in our example, that's why we have commented it) had run.

Create a setupVarious method (the above handler) in the setuphandlers.py file inside the pox.policy package:

from zope.app.component.hooks import getSite
from Products.CMFCore.utils import getToolByName

def setupVarious(context):

    if context.readDataFile('pox.policy_various.txt') is None:
        return

    portal = getSite()

    # perform custom operations

Create an empty flag file for the setup handler: In the profiles/default folder, add the pox.policy_various.txt file (read by the setupVarious method) to tell GenericSetup whether to run this step or not.
Note
When an import step has been run once, it will be run every time GenericSetup is called, even from other products. As the readDataFile method is called in the installing product context, if the flag file is not found, the step handler won't be run. That's why it is important to use unique names for these flag files.
Reinstall the policy product if needed.

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Overview of this book

Related Content you might be interested in

Current Title:

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Creating a policy product

How to do it...

Note

How it works...

Note

There's more…

Note

See also