Migrating Plone 2.5 content straight onto Plone 4

It’s my very last Plone 2.5 site and I’m very happy to see the back of it.  Using the joy that is quintagroup.transmogrifier, I was able to, without much manual effort, migrate my content from a Plone 2.5 site (constructed with instancemanager, of all things!) straight into a shiny new Plone 4 site on Buildout.

My only key need was to port the content and structure, and I was happy to make big allowances for the sake of certain content and time.  So, my thoughts here mightn’t (probably won’t!) suit everyone.My requirements …

in Plone · Fri 14 January 2011

Plone and Dexterity: Working with computed fields

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.

in Plone · Mon 19 April 2010

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

Migration complete (mostly)

Well, that’s always a good reason to let out a sigh of relief: I’ve managed to migrate most of the content from my previous blog over at Wikidot (which wasn’t really a blog so much as it was a hacked wiki). So, you’ll find a lot more content here than before, which is good, because it makes me look like I’m actually dedicated to creating content ;-)

I’ve also relaxed restrictions on comments (and added CAPTCHA security) so comment away people, if you’re reading this.  Just don’t expect much love if you spam …

in General · Thu 20 August 2009

Webpage content underneath Flash content

So, you’ve got a website that you’ve made and you’ve used a Flash movie on it.  Okay, no worries.  Now, what if you tried to add a (non-form-element) drop-down menu or some AJAX-ed content into the site, and found the Flash movie actually acted as an overlay?

This problem doesn’t seem consistent.  Different OSs, browsers, and Flash versions don’t indicate consistency - that’s what I’ve seen anyway.  Nevertheless, the problem persists for some users and it’s down-right annoying.

The fix?  Make your Flash code look similar to this:

<object data="my-movie.swf …

in Web · Fri 12 June 2009

Plone: Archetypes With Paster

From http://www.koansys.com/tech/create-plone-3-archetype-product-with-zopeskel-and-buildout:

ZopeSkel can create Archetype-based products for Plone 3. Wire it up in Buildout.

After creating a Plone 3 instance (e.g., with Unified Installer) go into the src/ directory and create a development product with ZopeSkel:

> paster create -t archetype
Enter title (The title of the project) ['Plone Example']: Koansys Newproduct
Enter namespace_package (Namespace package (like plone)) ['plone']: koansys
Enter package (The package contained namespace package (like example)) ['example']: newproduct
Enter zope2product (Are you creating a Zope 2 Product?) [False]: True
Enter version (Version) ['0.1']:
Enter description (One-line description of the package …

in Work · Wed 17 December 2008