Good morning from the land down under and welcome to World Plone Day 2010! It’s right on the hour (well, just after now) and 28 April 2010 — and yes, that’s World Plone Day to the uninitiated. To celebrate and to mark the occasion, I’ll be holding a bit of a discussion today about what Plone is, why it’s so useful, and what we, as users, are hanging out for in Plone 4 and above. But, what fun is that without sweets to eat?  And what’s potentially tastier than Plone?  Plone cupcakes!

Thanks to some great work by my lovely partner, she’s whipped up some cupcakes for WPD.  I didn’t do much save for helping with design and icing — woo!  Here’s the end results:

Okay, so the CMYK colour might be a little off and I’m thinking I’m not conforming to all Plone logo usage guidelines but they look good.  Haven’t tasted them yet but I’m sure they’ll be excellent.  I had thought of a line like “Open Source never tasted so sweet”, but I think I’ll let that go.

Viva la World Plone Day!

Today, we’re looking at how to utilise computed fields within a Dexterity-based content type. The specific use-case is that of having two separate fields (first name and surname, for a Person type, for example) generate the complete object title. The first part of this — having the title of the content displayed correctly — is pretty straight forward once you know what documentation to read and understand how things happen. The second part — having the ID of the content correctly generated to be first name/surname is slightly more complicated. (more…)

Writing unit tests (especial doctests) for your Plone product is reasonably time consuming. For us developers, having tested code is absolutely essential. This is especially true when clients are beating down your door looking for a fully functional product and you need to know what you’ve written works and isn’t going to fall over (just yet, anyway). Web apps are able to be tested using a multitude of frameworks, and whilst not the most fully featured (eg lacking Javascript support), Zope’s doctest machinery is right there within your Plone product. In order to write these, enter zope.testrecorder to more-or-less automate replicating your actions into tests. (more…)

Microsoft and IE are insane.  Yes, we all knew this, but here’s the proof:  IE won’t accept more than 30 style sheets to be loaded via <style> tags within a single page.  Insanity?  Yes.  It’s made even worse by the fact they openly admit this lunacy!  See the relevant support article from MS as proof. (more…)

Note: see this post for up-to-date details.

Essentially, the issue is that Deliverance doesn’t theme (and rightly so) the Kupu editor within Plone and hence any styles applied to normal pages by Deliverance don’t show up.  (more…)