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

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

Ubuntu 9.10 install hiccough

Yay, the new version of Ubuntu is out.  With it comes plenty of cool new features (how awesome does the start up and login screen look now?) and also plenty of opportunities for things to break when I’ve become so accustomed to having them working.  At least it’s not Windows though — I think I may just gnaw my own limbs off before I have to get forced to upgrade to Windows 7 for gaming reasons.

But I digress, there was one reasonably small problem with the upgrade that I saw on both of my Ubuntu machines (laptop and …

in IT, Linux · Fri 30 October 2009

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

DateTime in Python/Zope/Plone is painful

Alright, now for today’s problem:  why do two dates that look different when outputted actually end up being the same date?

Answer: I’m not sure, but I’m pretty sure it’s got something to do with the wacky support the above-mentioned 3 products have for timezones.

The background: Plone stores a DateTime object to record a user’s last login time.  It doesn’t really matter what’s purpose is, because Plone (this time) isn’t at fault.  The DateTime gets stored, no worries.  The problem arises when you try to put that value back into a …

in Python · Fri 19 June 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: Issues with products

Oh dear. Products in Plone that don’t care to uninstall themselves at all when removed. One such product that comes to mind is ZipFileTransport.

I could go into depth all day about its failure to uninstall, but in specific, it’s this line of code in its setupHandlers.py file that kills me:

sm.registerUtility(ZipFileTransportUtility('zipfiletransport'), IZipFileTransportUtility)

Now, where’s the unregisterUtility called? Nowhere, unfortunately. So when one tries to go and install/uninstall/reinstall/do certain things on the site, you get a nasty failure message about trying to unpickle a python object:

2009-04-23 10:19:19 …

in Plone · Thu 23 April 2009

Plone: Plone4Artists Video - Can’t Edit Videos

Wow..I just keep hitting these problems. The latest issue is chronicled here: http://dev.plone4artists.org/pm/p/plone4artists/ticket/160

which essentially boils down to this problem when you try and edit a video subtyped File from p4a.plonevideo (or p4a.video or whatever it’s called now):

Traceback (innermost last):
* Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 119, in publish
* Module ZPublisher.mapply, line 88, in mapply
* Module ZPublisher.Publish, line 42, in call_object
* Module zope.formlib.form, line 769, in __call__
* Module p4a.video.browser.video, line 362, in update
* Module Products.Five.formlib.formbase, line 55, in update …

in Plone · Wed 25 February 2009

Linux: Graphics Card Woes & BIOS Issues

…and I had thought that installing a graphics card in a computer was as easy as opening the case, inserting the card, and booting the machine (then Xorg config etc). Well, to tell the truth, I just moved my HDD, peripherals (gfx card included) to a new box - now a Dell OptiPlex 755. But, it’s not that easy if you can’t boot your Ubuntu 8.10 OS!

The computer kept spitting this message out, even though it just worked a few days ago:

15.848000 NVRM: This PCI I/O region assigned to your NVIDIA device is invalid …

in IT, Linux, Work · Tue 27 January 2009

Plone: Varnish Configuration (Cache Hits, Purge Fails)

What a painful, painful day. It’s taken about the entire day, but I’ve finally figured out why our Varnish configuration around here for Plone/Zope hasn’t been accepting PURGE requests. Thus, without accepting purge requests correctly, any content that gets changed in Plone doesn’t get updated in the cache until it times out (or we restart it). Ouch - especially because it affects all sites under virtual hosting, and a lot of these sites have publicly visible content that needs to be available immediately.

So, the problem manifested itself as thus:

• Cache hits happen
• Performance was good …

in Plone · Wed 21 January 2009