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.
Nothing hits you like a slippery wet fish in the face more than hitting this issue and having it obfuscated through a lot of different layers. The first symptom was that my content icons weren’t appearing within my Plone site. Only some of them though — the ones in folder listings and the navigation portlet. I thought nothing much of it initially, just thinking the setting for displaying content icons had been changed in the Plone control panel.
I started digging into this issue a bit more because it was annoying me. That, and changing the control panel’s options weren’t working. Hacking a few bits into the folder_listing.pt view showed me that icons were there, just not outputting any HTML. Weird. Outputting the actual type of the icon brain itself showed me:
myorg.theme.layout.icons.CatalogBrainContentIcon
and didn’t think much of it. So what, a class is being generated at run time for my theme? It wouldn’t surprise me — Python can do some pretty cool things and that’s probably just one of them.
Taking the CatalogBrainContentIcon string and grep‘ing for it showed me otherwise. My theme package had this class, amongst others, hanging around in it’s layout module. Moving the module and restarting Zope showed me that the ZCML was being loaded.
But how/why? It was definitely excluded from my main configure.zcml files..but not excluded entirely though. Little did I realise that I had an overrides.zcml file floating around. Commented out from configure.zcml, but still there all the same. Turns out adding the z3c.autoinclude entry point to the theme product makes Plone auto-include all overrides.zcml (unless told otherwise). *fish-smack to face* This behaviour was modified slightly in Plone 4.0a5, so that you can make your overrides.zcml be excluded, but that doesn’t mean anything about Plone 3.3.5.
So, watch out with seemingly innocuous ZCML files floating around. They can still be brought into play.
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