enPraxis

We’ve been doing a lot lately with getting Zope2 Products updated to function in a Zope3 world.  There’s been many occasions where a placeless script errors out.  Ideally we’d move them all away from placeless scripts and into browser view functions, but often times they need to be debugged quickly, so that we can get the base product working in Plone 3.

Jon ran across this situation recently, and needed to throw a debugger into the placeless script.  I had not seen this litte code snippet before, so perhaps many others have not as well.  In the __init_.py of your Product:

from AccessControl import allow_module

allow_module(’pdb’)

Restart Zope, and debug placeless scripts to your heart’s content.

Continuing the process of eggifying our Plone AddOn Products, we now have functional eggs for:

• collective.zipfiletransport
• collective.imstransport
• collective.contentlicensing

We also have a functional egg working for out leftskin product, which we use as part of the eduCommons suite.  It’s name is a bit deceptive, as it not only provides a default theme, but has a handy configuration panel for setting styles/images TTW, similar to WebLion’s CSSManager.

After returning from the Plone Conference in DC, we realized a few things:

1) Buildout is here to stay

2) Python Eggs are here to stay

We’ve been waffling on whether or not to move toward these technologies, but the research and data now show the clear benefits of utilizing them, of paramount importance is the ease at which they help the (re)deployment story.

Using Martin Aspeli’s egg cooking inroduction, Jon and I set out to convert our PloneBookmarklets AddOn into a full fledged egg, which can be found in the collective at collective.plonebookmarklets.  The entire process, form creating a buildout environment, to testing the development egg, took only 90 minutes.  Granted, it is a relatively simple product, with not many lines of codes, but it was really satisfying to see how approachable this new framework has become.

The egg can be found in the collective, for the time being; we’ll realease to the Cheese Shop once we figure out the process.

Another great factoid about this revision…it has contributions from 3 additional developers. ONE/Northwest provided numerous fixes related to browser layers and image cacheability, we have additional contributions for translations (Spanish and Basque), and some new social bookmarking tool additions as well (Facebook and Technorati). Thanks to those who are using the product, and have taken the time to make it better as well!