User IDs show as comment authors in Plone 4.x after migration from plone.app.discussion

If you’ve migrated your site from earlier versions of Plone to the latest ones in the 4.x series, or else have started using plone.app.discussion earlier than that, you might have come across a situation where comments on your site show user IDs as authors rather than a user’s full name. If you see this anywhere, chances are your comment’s migration didn’t go according to plan, and that the Creator information didn’t get recorded correctly on the comment.

I’ve just written this on the Collective developer docs: http://readthedocs.org/docs/collective-docs …

in Plone · Tue 01 November 2011

Plone/Zope: Truncating a Data.fs back to a certain date/time

Okay. So, anyone out here who’s listening — particularly those overly-enthusiastic users — don’t try to recursively wget your Plone site (or other CMS, for that matter) whilst you’re logged in with an account that can make edits. It will lead to a very bad situation where your site administrator and technical team need to step in and fix your mistakes. For the uninitiated, a loose recursive wget (when logged in with some degree of Edit rights) will hit every link that’s on your pages, and I mean in the (X)HTML source. For a Plone site, this …

in Plone · Tue 20 July 2010

Linux: Make time with faketime

So you, like me, have hit a situation where you’ve got a time-sensitive application that won’t run? Maybe you’ve downloaded one of those apps (like a demo) that won’t run after a certain date and time because it’s “expired”. Or else, maybe some other arbitrary time constraint is keeping you from running a Linux (or even Windows) program. On Linux (Ubuntu for me), there’s faketime to the rescue - a very handy tool that does what it says on the box, changes the system time for given command.

After installing faketime by something like:

sudo …

in Linux · Mon 12 July 2010

plone.app.blob and Failed Migrations

Another fun-and-games style problem I’ve come across when using plone.app.blob: sometimes migrations won’t work when converting a standard site’s files over to blobs.

That’s a pretty ambiguious description, but essentially, the error you might see will have a semi-normal traceback to start, and then garbage (contents of a file, presumably) - which, depending on the file size might hurt your browser.  The last part of the (normal) traceback reads thus:

File "/home/buildout/instance/eggs/plone.app.linkintegrity-1.0.11-py2.4.egg/ plone/app/linkintegrity/handlers.py", line 158, in referencedObjectRemoved raise LinkIntegrityNotificationException, obj LinkIntegrityNotificationException …

in Plone · Fri 03 July 2009