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…)

Plone 4 is approaching!  Excellent!  Lots of new features to play around with and plenty more things to have to fix with the upgrade.  I’ve been keeping tabs on the change log of updates and it’s looking really good.  Lots of little, but significant, changes are afoot.  Now, how about actually installing the Alpha 2 version of Plone 4 to see it for real?  Let’s do it! (more…)

..and how true that is.  Today’s time consumer is directly related to just 1 misplaced line of a buildout configuration (and presumably something that’s changed somewhere else).

The result

After much hunting and hunting, it turns out my Zope2 Fake Eggs weren’t being generated. (more…)

Taking a little bit of a time-out, I just have to ask the question: is Buildout not the best thing ever? (and the people who are so very kind to make the recipes?)

It’s made my work of managing our Plone infrastructure about 1000 times simpler since moving from Instancemanager (ughhh) and having to manually manage everything. I remember being a bit sceptical and very confused the first time I saw a buildout configuration file and thought that I’d never understand the thing.

Far, far from it of course! Whilst a little daunting at first, buildout has (in some/all metaphorical senses) won my heart. It couldn’t be easier to use, contrary to my initial (dis)beliefs.

Today sees me convert our archaic design of manually managing our Varnish RPMs and setup and changing it to buildout instead. Looks like the geniuses (and there’s no sarcasm here!) have made it perfectly – it does exactly what I need it to and makes my job so much simpler.

Eeek…what’s this mean?

install() got an unexpected keyword argument 'allow_hosts'

after trying to build zope2zeoserver from my buildout configuration. (more…)