Having a bad day? Just bombed your only copies of some files that you’d been storing as blobs together with your Plone database? Maybe you had the blobs stored incorrectly on your Zeo client, rather than the server, and then in a hasty effort to free some space (due to an on-going issue with blobs eating HDD space), deleted them. Whoops..they’re gone and their references are still in your Plone database. Or, in a less disastrous situation, maybe you just want to be able to run your Plone database without needing lost blobs? Read on. (more…)

Unsurprisingly, specifying a z3c.autoinclude entry point in your Plone product egg means your ZCML gets automatically included. That’s great because it means you don’t have to specify your product under the ZCML section of your instance in buildout. One thing that isn’t so obvious (it’s not mentioned that I can see on plone.org) is that if your package is marked for ZCML autoinclude, then Plone will automatically load an overrides.zcml file in your product. (more…)

As the title suggests, there’s a conflict between a Zeo database instance being run together with a Plone 4/Zope instance, and them trying to share the same blob storage folder.  But, this only happens if you misunderstand or incorrectly set the option of  shared-blob = off, and blob-storage to be the same location as for Zeo in your buildout.  If that previous set of (seemingly jumbled) thoughts doesn’t make any sense to you, then move along, nothing to see here. (more…)

Leftovers are typically useful when they’re in your fridge at home. They mean you don’t have to mess around making lunch for the next day for work, and can just grab them, and walk right out the door. Now, leftovers in the zope.component SiteManager aren’t so nice, especially when some Plone products fail to remove what they’ve registered. The consequences of this are that you’ve got references left which will break things when you uninstall/remove the physical eggs/files. These leftovers would be ones would be mutated food that comes to kill you after you’ve thrown it in the bin, assuming we follow the same analogy. But how to fix them? (more…)

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…)