Wget a Plone site (and make it actually work)

There’s a lot of different resources and posts on the web about how to export a Plone site to static html content, but no methodology would actually solve all of my problems. Now, Plone is inherently a complicated beast, given just how much it does, and that’s definitely putting it lightly. But here goes at my attempt to provide an actual, workable solution.  Word for the wise though, this is for more than just your front-end administrator to handle.  Also, instructions are designed for Ubuntu 9.10.  Mileage may/will vary on other distros or OSes.

in Plone · Thu 25 February 2010

(Lack of) Kupu CSS Styles, Plone and Deliverance

Note: see this post for up-to-date details.

Essentially, the issue is that Deliverance doesn’t theme (and rightly so) the Kupu editor within Plone and hence any styles applied to normal pages by Deliverance don’t show up.  My workaround, as detailed on that post, is to customise the “emptypageresources” page template and include a suitable link to the CSS file, like so:

<link href="site.css" type="text/css" rel="StyleSheet" tal:attributes="href string:${context/@@plone_portal_state/navigation_root_url}/static/theme/site.css;" />

(changing the tal:attributes section accordingly).  This should introduce perfectly correct styles for your editor from your …

in Plone · Thu 14 January 2010

Logged out users can’t bring up the Plone popup calendar

It’s another one of those ‘strange’ problems that has cropped up, but by default in Plone, users who aren’t authenticated aren’t actually able to bring up a pop-up calendar on a date field.

It’s amazing that I haven’t run into this issue before with something like PloneFormGen, where you’d think that a simple Date input field would be pretty common.  Although, I guess it’s the case that even though I’ve used these given forms, I’ve probably never taken much notice of the popup calendar icon and just selected a random date …

in Plone · Fri 18 December 2009

David tries Plone 4.0a2 (Part 2)

Rightio!  So we’ve got Plone 4.0a2 installed and up and running.  Boy, she looks sweet:

• The new Plone site setup is flawlessly simple.  No more ZMI for those of us that don’t want to use it.  It’ll always still be useful, but having Plone throw up a simple, no no-nonsense front-end installer is just what it needed.  Other PHP based CMSes always had it too easy ;-)
• Editing view:  clearer tabs at the top (no idea how many clients miss those, me included to start!) and resizable editing fields.  Great. TinyMCE as the editor — just what the …

in Plone · Tue 08 December 2009

David tries Plone 4.0a2 (Part 1)

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!

My steps are not going to work on your computer.  I don’t think you’ll be able to follow my words/commands exactly, but here goes anyway about my …

in Plone · Tue 08 December 2009

Deliverance, Plone, and tags

It’s been a little bit of time since my last post, and who can blame me with my site having been down for almost 2 full days over the last week!  I’m not paying that much for the webspace, thankfully, but if I was, I’d be seeing red over it.  Apparently some patch for MySQL broke everything; imagine how it looked to see my site with a ‘500 internal error’ plastered all over it and not being able to access my cPanel. Ugh.

Anyway, everything’s back again, assuming that you can see this.  Okay? Great!

Today …

in Plone · Fri 27 November 2009

Missing content menus in Plone

Another dose of insanity please!  Coming right up, sir.

Today’s second discussion comes from an issue I was having recently with a new Plone site that I was hosting behind Apache and Deliverance.  No Varnish here yet, because I’d rather the site worked first before I try and cache the life out of it.

Now, the specific problem I was having was that the content menus in Plone (eg Add New, Display, State, Actions and for me, Sub-types) weren’t displaying.  I thought it a Deliverance issue - maybe I was dropping those content items accidentally or not including …

in Plone · Wed 30 September 2009

Migrating a Plone site off to another database (Zeo)

Another of the interesting things in my professional life has been migrating a Plone site from one database (where it lived as a dev site, along with many others) onto a nice, clean database of its own.  Now, yes, I’m aware that the export/import feature of Zope isn’t supposed to be used for migrating content or sites.  I am also aware, however, through personal experience, that things have always been fine because I’m using the same eggs and essentially the same installations everywhere, thanks to buildout.

So, the process goes as follows, with the above-mentioned points …

in Plone · Wed 30 September 2009

PloneFormGen (Plone) & Google Calendar Integration

It’s a little bit of a different mash-up, but it’s still nonetheless useful to have, given types of booking forms and so forth that could utilise it.  The easiest way I found (to avoid security issues with Python scripts in Plone) was to create an external method and just import it within a PFG Custom Adapter.

in Plone · Tue 22 September 2009

Plone: Re-ordering Viewlets

Just responded to a post on the Plone Nabble forums (here) about how to re-order viewlets.  In particular, this one is little different (but not terribly so) because the original poster wanted to put the breadcrumbs above the global sections (global tabs in Plone).  Normally, this is straight forward because you just use a Generic Setup profile (viewlets.xml) and use an order manager to move your viewlet.  This, however, is a teeny bit more complicated because you’ve got one viewlet that’s outside of another viewlet manager.

Without further ado, my post from the forums:

Check out http …

in Plone · Wed 19 August 2009