Deliver me from … Deliverance?

// under bleeding edge deliverance plone rules technology theme themeing xml

Always one for being on and beyond the bleeding edge of new technology, I’ve (with the help of colleagues) been setting up a new technology for applying themes to web sites. In particular, I’m applying Deliverance to Plone and whilst I’m not the first one to venture out into the wilderness this way, I’ve got to be thinking that I could be one of the few people documenting their experience. Ah, but where to begin?

The proxy

Ah yes, the proxy. Deliverance is very kind to us in that it operates it’s own proxy. This, whilst okay, is a royal pain when Apache or similar is sitting in front, sending rewritten URLs to Deliverance [I’m hosting as a sub-folder on a domain]. Maybe I’m just not cluey enough to figure it out, but when you spend almost a week and then have to hack things about with python code, it’s probably not just me. In some cases, I think Deliverance is just trying to be ‘too’ smart, and you’ll see what I mean shortly.

At any rate, I’ve made Apache do a ProxyPass to Deliverance and then make Deliverance do the “rewriting”, and then the Zope VHM makes magic happen like normal. Great! Except no, that’s not it, because Deliverance has no idea about the fact my site is hosted from both HTTP and HTTPS (or hosted from 2 domains)? What I’ve had to do is thus in Apache (and the same for HTTP etc):

RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Scheme https
RequestHeader set X-Forwarded-Port 443
ProxyPass /mysite http://my.deliverance.host:8000/mysite

and then this in Deliverance, since we now have what scheme/port/host we’re serving from. All URLs coming back from Plone/VHM will be okay! 8-):

<proxy path="/mysite" domain="my.sites.domain">
<dest href="http://localhost:8080/VirtualHostBase/{X-Forwarded-Scheme}/{X-Forwarded-Server}%3A{X-Forwarded-Port}/mysite/VirtualHostRoot/_vh_mysite" />
<transform strip-script-name="1" keep-host="0" />
<response rewrite-links="0" />
</proxy>

The theme

Oh, the theme. Again, Deliverance tries to be too smart for its own good if you specify a Deliverance-hosted theme here. If you have something relevative (eg /_theme/theme.html), it’ll work, but on your HTTPS site all theme elements will be unencrypted since HTTP is it. Whoops!

Resolution? Not nice, but you’ll need to serve your resources outside of Deliverance (probably faster anyway!), and have them accessible for both protocols. The good news is that when you specify an absolute URL, with protocol, then Deliverance pays attention, thus:

<theme href="{X-Forwarded-Scheme}://static.web.server/static/mysite/theme.html" domain="my.sites.domain" />

POST requests

Ughh. Deliverance feels the need to be smart, again, by applying themes to incoming POST requests. Now, I can’t think of any time you’d actually want this (unless…well, no..never), so make sure you’ve got something like this in your XML file to stop Deliverence:

<match environ="REQUEST_METHOD: POST" abort="1" />

Copying/Moving Attributes

Okay, now this one’s just weird. You need to specify which individual or several attributes from your content and then tell Deliverance to apply them all to the attributes of the target element. Seems simple enough now, but why is there no doco? This works:

<replace content="attributes(href):#portal-logo" theme="attributes://*[@id='globalnav']/div/a" />

and this won’t (type mismatch error):

<replace content="attributes(href):#portal-logo" theme="attributes(href)://*[@id='globalnav']/div/a" />

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong, I like Deliverance. Xpath support is great, CSS 3-style selectors are awesome, and what it does is magical. However, it needs a bit of work before I parachute away from Plone’s themes for good.

Fair’s fair though, it’s only version 0.3. I’m looking very forward to the future though.

Go Top