Plone

Plone web service notes

See also WWW server info and Plone logs (internal): 2008 • 2006/7 • 2005 • 2004.

Product installation

Important: for whatever reasons, some Plone products have broken the entire site in the past. Before installing any product, or running any tools in Zope Management Interface that have the potential to affect the whole site (e.g. Archetypes migration tool), archive and set aside the /Applications/Plone2 directory: sudo tar cvf blah.tar /Applications/Plone2. Saving just the Data.fs database is not enough.

Database packing

Plone databases (mainly Data.fs) keep track of each version of each content element, and therefore grow quickly as site is revised. To purge the old versions, log in as admin user, go to global Zope management interface (logging in again), choose Control_Panel, and then Database Management. Pack the main database.

Under Plone 2.5 and later, the port 8282 seems to have disappeared. Log in as admin and go directly to http://localhost:8080/Control_Panel/Database/main/manage_main.

reStructured Text

The necessary ingredients for using this more advanced version of structured text seem to be:

Archetypes product version 1.3.0 or higher.
ATContentTypes product version 0.2.0 or higher (includes PortalTransforms and MimetypesRegistry products).
docutils version 0.3.5 or higher, in site-packages Python folder.

For whatever reason, the portal_transforms page at the root of ZMI did not show rest_to_html transform. To add it, select Transform from the Add menu, and enter:

id: rest_to_html
module: Products.PortalTransforms.transforms.rest

Localization

To create localized content (e.g. in German and English), we use three products:

PloneLanguageTool provides language selection box,
I18NFolder provides folders with localized names that appear in the navigation bar,
I18NLayer provides localized documents to be created, with alternative documents appearing at the same URL depending on the language selection.

After installing these products in a standard way, i.e., untar'ing into

Plone2/Library/Software/Zope270/Zope/lib/python/Products

and installing via Plone Setup, two changes need to be made manually:

In ZMI, in /portal_skins select Properties tab, and move I18NFolder so that it appears so in the sequence:
```
i18n_layer
I18NFolder
i18n_layer_plone2
```
Do this in both Default and Tableless boxes, then click Save. This makes language drop-down menu appear when editing I18NFolder objects.

In ZMI, in /portal_skins/plone_scripts, customize breadcrumbs script to include I18NLayer type in dont_show_metatypes :

dont_show_metatypes = ['TempFolder', # Metatypes of objects we wont show
                       'Plone Factory Tool',
                       'Plone Form Tool',
                       'I18NLayer']

This prevents triple (!) breadcrumbs from appearing for localized pages.

There are still problems with this set of products, especially with I18NLayer :

When localized default document in a given folder is displayed, the folder name in the navigation bar is not highlighted as it should be.
In the same scenario, the "bread crumbs" at the top of the page show folder title and document title, resulting often in double crumbs: research » research
When a localized document is displayed, the add new item menu at the top of the frame does not work, producing an id not allowed error. Content can still be added to the current folder, but only after switching to contents view.

Perhaps transitioning to future products like LinguaPlone will help. But, as mentioned on this LinguaPlone-related blog, navigation portlet does not work well with that product.

Membership

Membership is now (or should be!) restricted; existing members with manager privileges can go to the plone setup item in the personal menu bar to add a new member.

Problem: If a member is added by a manager, the manager owns that member's home page. Regular members cannot therefore edit their home pages. An easy way out is to promote the new member to a manager role using Zope management interface. But a proper way is to change the ownership, somewhere inside Zope Management Interface (ZMI).

To change the member role, e.g. from Member to Manager, go to the ZMI at http://www.cats.rwth-aachen.de/manage while logged in, click on the acl_users in the root listing, and assign new role to a member. In Plone 2 there is probably a better way.

Some sites change the name of the Members folder, to something more usual like people. This can be set in ZMI, but some things seem to break afterwards.

CVS

One option to view CVS repositories within Plone site is ViewCVS . We should give it a try once our CVS repository moves from Rice to RWTH.

WebDAV

For quickly adding multiple files (small ones! Apache should serve large files directly) WebDAV interface is much more convenient than the browser interface to Plone. On Mac OS X, simply hit ⌘K, enter www.cats.rwth-aachen.de and enter your member username and password. If you have enough site permissions, you will be able to navigate the web site file system and add files directly in the Finder. It's quite easy to accidentally mess up the site this way, so be careful!

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