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

Installing Python on Linux

Plone 3 runs only on the old Python 2.4 version. Unfortunately, almost no modern Linux distribution (or distro) ships with or supports that version. To fill this gap, we can use a special buildout to install an isolated Python environment called virtualenv.

Even for the most modern Plone 4, which runs on Python 2.6, this method can also be applied, as we did find problems with Python 2.6, shipped with Fedora 11 and 12.

Note

The idea of using virtualenv is to have a Python installation independent from the operating system's: no matter which version of Python is native in the OS, your Plone site will still work, as it will be never modified again unless you do it explicitly.

This first buildout, not the one that we’ll use to install Plone, is a good place to start to understand its parts and the way it works.

Getting ready

To set up virtualenv, we need any version of Python installed first. So just run your own distro package manager to get it, if it is not installed yet.

Note

The following example installs Python 2.4.6 (the latest 2.4.x available at the time of writing) as a virtualenv. By changing the version number, you can apply the same method to create a Python 2.6 virtualenv. You can also get a copy of these two procedures in the source code that accompanies this book.

In the following procedure, we will compile and make Python, so we will need various packages installed in our system first. For Debian or Ubuntu, run this as root to get all the required dependencies:

# aptitude install gcc g++ libbz2-dev zlib1g-dev libreadline5-dev libssl-dev

In Fedora, run this command instead:

# yum install python-devel gcc gcc-c++ bzip2-devel gzip-devel zlib-devel readline-devel openssl-devel

Create a base folder for your Python 2.4 installation. We prefer ~/libexec/python2.4.

$ mkdir -p ~/libexec/python2.4
$ cd ~/libexec/python2.4

Then get the bootstrap Python script. This script installs the zc.buildout package inside the same buildout environment so that we won’t need any other external command.

$ wget http://svn.zope.org/*checkout*/zc.buildout/trunk/bootstrap/bootstrap.py

Note

Note that the *checkout* piece in the URL above is correct. It has no special meaning.

Enter the following buildout.cfg file to create virtualenv:

[buildout] 
parts = 
    python 
    virtualenv 
    make-virtualenv 

# Add additional egg download sources here. 
# dist.plone.org contains archives 
# of Plone packages. 
find-links = 
    http://dist.plone.org 
    http://download.zope.org/ppix/ 
    http://download.zope.org/distribution/ 
    http://effbot.org/downloads 

[python] 
recipe = zc.recipe.cmmi 
url = http://www.python.org/ftp/python/2.4.6/Python-2.4.6.tgz 
executable = ${buildout:directory}/parts/python/bin/python2.4 
extra_options= 
    --enable-unicode=ucs4 
    --with-threads 
    --with-readline 
    --enable-ipv6 

[virtualenv] 
recipe = zc.recipe.egg 
eggs = 
   virtualenv 

[make-virtualenv] 
recipe = iw.recipe.cmd 
on_install=true 
cmds = ${python:location}/bin/python
${buildout:directory}/bin/virtualenv --clear .

The above buildout configuration file has three parts, which have their own recipe parameter. Let’s go through each of them:

The [python] part uses the zc.recipe.cmmi recipe, which downloads Python source code and compiles it. The cmmi suffix stands for Compile Make and Make Install.
The [virtualenv] part uses the zc.recipe.egg recipe, which installs the virtualenv Python egg and creates the executable bin/virtualenv file.
The [make-virtualenv] part uses the iw.recipe.cmd recipe, which can execute arbitrary shell commands. In this case, it runs the installation of a virtualenv to create an isolated Python 2.4 environment in your system.

As you must have noticed, there are other lines of code besides the part definitions and their recipes. These lines are parameters required by every recipe, like url for the zc.recipe.cmmi recipe or cmds for iw.recipe.cmd.

Note

Note that you can reference to variables defined in the buildout by writing ${part:parameter} as used in the last line: ${buildout:directory}.

You can correctly guess that there are many different recipes, each with their special parameter configuration and variables. For instance, there are recipes to install Varnish (a proxy cache server) and MySQL.

Note

For a list of available recipes, you can visit http://pypi.python.org/pypi?:action=browse&show=all&c=512.

How to do it...

So far we have just created a configuration file to create a Python 2.4 environment, but we haven’t got it yet. So let’s move on.

Run the bootstrap process:
```
       $ python bootstrap.py
```
You should get an output like this:
Start the buildout process with this command:
```
       $ ./bin/buildout
```
Congratulations! You have successfully installed a clean Python 2.4 environment on your computer.
Now you have two different choices in how to use it:
Specifying its path:
```
~/libexec/python2.4/bin/python <script>
```
or by activating it to include it in your PATH environment variable:
```
source ~/libexec/python2.4/bin/activate
```
You’ll notice that this will change your prompt, as shown in the following screenshot:
Once activated, you can return to your original Python version by running:
```
(python2.4) $ deactivate
```
Note
In the screenshot above, you can see that there are actually three different Python versions installed. The system default version is 2.6.2, and there is also a 2.6.4 and a 2.4.6 available in separate virtual environments.

How it works…

By running the bootstrap process in Step 1, we download the zc.buildout package. This creates the required directory structure and generates an executable buildout file, which will read and process buildout.cfg.

In Step 2, the buildout process downloads the Python 2.4 source code, compiles it, and then it creates the virtualenv.

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

Installing Python on Linux

Note

Getting ready

Note

Note

Note

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How to do it...

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How it works…

See also