Book Image

Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook

Book Image

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.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
Plone 3 Products Development Cookbook
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface
Index

Creating a portlet package


Once again, paster comes to the rescue. As in Creating a product package structure (Chapter 6) and Creating an Archetypes product with paster (Chapter 5), we will use the paster command here to create all the necessary boilerplate (and even more) to get a fully working portlet.

Getting ready

As we are still at the development stage, we should run the following commands in our buildout's src folder:

cd ./src

How to do it…

  1. Run the paster command: We are going to create a new egg called pox.portlet.banner. The pox prefix is from PloneOpenX (the website we are working on) and it will be the namespace of our product.

    Note

    Portlets eggs usually have a nested portlet namespace as in plone.portlet.collection or plone.portlet.static. We have chosen the pox main namespace as in the previous eggs we have created, and the banner suffix corresponds to the portlet name.

    For more information about eggs and packages names read http://www.martinaspeli.net/articles/the-naming-of-things...