A nice ‘gotcha’ is the distinction between Zope’s schema.Date and schema.Datetime. The difference is obvious and straightforward when the two terms are laid out side-by-side: one is for dates only and the other adds a time component. Where things fell down for me in my usage of these fields with a Dexterity-based content type in Plone is the human component. When these fields are mashed in together within a lot of other text/Python/names, it’s easy to miss those 4 little letters of ‘time’. This lead me trying to use a DatetimeFieldWidget when I really could only use a DateFieldWidget. Wrong widget for the wrong type = unpredictable. (more…)

Due to various reasons, the Products.LDAPUserFolder package available for Plone and Zope doesn’t support POSIX groups.  The ‘official’ (ish) reason for this is because of the fact that these groups don’t store full distinguished names (DNs) for members.  It makes some degree of sense, because a user ID like ‘david.test’ isn’t strictly unique.  On the other hand, these types of groups are quite common in LDAP implementations; not supporting them without giving it at least half a shot to find the user seems a bit strange. (more…)

These titles of my posts just keep getting longer and longer.  For those of you paying close attention (I know who you are), this is the next in my series of getting the above-mentioned tools working together.  Previously, it was Centos 5.x, Jaunty (9.04), Karmic (9.10) and now Lucid (10.04).  Only subtly different, each of this distributions has pretty much called for its own post on the matter of getting a working Plone 3.x / Python 2.4 virtualenv installation going.  So, here goes this time around. (more…)

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…)