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The Definitive Guide to Plone

1. This site provides an examples links and errata for the book All the software mentioned in the book is linked to in the software sect For a chapter by chapter listing of code and errata s check out the cha Plone and its visual design is Copyright 2000 2004 by Alexander Limi Alan Figure 4 26 The new background image 5 Chapter 5 5 1 Introducing Basic Plone Templating Plone puts together three layers of technology to create a page Python and page templates create some Hypertext Markup Language HTML which is sent to the browser There some Cascading Style Sheets CSS render the nice page with which you re now familiar Those two first elements the Python code and the page templates are the main areas of discussion in this chapter and Chapter 6 To understand how to generate and then edit a Plone template you have to first learn about some key underlying concepts Some of these concepts are particularly unique to Plone and although they provide great advantages it does take some time to get used to them In this chapter I ll start by covering object publishing Pll explain how to interact with objects inside Plone Then Pll explain how to build expressions Once you re familiar with those two concepts I ll cover how Plone pages are actually put together At the end of the chapter you ll create a new page inside your Plone site that uses the techniques you ve learned so far This chapter will m
2. log in gt Forgot your password gt New user Figure 3 2 The registration page Registration Form m Personal Details Full Name Enter full name eg John Smith User Name Enter a user name usually something like jsmith No spaces or special c Usernames and passwords are case enabled This is the name used to log in sensitive make sure the caps lock ki E mail Enter an email address This is necessary in case the password Is lost Wi privacy and will not give the address away to any third parties or expose Password Minimum 5 characters Confirm Password Re enter the password Make sure the passwords are identical I Send a mail with the password NOTE Because many of the Plone pages are quite large the figures in this book have been cropped to show only the key parts in this case the form and not the Plone logo or the footer These elements are still there but they re superfluous 34 To complete the form complete the fields that are reasonably obvious The values of the fields are as follows Full Name Enter your full name This field is optional User Name Enter the username you want to use Most people choose an alphanu meric value without spaces such as bob or jane97 This username will be used throughout the Web site to refer to you This field is required E mail A valid e mail address is required
3. gt meta_type product_name description Provides syntax highlighted HTML of source code product product_name factory addPloneSilverCity content_icon silvercity gif gt immediate_view view actions id view name View action silvercity_view_form permissions view_permission id source name View source action getRawCode gt permissions view_permission id edit name Edit action silvercity_edit_form permissions edit_permission def addPloneSilverCity self id REQUEST None This is our factory function and creates an empty PloneSilverCity object inside our Plone site obj PloneSilverCity id self _setObject id obj class PloneSilverCity PortalContent DefaultDublinCoreImpl1 meta_type product_name __implements__ PortalContent __implements DefaultDublinCoreImpl __implements__ security ClassSecurityInfo def __init__ self id DefaultDublinCoreImpl __init__ self 342 self id id self _raw self _raw_as_html self _raw_language None security declareProtected edit_permission edit def edit self language raw_code file The edit function that sets all our parameters and turns the code into pretty HTML filename
4. plone book _ examples plone _ecmascript plone _wysiwyg plone prefs plone portlets Plone Default plone templates Seve Add a new skin Name Layers Custom Chrome custom chrome grut plone_ecmascript Add Default skin Plone Default REQUEST variable name plone skin Skin flexibility I Allow arbitrary skins to be selected Skin Cookie persistence Make skin cookie persist indefinitely Save Figure 7 13 Adding the Custom Chrome skin Then I added the layers for the skin In this case the skin didn t have a layer called custom in it instead it had a folder called custom_chrome You now have two skins that use two layers and two folders Any objects added to the custom_chrome folder will affect that skin not the Plone Default skin 7 1 3 2 Using Multiple Skins As mentioned a standard Plone site has two skins Plone Default and Plone Tableless In the previous section I added a new skin Custom Chrome As I discussed in Chapter 4 you can 194 set the default skin using the Plone interface Click plone setup and then click the Portal Skin button This mirrors the choices available in the ZMI after clicking portal_skins selecting the Properties tab and scrolling to the bottom of the page You have one more option though REQUEST variable name This is the request variable that will contain the user s skin information This is plone_skin by default which is the cookie name But it can a
5. State Me Bank Draft Post Review Pay Reject Paid At this stage in Table 8 1 you ve seen the transitions and who can make them You haven t thought about the access that each user has to perform an action on an object at each point For example at which point can someone edit the bill and when can it be viewed These are called actions in Plone terminology as shown in Table 8 2 I hope that only I have access to my own credit card statements Likewise at any stage the bank is able to view the credit card bill and answer queries on it Table 8 2 The Actions and Entities That Can Make Them State Me Bank Draft View Edit Review View View Paid View View Actually as it turns out I can t edit my credit card bill only the bank can I can send back my credit bill by rejecting it but the bank is unlikely to want my edits In this situation assume the bank is the owner of the credit card bill This demonstrates a concept called ownership I may have several credit card bills from several banks and in each case you can think of the bank as the owner Each bank owns its own credit card bills but Bank A isn t the owner of Bank B s bill Table 8 3 combines the transitions and actions changing the terms Me and Bank to Payee and Owner respectively Table 8 3 The Transitions and Actions Combined plus the Roles of People State Payee Owner Draft Post View Edit 209 State Payee Owner Review Pay Reject View View P
6. tal content Value gt lt select gt lt br gt lt input type submit class context gt lt form gt lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt This script uses a method called uniqueValuesFor on the catalog which will return all the unique values that exist for an index This lets you perform a task such as populating a little drop down box in a form which is a pretty useful thing to have At this point it becomes an exercise in HTML and page templates to make the pages as com plicated as you d like Of course the best place to look for all this is in the actual templates of Plone which give lines upon lines of great examples All the portlets you re familiar with in Plone such as the calendar events related and so on are all built using catalog queries to determine what to show In this chapter I ve provided you with an overview of ways to develop a Plone site and how content types work in your site I demonstrated how a content type is constructed and then referenced through the catalog This is a key development methodology in Plone In the next chapter I ll show how to develop a new content type pretty much from scratch You ll see how you can integrate that new content type with the catalog register in the por tal_types tool 12 Chapter 12 12 1 Writing a Product in Python Writing a product for Plone allows you to do almost anything you d like to do with Plone Using Python to write content type
7. 128 129 6 1 1 1 Hooking Into Plone Using METAL So far you ve seen how to use TAL to dynamically create parts of pages However this really doesn t let you do a great deal of complex templating There really isn t a mechanism to put a standard header on top of every page other than using a TAL statement METAL is a method of allowing preprocessing of the templates and provides some more powerful functions than TAL All METAL functions start with the metal prefix 6 1 1 1 1 metal define macro The metal define macro command allows you to define an element to reference from another template The name of the referenced chunk is the name of the macro The following is an example that defines boxA as a piece you want to use elsewhere lt div metal define macro boxA gt lt div gt That div element is now a macro that can be referenced from other templates The macro refers only to the part of the page referenced by the element which in this case is the div tag So it s common to use multiple macro defines in one page and for the page to be a valid Hypertext Markup Language HTML page like so lt html xmlns tal http xml zope org namespaces tal xmlns metal http xml zope org namespaces metal 118n domain plone gt lt body gt lt div metal define macro boxA gt lt div gt lt div metal define macro boxB gt lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt Corresponding with the earlier goals of page
8. 61 home news members Bandy you are here home members andym s home link 2003 12 29 4378761780 navigation sharing Home Ca Members 2 2e Edit Link A link is a pointer to a location on the internet or intranet Enter the re m Link Details Description 4 brief description of the link The best news web site that there is URL Prefix is optional if not provided the link will be relative http news bbc co uk gt save gt cancel Figure 3 23 Adding a link 3 1 5 5 Adding and News Items News items are commonly used in Web sites to display news that s of interest to the reader Actually a news item contains the same information as a document The only real difference is that a news item will show up when a visitor clicks the news tab once the item is published as shown in Figure 3 24 62 _ welcome news download documentation development you are here home navigation News 3 About Plone C Development Documentation eduplone products publicly available 3 D loads oti The first eduplone products are now public and available under a GPL Public Relations Read Mines EEE Posted by jensen Hames ESA Epo sont acesaeeces c seen o cn olen ona meaner eee meee ao noe aa eso rn eter oes TATA Happy Holidays from the Plone Team The Plone Tea
9. Figure 2 8 Running Plone from the command line To test that Plone is running start a browser and go to http localhost if Plone is installed successfully you ll see the Plone welcome screen 2 1 2 Installing Plone on Mac OS X Unix and Linux The installations for Mac OS X Unix and Linux are different but the configurations are similar Specific packages exist for different operating systems including Mac OS X Debian Gentoo FreeBSD OpenBSD and RPM Package Managers RPMs for Red Hat SuSE and Mandrake In the following sections l ll cover some of the more popular Mac OS X Red Hat and Debian For information about your specific operating system consult the installation instructions for the specific installation system 23 2 1 2 1 Installing on Mac OS X The installer automates the installation of Plone on Mac OS X and has been tested on ver sion 10 2 3 and later You ll need administrator access on the computer on which you want to install You can download this installer from http ww plone org download Once you ve downloaded the installer double click the installer to decompress the archive and double click the resulting installer package to begin the install You should see the screen shown in Figure 2 9 Authenticate Name jane Doe Password or phrase a Details gt gt Cancel Eo Figure 2 9 Authorizing the installation using your Mac OS X password Enter your Mac OS X
10. enfoldsystems The Definitive Guide to Plone First Edition 16th May 2005 Table of Contents 1 Chapter 1 1 1 Introducing Plone 1 1 1 What Is a Content Management System 1 1 2 Do You Want a Content Management System 1 1 3 Introducing Plone s Features 1 1 4 Getting Involved in Plone s Development 2 Chapter 2 2 1 Installing Plone 2 1 1 Installing Plone on Windows 2 1 2 Installing Plone on Mac OS X Unix and Linux 2 1 3 Installing from Source 2 1 4 Configuring the Web Server 3 Chapter 3 3 1 Adding and Editing Content 3 1 1 Joining a Site 3 1 2 Enabling Cookies 3 1 3 Setting Up Your Folder and Preferences 3 1 4 Adding and Editing Documents 3 1 5 Adding and Editing Other Types of Content 3 1 6 Organizing Content 3 1 7 Discussing and Finding Content 3 1 8 Example Creating the Plone Book Web Site 4 Chapter 4 4 1 Making Simple Customizations 4 1 1 Administering Sites 4 1 2 Using the ZMI 4 1 3 Customizing Plone s Look and Feel 5 Chapter 5 5 1 Introducing Basic Plone Templating 5 1 1 Understanding the Underlying Templating Machinery 5 1 2 Using the Zope Page Templates System 5 1 3 Understanding the Page Template Basic Syntax 6 Chapter 6 6 1 Introducing Advanced Plone Templating and Scripting 6 1 1 Understanding Advanced Plone Templating 6 1 2 Scripting Plone with Python 6 1 3 Useful Tips 6 1 4 Using Forms 7 Chapter 7 7 1 Customizing the Look and Feel of Plone 7 1 1 Introducing P
11. security ClassSecurityInfo This security object provides an interface into Zope security machinery You can then apply methods to the object My favorite method for doing this is to add a line applying the security directly above the method This way it s easy to remember where the security is applied and you won t forget to update it later if you need to do so The declareProtected method takes the permission and the method name to protect the edit method So that only people who actually have the edit permission can call it you do the following security declareProtected edit_permission edit Repeat this for each method giving the appropriate permission and method name The only one that needs to be protected is__init__ because this begins with an underscore To apply all this security you must initialize the class Without doing this one step all the security further declared won t be applied and your object will be public In other words don t forget this line InitializeClass PloneSilverCity The API for ClassSecurityInfo provides the following methods for the class e declarePublic This takes a list of names All the names are declared publicly accessible for all users through restricted code and through the Web declarePrivate This takes a list of names All the names are private and can t be accessed through restricted code declareProtected This takes a permission and any number of names All the names ca
12. C Program Files Plone amp Program Files 7 Zip Accessories Common Files ComPlus Applications Internet Explorer microsoft frontpage hd fac gt The program requires at least 80 5 MB of disk space lt Back Cancel Figure 2 2 Selecting a directory When you get to the password screen as shown in Figure 2 3 you must enter a username and a password This will create a user for you and this will make the Plone site in that user s name Often people create one user called admin or similar for this role You ll need this 18 username and password later so remember it however if you do lose this password you can enter a new one later te Setup Plone Of x Enter a password P In order to manage your Plone site an administrative account will be created 2 When you first connect to Plone to manage your account you will need to login using admin and this password Account name Password a Confirm Password ee o ooo o lt Back Cancel Figure 2 3 Entering a username and password The installation takes about five minutes depending upon the speed of your computer The installation performs a few tasks at the end of the installation such as compiling all the Python files and setting up the database When the installation has finished a message displays to let you know that it s done see Figure 2 4 i Setup Plone lel x Completing the Plone Setup Wizard Se
13. size 30 maxlength 255 registerWidget EmailWidget title String description Renders a clickable email field used_for Products Archetypes Field StringField To include this in your article you can now directly import the EmailWidget and use without having to explicitly define the macro like so from EmailWidget import EmailWidget StringField email validators isEmail widget EmailWidget label Email 13 1 3 3 Developing Folderish Objects You ve already worked with folderish objects a lot in Plone but you may not have known it A folderish object is one that exhibits similar characteristics to a folder or directory namely that it can contain separate individual objects There really is nothing special about a folderish object just that it inherits from a certain base class to provide its properties and new content can be added to it Folderish objects are useful for you to make for several reasons They provide a simple way to create collections of disparate objects in one location They also allow users to manage the contents using the standard Plone user interface without you having to do anything Generally 384 it s best to keep the folder quite simple and the logic should be on your objects and in the objects workflow However some exceptions to that always exist and a classic example is the family of collectors CMFCollector and
14. Shorter Wider Narrower Figure 5 3 Editing a page template NOTE Before Plone 2 all the page templates passed through the variable here which is equiv alent to context If you see here in any code in a page template it means context The new context variable was added to be clearer and bring the page templates in line with Script Python objects After clicking Save Changes the page template will be compiled If you ve made any errors in the template you ll see them highlighted at the top of the page Figure 5 4 shows an error with an h1 tag that isn t closed As previously mentioned page templates must be valid XHTML 114 Title l Content Type text html Browse HTML source Last 2003 09 16 10 07 AM N 7 Modified I Expand macros when editing Compilation failed Errors TAL HTMLTALParser OpenTagError Tag lt h2 gt is not allowed in lt hi gt at line 7 column 5 lt html gt lt head gt lt title tal content template title gt The title lt title gt lt head gt lt body gt lt hi gt Broken template lt h2 gt lt span tal replace here title or_id gt content title or id lt span gt lt span tal condition template title tal replace template title gt optional template title lt span gt lt h2 gt Save Changes Taller Shorter Wider Narrower Figure 5 4 Page template error Once you ve saved the page template successfully you can click the Test tab to see the rendered valu
15. The security for Plone is so powerful and multifaceted that it can be quite hard to debug and manage But perhaps no other part of a Plone site is as important as getting security right A security breach in your site is probably the most serious blunder you can make and for this reason I cover Plone security quite comprehensively In this chapter I first cover all the user terminology and key interfaces with which your users will interact Then I show how to add and edit users and groups through the Plone interface I then step through the key tools and Application Programming Interfaces APIs that manage users and their security Then I cover using Python tools to script changes to users and their properties Finally I cover server security and expand user authentication providing a detailed example on how to incorporate users from a Lightweight Directory Access Protocol LDAP server 9 1 1 Administering Users One of the most common tasks you ll need to do as an administrator of a Plone site is to deal with the members of your site Administration usually involves recovering passwords and changing member settings You can perform quite a few simple tasks through the Web but of course the best friend to any administrator is a scripting language such as Python to make changes en masse If you have a large number of users the Scripting Users section later in this chapter will be of particular interest to you 9 1 1 1 Users Roles and G
16. You are now logged in page Some clues exist to find this template so you can alter it Pl run through each of them in turn now 189 7 1 2 12 Searching by Using the URL The Uniform Resource Locator URL to a page translates to a series of objects in Plone that are traversed In Figure 7 11 I ve traversed to the login success page In this case the final part of the URL is login success as you can see in the address bar in Figure 7 11 When an object is loaded into an FSDV the extension is stripped off so you re looking for a template or script that starts with login_success Contents Properties View Security Undo Owner Plone Skins Tool at Plone portal skins Displaying items 1 1 of 1 items matching your query You can revise your search terms below plone_forms login_success Login successful 2 Find objects of type Archetypes Tool Archetypes Content BTreeFolder2 with ids llogin_success containing oT modified before Search only in this folder Search all subfolders Find advanced Figure 7 11 Searching for an ID In Zope you can perform this search by going to the portal_skins tool and clicking the Find tab Once there enter login_success in the with ids field Leave all the other settings the same 190 and click the Find button Sure enough you ll find the login_success template You can also conduct this search on the file system depending upon your ope
17. lt metal bodytext metal define slot main tal content nothing gt Page body text lt metal bodytext gt Each type of content has a different template and each template defines how they ll use the main slot differently So then each content type has its own particular look and feel from the templates Just one element is missing in the equation Somehow when you called image _view the template knew it should use main_template In the image_view template you use the macro from the main_template This is defined in the following HTML lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtm1 xml lang en US lang en Us metal use macro here main_template macros master i18n domain plone gt In this case the main_template has the main slot filled in by the slot defined as main in the template being rendered The following is a timeline of how the page is built for viewing an image image_view main_template image view main_template define slot main fill slot image_view fill slot main_template main_template This allows Plone to be flexible in terms of how each page is defined For example main_template defines just more than that one slot there s also a slot for inserting Cascading Style Sheets CSS code lt metal cssslot fill slot css_slot gt lt metal cssslot define slot css_slot gt lt metal cssslot gt If a view needed a custom set of CSS you could define this slot in the view and it d be filled in when renderin
18. re logged in such my favorites my preferences and so on These all have the category user so that the actions will appear in the top right corner The portal_groups tool provides similar tools to portal_membership but for groups Likewise when a group is created a group workspace is created where all members of that group can add and edit content 247 9 1 2 4 Useful APIs The portal_membership tool has one of most commonly used set of API functions Often you ll want to find out key information such as the currently logged in user whether the user is anonymous and so on The portal_membership tool provides you with these methods the following are some of the most important e isAnonymousUser This returns true if the user is anonymous e getAuthenticatedMember This returns the currently logged in user wrapped with portal_metadata properties If no user is logged in it returns a special nobody user with null mappings for portal_metadata properties listMemberlds This returns the IDs for all the users listMembers This returns all the user objects getMemberByld id This returns the user object for a given ID getHomeFolder id None This returns the home folder for a given ID The ID is optional and if not provided gives the current member s home folder getHomeUrl id None This returns a URL to the member s home folder The ID is optional and if not provided gives the current members home folder s
19. s administration interface and developing Plone requires an understanding of Zope and its objects This book doesn t go into depth about Zope rather it gives you enough information to complete tasks in Plone Just reading this book will give you enough information to customize and modify almost anything you want in Plone For more information on Zope I recommend The Zope Book Originally published by New Riders it has since been placed online and is updated by community members It s available free online at http www zope org Documentation Books ZopeBook 2_6Edition Both Zope and the CMF are key technologies that Plone needs without them Plone wouldn t exist The Plone team owes a great deal of thanks to everyone at Zope Corporation for having 11 the vision to create and then offer both Zope and the CMF as open source The list of people I d like to thank there and in the CMF communities is long Thank you everyone involved Zope is written in Python a powerful object oriented open source programming language comparable to Perl or Tcl Knowledge of Python isn t required to use Plone or even to do some basic administration however customizing products and scripting Plone does require some Python Tommy Burnette a senior technical director at Industrial Light Magic says this about Python http www python org Quotes html Python plays a key role in our production pipeline Without it a project the size of Star
20. s an example nocall context someImage 5 1 1 2 4 Using String Expressions String expressions allow you to mix up text and variables into one expression All string expressions start with the string prefix This is a useful function and you ll see it used quite a bit The text can contain anything that s legally allowed inside an attribute which essentially includes alphanumeric characters plus spaces Contained inside the text can be variables prefixed with a dollar sign Here are some examples string This is some long string string This is the title In the latter example the variable title is evaluated The variable can actually be any path expression If the variable contains then the variable has to be wrapped with to signify the start and end of the expression For example string This is the context someImage title If a dollar sign in the text needs to be escaped use another dollar sign immediately before the dollar sign you need to escape For example string In US it costs context myThing cost 5 1 1 2 5 Using Python Expressions Python expressions evaluate a line of Python code All Python expressions start with a python prefix and contain one line of Python For example python 1 2 The Python code is evaluated using the same security model that a Script Python object uses as discussed in Chapter 6 For these reasons Python should be simple and limited to presenta tion fu
21. state_change object mship context portal_membership mhost context MailHost administratorEmailAddress context email_from_address the message format s will be filled in from data message From s To 4s Subject New item submitted for approval s 4S URL s This sets up the message and objects you need Apart from the object being transitioned you ll also need a reference to the membership tool portal_membership and the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol SMTP server via MailHost The message is easily configurable to send an e mail in any format you like You then use the listWembers method of the portal_membership object to get a list of members For each member you can then see if the reviewer role is in the list of roles for that user by calling the getRoles method for user in mship listMembers if Reviewer in mship getMemberById user id getRoles The astute reader will note that looping through every member in a Plone site could be a little slow if you have thousands of users In the next chapter you ll modify this script to pull the list of users from a specific group There s no point in sending an e mail if you don t have a user s e mail address so you check here that there s a valid e mail first Now all that s left is to format the e mail and send it For this you can use Python s string replacement functionality and pass in four parameters that correspond to the s in the messa
22. userName request userName nothing user0bj python here portal_membership getMemberById userName 126 getPortrait nocall here portal_membership getPersonalPortrait getFolder nocall here portal_membership getHomeFolder gt In this div tag there are four defines one to get the username passed in through the request object and another to translate that username into a user object The last two defines ensure that you have a valid reference to the methods that give you user pictures and folders these again are convenient because they make later code simpler Making a div tag or other tag such as this that contains a series of defines is quite a common pattern in the Zope Page Templates system It simply makes the code cleaner Next you do two simple conditions to check that you have a user lt p tal condition not userName gt No username selected lt p gt lt p tal condition not user0bj gt That username does not exist lt p gt If no username is given in the request then the expression request username nothing will result in a userName that s nothing and hence fail the simple test Further if the username isn t valid the userObj will result in None and error messages will be printed for both these conditions Now you re ready to actually process the user lt table tal condition user0bj gt lt tr gt lt td gt lt img src tal replace structure python getPortrait userName gt lt
23. By using the tal prefix on the element you ve defined the default namespace for this whole element as tal If no other prefix is given the tal namespace is used In the example using span tags the default namespace is XHTML so you have to specifically define the tal prefix when using the Content tab Note that the element name is descriptive and can be anything not already defined the tal namespace for example content or replace Because tal number isn t a valid XHTML element the actual tag won t display but the content will making the omit tag unnecessary This technique is used a lot in Plone to make code that s smaller simpler to debug and more semantic 152 6 1 3 2 Introducing Tidying Code HTML Tidy is an excellent tool for testing and cleaning up HTML code that can perform a few useful tasks Versions of HTML Tidy exist for all operating systems you can download it from http tidy sourceforge net For Windows users find the appropriate download for your version of Windows unzip the tidy zip file and place the tidy exe in your PATH usually your Windows directory such as C up WINNT HTML Tidy can tell you if there are any XHTML errors in your page template For these purposes one flag can make a difference xml This tells HTML Tidy to process the file as XML and report any XML errors Given the example bad template shown in Listing 6 4 you can see a few errors Not only is the code not indented bu
24. Each ZCTextIndex requires a lexicon fortunately Plone creates and configures all this out of the box If you click portal_catalog select the Contents tab and click plone lexicon you can see the default configuration of the lexicon Clicking the Query tab will show you all the words that are in the lexicon built out of your Plone site content The ZCTextIndex is searched using the format I described in Chapter 3 It takes similar terms to the searching that you can use on Google or other search engines At its most basic you can search for any term note that this is case insensitive like so results context portal_catalog searchResults SearchableText space But you can also search for all of the following e Globbing Use an asterisk to signify any letters For example tues matches tuesday and tuesdays You can t use the asterisk at the be ginning of a word though e Single wildcards Use a question mark to signify one letter For example ro e matches rope rote role and so on You can t use the question mark at the beginning of a word e And Using and signifies that both terms on other side of it must exist For example rome and tuesday will return only a result with both those words are in the content e Or Using or signifies that either terms can exist For example rome or tuesday will return a result if either of those words are in the content e Not Using not returns results where this isn t present a
25. Guard This is the security for this state explained shortly Display in actions box This is how this transition will be displayed in Plone Entering a value here also ensures that the transition will be entered as an action You can then get this transition as an action by querying for actions Of these values the destination state is quite interesting Although I ve already mentioned that transitions normally change state this isn t required Because each transition can run scripts and write something into the history it can be useful sometimes not to change state For an example of this see the Using Workflow to Track Changes section later in this chapter If your transition does change the state then select the new state as the destination state A transition can have multiple starting points but only one destination if you need multiple destinations you ll have to make multiple transitions You can specify scripts to run before or after this transition Two common examples are moving an object in workflow and sending an e mail notification The Common Tasks and Examples section covers both of these examples Before any transition can be executed a security guard checks the entire transition to ensure that the user running the transition has the right to do so The guard has the following three components Permission s These are the required permissions Multiple permissions should have a semicolon to separat
26. Jan e B Locale s full month name for example January e d Day of the month as a decimal number e H Hour 24 hour clock as a decimal number e I Hour 12 hour clock as a decimal number e m Month as a decimal number e M Minute as a decimal number e S Second as a decimal number e y Year without century as a decimal number e Y Year with century as a decimal number If you want to include the day name in the short date it s a simple matter of changing the short date format to read A b d y This produces Thursday Oct 24 02 These dates are used in the boxes on the left and right of the screen in the search results in the content byline and so on 4 1 3 5 Adding Keywords and Event Types One of the tools in Plone portal_metadata allows the site administrator to define some of the metadata elements Plone uses the metadata defined in the portal_metadata tool in several places For example when you add an event you re given a list of possible types of events You can add to this list by clicking portal_metadata clicking elements and then clicking subject in the ZMI You ll see a vocabulary for events that lists the subjects for that content type It s a simple matter of adding or editing that list one item per line to have the relevant event types These event types will then appear in the forms for adding and editing events Another use of portal_metadata is the selection of keywords availab
27. Please contribute your experiences at the Plone website Thanks for using our product The Plone Team Last modifie Figure 3 8 Welcome to Plone a simple document 3 1 4 2 Adding a Document You have two ways to add any piece of content using a Web browser First ensure you re logged in because only logged in users can add content Second select the my folder link from the top right navigation bar This will take you to your home folder an area that you control 44 If you re able to add content to a folder then the folder will show up with the green border around the top see Figure 3 9 home news members ieee ee ee Bandym B you are here home members andym s home navigation Home Ca Members ime andym s Home andym s Home a Up one level E Home page area that contains the items created and collected by and Select z add new item Li title size modified sta C B andym s Home Page 1K 2003 12 29 09 21 57 visit gt rename cut gt copy gt delete change state Figure 3 9 My content If the green border doesn t appear then you won t be able to add content this border contains the actions you can perform in the current location In Figure 3 9 you can see that the page shows the contents of the folder because that s the highlighted tab Other tabs appear such as view sharing and properties for more advanced options In the
28. S although it will still download the file for you For example wget S http www agmweb ca First the following are the headers returned for test gif before andy basil scripts header py http localhost 8080 test gif GET Accept Ranges bytes Connection close Content Length 2541 Content Type image gif Date Wed 03 Sep 2003 23 55 38 GMT Etag Last Modified Wed 03 Sep 2003 23 54 27 GMT Server Zope unreleased version python 2 2 2 linux2 ZServer 1 1 413 After adding the image to the cache you ll recheck the HTTP headers using the script again You ll find that there are two new headers For example andy basil scripts header py http localhost 8080 test gif GET Cache Control max age 3600 Expires Thu 04 Sep 2003 00 56 03 GMT on 2 2 2 linux2 Zserver 1 1 NOTE Unfortunately Zope 2 doesn t conform to the Request for Comments RFC regard ing HEAD requests Instead of sending the full set of headers when a HEAD request is sent the values from the cache manager are missing When testing you should always send GET requests For more information on the HTTP headers and how they relate to caching see RFC 2616 at http www w3 org Protocols rfc2616 rfc2616 sec14 html The Accelerated HTTP Cache Manager caches an entire response which works well for static items However the normal Plone page consists of personalized elements such as the calendar the personal navigation bar and so on In this s
29. This is an imperfect solution to a tricky problem of course If you ve used FTP or External Editor on a file you ll know that it tries to solve this by placing a number of lines at the top of the page containing key value pairs for metadata on the object This is another attempt to solve the same problem To set up primary field marshaling you need to add the following to your schema mar shall some_marshallerQ Currently there are only two marshalers a PrimaryFieldMarshaller which takes the whole content and places into your object and an RFC822Marshaller This second marshaler handles the content for field name value pairs as used in e mail For this chapter s purposes I ll use the PrimaryFieldMarshaller to handle content with External Editor 13 1 1 5 Validations of Input Although the forms handle the content and some basic errors such as omitted content quite well you ll probably want some more sophisticated error handling You can make a series of validations to test that the content in your content type is correct For example if you have an integer field you ll probably want to test that the data they ve added is what it s meant to be To do this you can add a validation parameter to the field To test that your IntegerField really is an integer for example you d do this from Products Archetypes public import IntegerField from Products Archetypes public import IntegerWidget a simple field for age age Integ
30. You can do this by accessing the IP and port of your Plone server directly In the case of the previous example you can access the site by going to http 192 168 2 1 8080 Plone and you ve circum vented the proxy server completely If you don t have any problems accessing and logging into Plone this way but do when you try through the proxy server chances 292 are any errors are occurring in the proxy s server side Some older versions of Apache 1 3 do give problems with cookies when logging in so you should upgrade to the latest 1 3 version Checking the URL Double check that your proxy server is sending the right URL which can be quite long and complicated Break it down by the forward slashes to examine each part Remember that for Plone to return the correct URL it must be passed the correct values So you have to ensure that the protocol URL port section is correct If your site is using SSL for example ensure your protocol part is https not http 10 1 4 Integrating Plone with the File System Integrating Plone with the file system may sound a little odd but Pm talking about enabling the use of content on the file system with Plone Of course Plone already exists as a series of files that s installed and run on the file system However all content in a Plone site is stored in the ZODB but many people tell me they want to store and serve their content from the file system directly Actually a lot of peopl
31. You could assign proxy roles on the script if it needs to happen as someone else Returning to the tran sitions you can assign this script to any number of transitions in the script after and script before settings You can run the script either before or after a transition 8 1 3 2 7 Editing Permissions The Permissions tab lists the permissions that are managed by this workflow You ve seen these permissions already when examining the states You set the list of permissions manageable in those states in this tab To add a new permission select the permission from the drop down box and select Add 222 8 1 3 2 7 1 How Can You Edit a Published Document Well you can t edit a published document in the default workflow unless you have the manager role If you allow the owner of the document to edit it then you really should review it again However this seems to be a common request and is a trivial thing to change In the ZMI click portal_workflow and select the Contents tab Then click plone_workflow and select the States tab Finally click published and then select the Permissions tab Check the box that corresponds to allowing the owner to modify portal content Insert 3294s0801 tif Click Save Changes to save your permissions Because you ve updated the security settings you ll have to click portal_workflow select the Contents tab and click Update security settings This will update all the objects in your site an
32. You must take into account how often the page is visited users expectations at that point and realistic requirements Micromeasuring just one part of a site can be useful to track down a certain issue but it may not make your site much faster As with most things you need a sensible approach to optimizations 402 14 1 2 3 Production Mode vs Debug Mode One of the biggest speed killers for Plone is to run your site in debug mode When running in debug mode each and every template script and object in the portal_skins tool is compared against the file system to see if it s up to date This check happens with To find out if your site is running in debug mode in the ZMI access the portal_migration object in your Plone site At the bottom of the page will be a list of information including Debug Mode status To change this alter the configuration file as discussed in Chapter 2 14 1 2 4 Other Reasons for Slow Performance A server may be running slowly for reasons outside of Plone If you re running optimization you should always take a look at these considerations first since these will provide quick speed improvements for little cost 14 1 2 4 1 Processor Usage If you re running a great number of applications or just some intensive ones then this will limit the amount of processor time available to Plone Assembling pages in Plone can take a lot of Central Processing Unit CPU power When an application is bound by
33. and groups Then you make a random password by calling generatePassword This generates a random six character pass word composed of uppercase and lowercase characters and numbers If you wanted to base the ID or password on provided information such as the username or e mail then this is the opportunity to do that In this case I ve entered each group in the same field separated by a comma for example Sales Marketing Therefore I need to split that into a list of individual names like so try add in member pr addMember id id password password roles Member properties fullname name username id email email 259 groups are separated by commas for groupId in groups group pg getGroupById groupId group addMember id out append Added user s id except ValueError msg if we skipped this user for a reason tell the person out append Skipped s reason 4s id msg return something return n join out Given that you now have all the user information you need to register the user you can perform the actual registration You do this by calling the addMember function which is a function of portal_registration and which registers the user A dictionary of key value pairs such as e mail and name is passed through to the function Then for each group you call getGroupByld to get the group and call addMember on the group As the name suggests
34. but unless you put a lot of data into them you wouldn t likely notice any difference I ve stored more than 100 000 objects in BTreeFolder and it s always responded well 13 1 3 4 Handling Microsoft Office Content Handling Microsoft Office content such as Word and Excel documents is a bane that all content management systems face at some point However this is really the case for every type of content Microsoft Office OpenOffice org Portable Document Format PDF images and so on Using these content forms on Web sites usually causes a few problems this is well known of course Editing is clumsy because clicking a document causes you to download it or even worse open it in your browser When you ve finished you have to upload back up to the Web site which can normally mean clicking around a bit to get back to it When the content is online the contents aren t searchable because they aren t in a plain text format the catalog can understand Further you can t view the content online because again it isn t in a Web friendly format You have a couple of solutions for solving the first problem of editing content If again you assume most of your users are using Windows then using WebDAV can be tricky for you 385 because Microsoft s Web folder implementation is of questionable quality Instead External Editor fulfills this function quite well if Plone can tell External Editor that this is a Word file it ll o
35. for object in objects diff now object bobobase_modification_time if diff lt difference dct object object diff int diff result append dct return result In this Script Python object I ve introduced a couple of new concepts First you import Zope s DateTime module using the import function The DateTime module covered in Appendix C is a module to provide access to dates It s pretty simple but if you make a new DateTime object with no parameters then you ll get the current date and time this is the now variable When you subtract two DateTime objects you ll get the number of days You can compare that to the difference a user wants to monitor and if it s longer add it to the result list The result of this is a list of dictionary objects which looks like Listing 6 3 Listing 6 3 The Result of Listing 6 2 147 diff 1 object lt PloneFolder instance at 02C0C110 gt 1 diff 4 object lt PloneFolder instance at 02FE3321 gt Fi So now that you have the results in the right order you need a page template that will pass in the list of objects and process the results An example of this is as follows lt ul gt lt li tal repeat updated python context updateScript context contentValues gt This template has a tal repeat call at the top that calls the script in this case called update Script Into that function it passes one value a list of contentVa
36. gt lt a href tal attributes href here portal_url getPortalUr1 gt Home lt a gt lt tal block gt But it d be faster to use a tal define like so lt tal block tal repeat result here portal_catalog tal define url here portal_url getPortalUrl1 gt lt a href 409 tal attributes href url gt Home lt a gt lt tal block gt As already stated Plone defines a large number of global defines By using those definitions a developer can reduce the number of traversals You can find a full list of all these defines in Appendix A 14 1 2 6 2 Security Checks and Traversal Whenever an object an object s attributes or an object s methods are accessed a security check is performed Although each security check isn t that expensive a large number of security checks can really add up This is especially true when you traverse to an object for example to here folderA folderB object In this case Zope will be doing security checks on each of those folders and then on the object If the information can be accessed without doing that traversal each time you ll find a performance gain Another way to avoid doing security checks is to write code in Products on the file system Code in Products is considered trusted code is subject to fewer checks and is hence faster 14 1 2 6 3 The ZCatalog The ZCatalog is an efficient binary tree of data about objects You should use it in most situations when getting a
37. http sourceforge net mailarchive forum php forum_id 11647 Translating the content that people add is actually quite a tricky task and something that Plone is working toward but currently it hasn t completely ironed out The favorite approach at the moment is to use two products PloneLanguageTool and il8nLayer both of which can be found on SourceForge http sfnet projects collective However both of these are for more experienced developers to fully understand and integrate I hope something like this will be in the next release of the book 139 6 1 1 3 Example Displaying Multiple User Information In Chapter 5 you used simple TAL commands to show a user s information in more detail That template has a few drawbacks one of them is that it shows only one user at a time You ve seen that a simple tal repeat can enable you to repeat content but you ll now use a macro to make this page more modular You ll change the user_info page template so that it lists every page member in the site Instead of looking for a username being passed in the request you ll use the function listMembers which returns a list of every member on the site lt div metal fill slot main gt lt tal block tal define getPortrait nocall here portal_membership getPersonalPortrait getFolder nocall here portal_membership getHomeFolder gt lt table gt lt tr tal repeat user0bj here portal_membership listMembers gt lt metal block metal
38. making objects based on certain other factors or creating objects en masse Plone has two useful Script Python objects for this generateUniqueld This creates a new unique ID for the type of object for exam ple Folder 2003 12 19 7359814582 It s unique only to the folder it s created in if you create a lot of objects quickly then it s possible that they couldn t be unique For most normal usage this is good enough invokeFactory This takes an ID and a type name This will create an object of the type given and give it the ID specified You ll make an example script that creates a folder and a default page in that folder and into that default page you ll put some specific content If this sounds familiar this is what happens when you join a site and a home folder is created for you The type names match the registration inside the portal_types tool so if you wanted to create a folder and inside that create a document you d need to pass the parameters Folder and Document to the invokeFactory script Listing 11 2 shows a script that gets a unique ID and that creates a folder based on that ID It will then step inside the folder and create a new document Listing 11 2 Getting an ID and Creating a Folder title Create parameters create with a random id newld context generateUniqueld Folder create a object of type Folder context invokeFactory id newld type_name Folder newFolder getattr c
39. p gt lt span tal repeat type python numbers bystate keys gt lt ul gt lt li gt lt span tal replace type gt lt i tal replace python numbers bystate type gt lt li gt lt ul gt lt span gt lt span gt lt h3 gt Users lt h3 gt lt p gt User count lt i tal replace here getUserCount gt lt p gt lt body gt lt html gt This is called output pt and placed inside the www directory You don t have to use a separate directory but doing so makes it easier to remember The last step is to hook this up into the ZMI for your product You do this by returning to the Stats class and adding the following first import a PageTemplateFile class that can handle the template from the file system from Products PageTemplates PageTemplateFile import PageTemplateFile Then you register the page template as a method for the product that can be accessed In the following the method outputPage can now be called through the Web and the matching page template is returned outputPage PageTemplateFile www output pt globals security declareProtected view_permission outputPage 359 Finally the tabs at the top of the ZMI are determined by a tuple called manage_options that maintains a list of all the tabs to be shown on a page You need to insert the new management page in there so you do the following manage_options label output action ou
40. publish Reviewer publishes content submit Member requests publishing Delete Set Initial State Figure 8 6 Setting the initial state for this workflow You set the initial state for your workflow on this page by checking the box next to the state and then clicking Set Initial State All content that uses this workflow will be created with an initial state Any content that has already been created will remain in its initial state changing the state afterward won t change that state You can set only one initial state for each workflow 8 1 3 2 1 1 How Can You Set the Initial State As Private On some sites it may make sense for content to not show up at all or be accessible to users other than administrators and owners only after it has been completed The best way to do this is to set the default state for the object to something that provides this security for example private In the private state only reviewers managers and owners can actually see the item To set the default state to private in the ZMI click portal_workflow and select the Contents tab Next click plone_workflow select the States tab and then select the default state by checking 216 the box next to visible Finally click the Save Changes button New content will now be in the private state and not accessible to the general public 8 1 3 2 2 Editing States The States tab lists the states that are present in this workflow At the beginning of thi
41. python path pathexpr 18 3256 184 0 0996 path here calendar_slot macros calendarBox 16 8383 23 0 7321 path here global_elements macros skin_tabs 3 9568 23 0 17203 python request get news here portal_catalog searchResults i E o meta_type News Item sort_on Date sort_order reverse 2 1732 23 0 09449 review_state published 5 python here portal_actions listFilteredActionsFor here 1 8614 23 0 08093 python here breadcrumbs here 0 8098 23 0 03521 python here toLocalizedTime here ModificationDate 0 6545 i 23 0 02846 Q long_format 1 path options slots_mapping here prepare_slats nothing 0 6096 23 0 02651 python here showEditableBorder template_id template_id 0 5987 23 0 02603 actions actions path here navigationLocalRelated 0 5436 23 0 02363 python here plone_utils createNavigationTreeBuilder portalObject navBatchStart 0 5375 1 23 plese v aa 1 oe on x anna an moana ina Figure 14 5 Page Template Profiler results In this case you can see that on my site that calendarBox is taking 0 7321 seconds to call each time it s being called Since the entire page is taking 1 9 seconds you can assume this is an area I could optimize 14 1 2 5 3 Python Profiler The Python Profiler provides very low level timing information and is normally used for more complex debugging of underlying code It gives you a detailed report of the amount of time spent in various areas o
42. raise ValueError Unknown file type cannot create lexer Second when you re in Plone you need to be able to figure out exactly what languages are available so you can show them to the users Write the following function to return that list and call it list_ generators def list_generators 331 This returns a list of generators a generator is a valid language so these are things like perl python xml etc lexers LanguageInfo get_generator_names return lexers Finally the generate_html function takes a source file as a string an optional generator and an optional filename SilverCity requires a file such as buffer to write the content out so you can use Python s StringIO module to accomplish this The following is the generate_html function def generate_html source_file generator None source_file_name None From the source make a generator and then make the html SilverCity requires a file like object target_file StringI0 generator create_generator source_file_name generator generator generate_html target_file source_file return the html back return target_file getvalue generator name You ll note that this calls the create_generator function you wrote earlier to figure out the correct generator for this language That s all the code you need to able to generate the HTML for a file I haven t gotten into any of the specifics of actually lexing through the source or
43. rassingly small because all the work you ve done previously is handled by two utility functions installTypes and install_subskin The term subskin Listing 13 3 Installation Script from Products Archetypes public import listTypes from Products Archetypes Extensions utils import installTypes install_subskin from Products ArchExample config import PROJECTNAME GLOBALS from StringIO import StringIO def install self out StringI0 installTypes self out listTypes PROJECTNAME PROJECTNAME install_subskin self out GLOBALS out write Successfully installed 4s PROJECTNAME return out getvalue The full version of ArchExample is available from the Plone Book Web site at http plone book agmweb ca and you should be able to drop this and run it on your site As you ve seen this content type is quick and easy to develop and easy to alter without having to write lots of code 13 1 3 Archetypes based Development This section provides some more in depth coverage on some of Archetypes more advanced features These features will provide some useful tools for the devel opment of your content types This will include making references creating new widgets and transforming content For this chapter it s important to recognize how the changes you ll make can be carried through to Plone As you ve seen in the past you have different stages in your product setup When you change your product it helps to know the st
44. so the fontColor here will be black Now you can see where that variable is referenced in the plone css file To access the CSS file click portal_skins portal_skins and then plone css In this file you can see that mainFontColor is referenced in quite a few places for example it s referenced in the main body of a page like so body font dtml fontBaseSize lt dtml var fontFamily gt background color dtml backgroundColor 174 color dtml fontColor margin 0 padding 0 You could keep reading through the style sheet if you really wanted but changing the variable is always a quick way to see exactly what it affects Returning to the ZMI click portal_skins click plone_styles click base_properties and then click the Customize button As you ve seen this will create an object in the ZMI that you can cus tomize This time the customized object is actually a folder that has the properties contained in the folder To access the properties you ve just customized click portal_skins click custom and then click base_properties Next select the Properties tab see Figure 7 6 175 Contents View Properties f Folder at Plone portal_skins custom base_ properties Security Properties alow you to assign simple values to Zope objects To change property values edit the Name r title plone_skin logoName fontFamily fontBaseSize fontColor fontSmallSize backgroundColor r r r r r
45. such as changing the content its keywords or other proper ties This permission applies to nearly all objects Set own password This gives the right to change your password in a Plone site Set own properties This gives the right to change your properties in a Plone site View This allows a user to view the object in question View doesn t just mean only HTML views but also File Transfer Protocol FTP WebDAV and other forms of access 9 1 3 1 Adding a Role Placing users in roles means you have to find a compatible set of permissions for each role so that grouping the permissions makes sense This isn t always possible Sometimes a certain user may need something different from similar users However from a development point of view the fewer and simpler you can keep the roles the easier it will be It s not too complicated but an initial urge to create a role for every conceivable security option is a really bad idea You ll get yourself into a total mess quickly Instead I urge you to leave the number of roles sparse and keep them generic to the entire site To add a role go to the root Plone folder click the Security tab and scroll down to the bottom it s a long way At the bottom is a simple form to add more roles or remove a role Add the name of the new role and click Add Role 9 1 3 2 Performing Common Tasks You can set some security options quickly and easily to perform regular tasks Before you make a lot o
46. t show every Members folder This is selected by default 90 showFolderishSiblingsOnly Only folders in parent folders will display if this is selected otherwise it will show all content This is selected by default showFolderishChildrenOnly When this is enabled on a folder it shows only folders in the same folder rather than all the other types of content Select ing this option effectively shows you all the contents of the folder currently viewed This is selected by default roleSeeUnpublishedContent As mentioned content is shown only if pub lished to members and anonymous users Add more roles to this list with each role on a new line to have nonpublished content display This is unde sirable if the user doesn t actually have access anyway croppingLength This determines how many characters of the names to show in the navigation tree The default is 256 idsnotToList This is the item IDs not to show Place each ID on a separate line The default is None Make any changes to that form and then click Save Changes The order of the items in the navigation tree is determined by the order of the items in the folder contents form As shown in Chapter 3 using the up and down arrows users can change this order to suit their own needs 4 1 3 3 Book Web Site Altering the Navigation Tree For most Web sites I prefer a fuller navigation tree than the one provided by default So I went to the navigation tree options and
47. the default is basic and isn t aimed at being a perfect page of course being a Plone page it s better than your average content management system However you may have specific needs that relate to the content perhaps it s a matter of presenting your content in a certain way Archetypes actually creates a class for each content type Much in the same way that you created a class for the source code type in the previous chapter you can create a base class for your archetype This base class is called BaseContent and is available in the public module of 376 Archetypes for importing This BaseContent class defines all the things that Archetypes needs to know Making this class provides you with an opportunity to override almost anything you want in the class As I now show there are two parts to this First you make an action that s to be used by the factory type information in Archetypes you do this by assigning the actions attribute of the class For example from Products Archetypes public import BaseContent class Article BaseContent other stuff actions id view gt name View action string object_url article_view permissions CMFCorePermissions View Second you need to create a page template for the actual view of the object called article_view This string defines a page template that the content type will locate in the skin for this product In thi
48. this will register the user with that group When youre done it s a matter of printing something out to the person running the import To run this on your site you ll need to put this into the Extensions directory of your Plone server and call it import_users_with_groups py Then you ll need to manually add the groups that you ll have for your site this script doesn t create the groups for you Then prepare the csv file if you have your users stored in some other system you ll need to find some way to get them into this format Change the filename in the script to point to your filename Next add an external method to your Plone site with the following values e ID import_users_with_groups e Module name import_users_with_groups e Function name importUsers Once you ve added this external method click Test to run the method and you ll get the result 9 1 4 2 Changing User Settings If you install a new product or make a new setting it can be necessary to change user metadata in bulk For example if you install a new WYSIWYG editor and want this to be default for every user then two things need to occur e Change the default setting for every new user To do this click por tal_metadata and select the Properties tab Set the default there and all new users will get this value e Alter the settings for every existing user which can be done only with the following external method 260 def fixUsers self pm
49. use macro here user_section macros userSection gt lt tr gt lt table gt lt tal block gt lt div gt You ll note that the code for user info is now a great deal shorter The member returned by listMembers is passed in to tal repeat For each member there will be a table row and then a macro to show information to the user In that table row the locally defined variable userObj now contains the user information Of course you now need to make a macro called userSection in a page template so you ll create a page template called user_section as referenced in the macro This template contains all the code that was between the table s row tags Again you can find a full listing for this page template in Appendix B lt div metal define macro userSection tal define userName user0bj getUserName gt The only real change is that the use macro in the main template has to be removed and a new macro defined so that this macro can be defined Because the username is no longer explicitly passed you need to get the username from the user object by using the getUserName method To test the resulting page go to http yoursite user_info and you should see a list of users The page now is user friendly showing multiple users on one page The code is more modular rendering the user s information in a separate macro that can be altered independently This page is still not perfect but will be improved in later chapters 140 6
50. validated Web site appearance 1 1 2 Do You Want a Content Management System Although not the only advantage of a CMS the most obvious benefit of a CMS is coordinating a Web site easily Take a situation where one person a Webmaster coordinates a Web site either an intranet or an external site Content comes from users in a variety of formats and the Webmaster turns these into usable Web pages by converting them to Hypertext Markup Language HTML If a user has to change those pages then the user sends the changes to the Webmaster who changes the pages and so on This presents many problems for the organization the biggest being that all content is flowing through one person an obvious bottleneck That one person can do only so much work and if that person is sick or leaves the company a great deal of productivity is lost in finding a replacement The publishing process can be quite frustrating as e mails fly between the Webmaster and the user trying to get content published What s needed is a system that does the following Separates the content of a page from the presentation If the actual content is separate from the presentation method then the content author doesn t need to know any HTML or how the page is delivered In fact one piece of content could have many different templates applied to it including formats other than HTML such as Portable Document Format PDF or Scalable Vector Graphics SVG When yo
51. velit vulputate Demoveo imputo bene letatio nunc ut patria venio mol camur duis tum iustum aptent iriure et transverbero brevitas adipiscir utinam quadrum proprius nisl eu vulputate Damnum vulputate lobortis persto genitus dolor delenit Sino nunc duis blandit sagaciter antehabeo esse epulae ventosus app Figure 3 13 Saving the content will take you to the view tab If you don t provide the correct input on the edit form when you save the document you ll be returned to the edit page and your errors will be highlighted At this point your changes haven t been applied you must correct the mistakes and click Save again before the changes will be committed The view tab shown in Figure 3 13 shows the document you ve created You ll see that the title description and content are all shown in slightly different styles At the bottom of the page is a byline that contains information about the author of the document including the date the page was created You ll note that if you go back to folder contents after saving your changes you ll see two documents in your folder the existing one that s created for you and the new one you ve just added You can edit either of these documents by clicking them to open the view tab which allows you to select the edit tab 49 3 1 4 5 Choosing a Text Format As mentioned previously you can edit the document content in at least three formats struc tured text HTML and plain text
52. you have several useful scripts for cleaning up page template code and performing syntax checks These are additional tools and checks Zope actually performs 151 all the necessary checks when you upload a page template For a project such as Plone it can be useful to run automatic checks on your code or verify it locally before committing changes To run these checks you ll need to be able to edit these tools locally and have Python installed on your computer For more information on External Editor a method for editing remote code locally see Chapter 10 6 1 3 1 Introducing XML Namespaces Page templates use XML namespaces to generate code Programmers can use the rules of XML namespaces to make life easier At the top of a page template you ll see a declaration of the namespace in the starting tag lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtml This sets the default namespace to Extensible HTML XHTML For any containing element if no namespace is defined it uses that default namespace For example you know the next element is XHTML because it has no prefix lt body gt Normally for TAL and METAL elements and attributes you have been adding the prefix tal and metal to define the namespace The following code is something that should be familiar by now lt span tal omit tag tal content python 1 2 gt This will render 3 However the following is an alternative lt tal number content python 1 2 gt
53. you have to install SilverCity fortunately this module corresponds to the install instructions for Python modules as outlined in Chap ter 10 To install on Windows download the file SilverCity 0 9 5 win32 py2 3 exe from http silvercity sfnet and run the graphical installer To install on Linux download the file SilverCity 0 9 5 tar gz from http silvercity sfnet and save it to disk Then unpack it and run the setup py program For example tar zxf SilverCity 0 9 2 tgz cd SilverCity 0 9 2 python setup py install After doing this you can quickly test that it works from the following Python prompt in Win dows or Linux python Python 2 3 2 1 Oct 6 2003 10 07 16 GCC 3 2 2 20030222 Red Hat Linux 3 2 2 5 on linux2 Type help copyright credits or license for more information gt gt gt import SilverCity gt gt gt This means SilverCity has been successfully installed If you don t get a similar result and can t import SilverCity stop and solve this issue first otherwise nothing else will run 330 Now you need to figure out the Application Programming Interface API for this mod ule being lazy I went and read an example script located in PySilverCity Scripts called source2Zhtml py This script does exactly what you want It spits out HTML for a given piece of code A really cheeky way to see this in operation is to feed this script to itself like so python source2html py source2html p
54. 08 18 08 m gt session_data_manager Session Data Manager 2003 10 08 18 08 C standard_error_message 1 Kb 2003 10 08 18 08 C standard_html_footer 1 Kb 2003 10 08 18 08 C standard_html_header 1 Kb 2003 10 08 18 08 C 2 standard_template pt 1 Kb 2003 10 08 18 08 x Figure 2 12 Plone Site in the drop down list 2 1 3 1 Installing from CVS Concurrent Versioning System CVS access is recommended only for experi enced users and developers You can find current CVS access information at http ww plone org development cvs The current CVS checkout command is as follows cvs d pserver anonymous cvs sf net cvsroot plone login cvs d pserver anonymous cvs sf net cvsroot plone co CMFPlone Plone 2 has a whole host of other dependencies such as DCWorkflow Formulator Group User Folder and so on that aren t in Plone CVS meaning users will have to go and find all these dependencies When you start Plone it ll print any errors regarding packages not found For example 28 2003 11 21T12 23 11 ERROR 200 Plone Dependency CMFActionIcons not found Please download it from http cvs zope org Products 2 1 3 2 Adding a Plone Site Once you ve installed Plone from source you need to create an instance of Plone To do this you ll need to log into the ZMI and add a Plone site You can access this by going to the Uniform Resource Locator URL for the management interface which is normally http localhost 8080 manage thi
55. 1 5 2 Adding and Editing Files A file is any arbitrary file that can be uploaded from your hard drive To add a file select File from the drop down list On the edit tab you ll see an Upload button that lets you pick the file from your hard drive This could be any sort of item including a plain text file a Microsoft Word document a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet an executable program an Adobe Acrobat document and so on When you add a file the name of the item in Plone changes to the name of the file uploaded So if you upload a file called book pdf itll be accessible in Plone as book pdf Figure 3 20 shows a plain text file 58 navigation propertie Home C Members andym s Home greek txt OB Click here to get the file Size 1008 File type text plain File contents Foras vulputate vulputate sudo letatio vel amet distineo sino Sagqaciter duis nisl feugait sed iusto duis Iusto secundum brevitas lenis vento duis suscipit humo reprobo Minim antehabeo gemi Acsi uxor haero minim luctus lobortis rusticus Iusto in ulciscor illum blandit saepius Haero metuo suscipit consectetuer iriure scisco veli letatio nune ut patria venio molior ea euismod camur duis tum iustum aptent iriure et transver Fere iustum aliquam ibidem abigo similis utinan vulputate Damnum vulputate lobortis euismod s nulla persto genitus dolor delenit Sino nune duis blandit sagaciter antehabeo esse illum consequa
56. 13 you can generate and alter Plone code easily through the Web or using Unified Modeling Language UML tools Chapter 10 covers integration of Plone with enter prise solutions such as LDAP Apache Microsoft Internet Information Services IIS Macrome dia Dreamweaver and so on 1 1 3 8 Content Customization Users of a Plone site can add all manner of content but the data added isn t limited or con strained Plone developers can create their own content types so that almost any type of content can be managed the only limit is your own imagination In Chapters 11 and 12 I ll discuss how to customize the content types Chapter 13 will introduce Archetypes which is a very powerful system for generating content types that don t require programming for instance you can generate new types of content from UML tools 1 1 3 9 Documentation The Plone project maintains documentation including this book which is published under the Creative Commons license The best starting place for the community documentation is at http www plone org documentation 1 1 3 10 Community One of the best things about Plone is the community of developers and companies that sup ports and develops Plone With more than 60 developers involved to some degree in the project around the world it s almost always possible to find a Plone developer online who is willing and able to help you Alan Runyan Alexander Limi and Vidar Andersen started Plone how e
57. A A test document 1K C Plone Logo 6998 Ci O greek txt 1008 O li Monthly Staff Meeting 1K E pec News 2 1K gt rename cut gt copy gt delete Bandym properties modified 2003 12 29 09 21 57 2003 12 29 11 04 06 2003 12 29 15 59 51 2003 12 29 16 08 03 2003 12 29 16 20 20 2003 12 29 16 23 32 change state Figure 3 25 Contents of a folder after I ve added some of the content types described in this chapter For example to quickly rename a piece of content click that item s checkbox and then click Rename This will open the rename form and allow you to rename the title of each item in that list Click Save to have the changes take effect The Cut and Copy buttons allow you to copy or move content between different folders The Delete button allows you to delete the item from Plone Just like on your hard drive if you copy move or delete a folder all the contents of the folder will also be moved copied or deleted A new feature in Plone 2 is the ability to change the default order of items in a folder By default items in a folder will display in the order the items were added If one item is more important and needs to be moved to the top use the arrows on the right side of the table to move the item The following features will appear in the folder contents only when certain things happen e If the content has an expiration date set and it has expired you ll see the word expired appear in red next to the
58. D Home A Ca Chapters This site encountered an error trying to fulfill your request The errors we D Software Error Type ValueError Error alue invalid literal for inti Request made at 2004 01 03 14 30 54 793 US Pacific Plone and its visual design is Copyright 2000 2004 by Alexander Limi Alan cron 08 Done Figure 4 6 An example error message So when a user reports an error the report will often include a message with the error name and a value in it If user isn t allowed to do something and an Unauthorized error is raised or a Page Not Found 404 is triggered then you ll get a custom error page rather than the 82 standard page shown in Figure 4 6 The following standard error types occur e Unauthorized This occurs when a user doesn t have the right to perform a function e NotFound This occurs when the item a user is trying to access doesn t exist e Redirect This is an error that can raise a Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP redirect e AttributeError When an object doesn t have this attribute this error is raised e ValueError This occurs when a value given is incorrect and isn t caught cor rectly by the validation or other framework 4 1 3 Customizing Plone s Look and Feel The following sections describe the other customizations you can make to a site almost of all these require access to the ZMI 4 1 3 1 Understanding Portlets On a Plone site you ll see three columns
59. Figure 9 12 252 Contents View Properties Security Undo Plone Site at Plone Permissions assigned to the role Reviewer Access Transient Objects Access arbitrary user session data Access contents information Access future portal content Access inactive portal content Access session data Add Accelerated HTTP Cache Managers Add Archetypes Tools Add BTreeFolder2s Add Browser Id Manager i Save Changes Figure 9 12 Settings for the reviewer role For all these permissions it s a simple matter of checking the boxes for the permissions you want or selecting the options in the select box and clicking Save When the Acquire Permission setting is checked security settings for this permission will be acquired when it s unchecked permissions will not acquired Acquisition is the ability of an object to search the object hierar chy to find permissions and then combine them for the overall permission NOTE The permissions page will turn on the security for the manager user for you locking out your manager user would be really bad so it s good for this to be on by default Now take a look at the Access contents information permission In the ZMI go to the root Plone 253 object and click the Security tab The default setting for this permission is that no roles are enabled that is the settings for each user are blank However the Acquire Settings option is checked meaning you have to look i
60. Figure 9 15 265 home software chapters feedback you are here home software TE a Site error Home This site encountered an error trying to fulfill your request The errors we Software Error Type log in Unauthorized mame Error alue EPERE Your user account does not have the required permission Access instance at 026D1F50 denied Your user account Anonymous Use one of the following roles Manager Member Owner Your rol gt log in Request made at 2004 01 06 14 40 49 229 US Pacific gt Forgot your password gt New user Figure 9 15 A nice detailed error message The message is rather long and self explanatory At this point I normally pop into the other browser and examine the permissions settings for the objects involved to see what the cause may be 9 1 4 5 2 Common Problems A couple of problems are easy to spot when dealing with Plone The first one is unrelated specifically to Plone but worth repeating Check that the user who can create the error is the one you think it is Often I ve heard people say Works in one browser and not in the other This is usually because when you ve switched browsers you ve also switched users Continuing with the obvious double check that your user has the role you expect it to have This may mean going to acl_users seeing what user role they have and double checking it s the one you expect Next think of any groups that a user may
61. Further a programmer may not be able to complete the speed increase or may make it slower You have alternatives to optimizing code for example you could install more memory or hardware if the application is bound by one of these constraints Although many programmers think that throwing hardware at a solution is a lazy option it can be an extremely cost effective solution Introducing new hardware is low risk can bring a large speed gain and often cost less than a programmer Further you can really scale your server by caching or adding more computers and separating the load These techniques form the rest of the chapter 14 1 2 7 Caching of Content So now that you ve found the slow parts of your application you ll turn to the main tool to increase performance caching Caching When talking about caching I m talking about two things that can be cached content and skins Content is the data entered by the user into content types Skins refer to anything in portal skins and can be templates scripts images or files These two types are cached differently I like to think of caching in terms of the amount of control I ll have over the caching mechanism In other words the closer to the client that caching is performed the faster the response will be but also the less control I will have over that cache This in fact includes the possibility that there may be no cache at all Figure 14 7 illustrates caching between a client and
62. Hence the expression is string portal_url Software 4 1 3 8 4 Altering the Icons for a Document If you re looking at a list of links or options in a Plone site then chances are that a series of actions are producing that list If it s not actions then it s code but many of the key features of the Plone interface are generated dynamically from settings in the ZMI Two other examples of actions are the document actions and site actions The site actions appear in the top right corner and are links to change the size of the text These links could be anything but just happen to reference some client side script functions These links are again configured in portal_actions and are just actions that have a different category If you look through the actions in portal_actions you ll see these three actions at the bottom of the page They have the category site_actions If you want to remove them just uncheck the Visible option The icons come from the portal_actionicons tool which is another simple tool that maps the icon to the action Looking in portal_actionicons you ll see a match for normal_text of site_actions that matches up an icon see Figure 4 20 97 Icons Undo Ownership Plone Action Icons Tool at portal actionicons Edit Action Icons Category Action ID Action Title Priority Icon URL Expression plone sendto Bento booo mailicon git plone print Pit o ritieni plone extedit ExtemalEdt 0 extediti
63. Introducing Plone s Cascading Style Sheets The visual representation of a Plone site in a browser is put together almost entirely using CSS Perhaps the easiest way to see exactly what the CSS does for a Plone site is to compare Figures 7 3 and 7 4 The first shows Plone with style sheets and the second shows Plone without any style sheets 170 home news members you are here home welcome to plone navigation B Home log in Name Password gt log in Forgot your password gt New user Figure 7 3 Plone with style sheets Welcome to Plone This welcome page is used to introduce you to the Plone Content Man This is the 2 0 version of Plone It is fetched from CVS hourly and the sys Please help us test the system by using it and reporting bugs that are n plone org collector Join and login There is an publicly available reviewer account that is s approve items you submit for publishing There is also a predefined mem a login member a password member login reviewer password reviewer Packages updated hourly CMEPlone 2 0 tarball a CMEPlone 2 0 zipfile Migration You can find migration information from Plone 1 0 x to Plone 2 0 at the PI Please work with us to improve the migration experience before 2 0 is re 171 Skip to content Portal Search Search Sections Home e News Members P
64. One is Epoz which allows users to edit and alter documents directly in the browser without having to know HTML If you have lots of users entering content then installing Epoz allows your users to alter HTML content without having to actually understand HTML For really advanced editing you could use External Editor which would allow you to edit content in a local program such as Microsoft Word 10 1 4 5 1 Browser WYSIWYG Editor You can find the tested version of Epoz 0 7 4 at http zope org Members mjablonski Epoz 0 7 4 Epoz requires a modern browser which most Plone users will need anyway The required browsers are Internet Explorer 5 5 Mozilla 1 3 1 and Netscape 7 1 Download and install Epoz as usual after installing you ll need to change your personal Plone preferences so that you can use Epoz Log into Plone click my preferences and select Personal Preferences On the preferences page open the Content Editor drop down list select the Epoz option and then click Save to commit your changes Now you ve chosen your editor go to a document any document will do and click the Edit tab You ll note that the Body text field has now changed significantly into a rich editor The editor should be pretty self explanatory to you with familiar buttons such as B for bold I for italics and so on see Figure 10 12 298 index_html Title Plone Book Description 4 brief description of the document This site pr
65. Placeless Translation Service Click this and it ll open all the translations that exist These translations are read in from the file system click a translation to see the 138 information about the language such as the translator the encoding and the path to the file All the files are actually stored in the i18n directory of the CMFPlone directory Translations are handled using two files for a translation a po and a mo file For example plone de po contains the translations for German de is the code for German The mo file is the compiled version of the po file and is used by Plone for performance You never need to look at the mo file so you can just ignore it The po is the file you can edit to change a translation If you open that file in a text editor you ll see a series of lines starting with the text msgid or msgstr Above the msgid is actually the code where the i18n command occurs so you can see which bit of a page you re translating For example from plone_forms content_status_history pt H lt input attributes tabindex tabindex next value Apply class context name workflow_action_submit type submit gt from plone_forms personalize_form pt H lt input attributes tabindex tabindex next tabindex value Apply class context type submit gt msgid Apply msgstr Anwenden In the two parts of the previous page templates the word Apply will be translated into A
66. PloneCollector both of which are quite complicated collector objects that provide logic for a bunch of collector issues The easiest way again to make a folderish object is to use Archetypes You ve seen that there s a BaseContent type that handles all the work needed to create a nonfolderish object Well there s also a BaseFolder content type that contains everything for creating a folder Futher you ll find a special schema for folders since folderish object also usually have a description To make a folderish type just ensure that you change your base classes and your schema For example possibly the simplest folder is as follows from Products Archetypes public import BaseFolder BaseFolderSchema schema BaseFolderSchema class SimpleFolder BaseFolder simple folderish archetype schema schema registerType SimpleFolder If you re going to store a huge amount of content in a folder then a folder tends to become inefficient at about 100 objects That s a rather arbitrary figure that should be taken with a pinch of salt normal folderish objects are designed to be fast for small numbers of object If you wanted you could use a binary tree folder which stores the objects internally in a more efficient binary tree rather than a Python dictionary To use this just import BaseBTreeFolder and BaseBTreeFolderSchema and use these in your object instead As far as developing a product is concerned they work just the same
67. PloneSilverCity PloneSilverCity py 97 getLanguages gt langs Pdb n gt var zope zeo Products PloneSilverCity PloneSilverCity py 99 getLanguages gt for value description in list_generators Pdb langs For more information on the debugger I recommend the online documentation at the Python Web site http python org doc current lib module pdb html You have other ways to de bug Zope such as using ZEO to get an interpreter for example Chapter 14 covers using ZEO Integrated developer environments such as Wing http wingide com wingide or Ko modo http www activestate com Products Komodo can remotely debug Zope instances and have nice graphical interfaces 12 1 2 Writing a Custom Tool Writing a tool is simpler than writing a content type mostly because there s little to do in terms of registering the product and because the user interface is simple For an example I use simple statistics tool on my ZopeZen Web site http www zopezen org for giving information about the amount of content number of users and so on This simple tool prints a few numbers that interest me as a manager of the site Figure 12 2 shows my ZopeZen stats 354 Zope Statistics for ZopeZen org Log In User count i672 Name Total count 6277 By type Password lq Event 8 B News Item 875 amp Discussion Item 2445 l O File 22 magin Link 195 Book 70 Folder 2752 ilosoke coat al
68. Subject KeywordIndex The keywords for an item Title TextIndex Item s title Type FieldIndex The portal type as defined in the portal_types tool allowedRolesAndUsers KeywordIndex Who can view this content this is an efficient way to examine this so you can filter the search results created FieldIndex When the item was created effective FieldIndex When the item will become effective end FieldIndex For events only when the event will end expires FieldIndex When the item will expire and no longer be viewable getId FieldIndex The ID for an item id FieldIndex Same as getId in_reply to FieldIndex For discussions gives the item to which this comment is responding meta_type FieldIndex The underlying metatype of the item modified FieldIndex When the item was last modified path PathIndex The path to the item portal type FieldIndex Same as Type review_state FieldIndex The state of the object in workflow start FieldIndex For events only when the event will start 316 If you re ever unsure of the contents of an index then you can see the contents of the indexes in the ZMI Click portal_catalog and select Catalog and this will list every object cataloged at this time Click an object and a window will pop up with the contents of the index and the metadata The metadata comes first so scroll down to see the indexes To add remove or alter the indexes return to the Indexes tab Use the usual Add drop down box to add
69. Take the following example e Plone is on a box at the IP address 192 168 2 1 on port 8080 Note that the IP address is one that the proxy server can access it s not the IP address to the outside world the proxy server handles that e Plone should appear to be at www mysite com on port 80 e The actual Plone object is at Plone e The incoming request is for Members andym This translates into the following long URL http 192 168 2 1 8080 CCC VirtualHostBase http www mysite com 80 Plone CCC VirtualHostRoot Members andym The point of doing this is that when the VHM object sees that URL it knows exactly what to do with it It munges it and sends the request to the Plone object Obviously the actual page fragment Members andym will be different for each request and needs to be calculated But if you know what you re aiming for you can now configure your server 10 1 3 2 1 Configuring Apache Apache is probably the most popular choice for placing in front of Plone and it s available for all Linux Unix and Windows platforms http httpd apache org After installing Apache you need to pass requests onto Plone by using HTTP proxies For configuring Apache you ll need to access Apache s configuration files where they are depend upon your installation of Apache so consult the Apache documentation In Windows the configuration is accessible from the Start menu In Linux you can usually find the Apache configurati
70. Web page e News item This is a document that s to be shown under the news tab for example a press release e Link This is a link to another item which may be internal or external to another Web site e Image This is an image such as a gif or jpeg file e Event This is an upcoming event meeting conference or other event e Folder This is like a folder on a hard drive this is a folder for putting content into so that it s easy to find later 42 e Topic This is a grouping of other content This is essentially a saved search criteria that you can reuse later Only privileged site users can add topics e File This is another piece of content such as a movie sound clip text file spreadsheet compressed file or anything else you d like to upload I ll go through each of these items using the document as an example showing in detail how to add and edit documents easily and quickly Using these basic content types I ll show you how to build a dynamic site through a browser without doing any programming Actually you have many ways of adding and editing content in a Plone site than just through a Web browser Access via File Transfer Protocol FTP via Web based Distributed Authoring and Versioning WebDAV or via scripts is all possible I ll discuss how to set these up in Chapter 10 and just deal with the Web browser interface for now In Chapters 11 to 13 of this book Pll discuss how to make new custom co
71. You can use my file system tools on the content Well you can mount Plone via File Transfer Protocol FTP and WebDAV Both of these provide file system like interfaces that work with Plone You want to back up the content easily In Chapter 14 I show how to back up and administer Plone and how to do simple incremental backups An alternative storage called Directory Storage can handle this http dirstorage sf net 293 You want to use CVS Subversion BitKeeper or some other source control sys tem on the content Ah that makes sense but unfortunately isn t fully integrated yet In future versions one tentatively called Plone 3 this may be fully integrated With these points in mind you ll now look at various ways you could serve content that exists on the file system through Plone 10 1 4 1 Using the Proxying Web Server So you ve set up the Web server as described earlier in this chapter At the risk of repeating myself that Web server is better at serving plain content than Plone ever will be If you have a large number of downloads simply put them in a directory on your server that won t be proxying to Plone and then link to them from Plone The users will just click the link and download as usual Doing this in IIS is easy because IIS first automatically checks to see if the file exists before raising the 404 error Apache requires only two extra lines in the configuration highlighted in the following code in bold
72. ZClasses You re creating the content type using Python but you ve probably heard about ZClasses in other documentation or on the Internet ZClasses are an existing framework in Zope 2 for developing classes through the Web Many people have developed and distributed ZClasses successfully and there can be a role for them for rapid development However I really don t recommend them It s hard to develop them using existing tools place them in source code distribute them and so on Almost everyone I ve talked to about ZClasses agrees that it s worth the effort to learn how to develop with Python and I ve seen more than one presentation that has ZClasses in the list of mistakes people have made If you do see documentation or other information relating to ZClasses then I really recommend resisting the temptation to use it For this reason there s no mention of developing using ZClasses If you re looking for a quick way to develop then take a look at Archetypes which is a slightly different approach 12 1 1 3 Integrating SilverCity Before you get too far into the Zope code it may be useful to figure out how to use SilverCity In any software development writing layers that allow testing at atomic layers is absolutely vital For this reason you should start by making sure that you can use SilverCity from a Python module If that works you then simply have to add the Zope layer So look into SilverCity for a moment First
73. a proxying server isn t required for this it s much easier with one A favorite method for proxying to Plone is to use an Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP proxy Apache achieves this using the mod_proxy module When a request for a page comes into the proxying server it performs various functions Then a new request is created and sent to the ZServer That response is passed back to the server and then onto the client Of course this all transparent to the client which just makes requests as normal to a server NOTE The old way to connect Apache to Plone is via Fast CGI or Persistent CGI These are harder to configure and actually slower when running Although lots of old documentation exists on these subjects more efficient solutions now exist and I don t recommend these meth ods 284 10 1 3 1 Configuring Plone Before configuring your proxy Web server you need to configure Plone Since only one server can connect to a port at once alter Plone so that it s listening to a high numbered port Usually this port would be something that s blocked at the firewall and isn t accessible from the outside Example ports are 8080 9090 9673 and so on Chapter 2 provides information about how to change the ports on which your Plone server runs Next you probably want to perform URL rewriting to change the URL of your site Because the Plone object lives inside the Zope Object Database ZODB and has an ID it s accessed by pu
74. a new index or remove an index If you want to run a reindex of a particular index then select the indexes in the left and click the reindex button If you add an index to the catalog it isn t populated meaning you then need to click the reindex button to ensure that there s some content in your index NOTE If you have a large site this indexing can be quite time and processor consuming so you may want to avoid doing this during peak load times 11 1 2 2 Metadata When the catalog returns a result it doesn t return to you the object instead it returns the metadata stored in the catalog This metadata is a series of fields or columns for each value on the object Likewise a set list of columns for a Plone site are created as described in Table 11 3 Table 11 3 Default Metadata That s Set Up in Plone Name Description CreationDate The date when the object was created Creator The username of the person creating the object Date This is the effective date if not present it s the last modified date Description The description field EffectiveDate The effective date ExpiresDate The expires date ModificationDate The modification date Subject The keywords on an object Title The object s title Type The object s portal_type created Same as CreationDate effective Same as EffectiveDate end For events only when the event will end expires When the object will expire getIcon The objects icon getId T
75. a server 411 Less performance server A More control Server Caches Your Caching Proxy Server ISP s Caching Proxy Server Client Browser Cache More performance y Less control Browser Figure 14 7 Caches between a client and a server The user s browser cache is the fastest place to cache things but you have no idea if a user will actually have caching turned on in their browser Next come the intermediate caches of proxy servers keep in mind this could be your proxy server which you should have control over or an Internet service provider ISP proxy Finally there are the server caching options In the following sections I ll discuss the following caching mechanisms e Caching skin elements using the Accelerated HTTP Cache Manager e Caching of code using the RAM Cache Manager e Caching of content added by users via the Caching Policy Manager I ll then discuss how to use Apache and Squid two commonly used external servers that pro vide a whole host of high performance configuration options 412 14 1 2 8 Caching Skins Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP allows you to set HTTP headers for caching When a response returns with these headers it s the responsibility of the proxies between the client and the server to cache the object according to these headers In Figure 14 7 this could be any of the caches from the server cache down This proxy can be a Web server that you control on the server such a
76. an advanced variable and it s recommend you understand traversal and acquisition before using this user This is the current user object For example user getUserName is the user name of the current user CONTEXTS This is a list of most of these values NOTE With the exception of CONTEXTS any of these variables can be redefined in a tal define statement if the user wants However this can be confusing for anyone using the code and isn t recommended The test_context page template shows all the values of these variables plus the locations of some of the objects see Listing 5 1 It can be useful for debugging and explaining the vari ables Add it as a page template called test_context and then click Test to see the results Listing 5 1 test_context lt html gt lt head gt lt body gt lt hi gt Debug information lt h1 gt lt h2 gt CONTEXTS lt h2 gt lt ul gt lt tal block tal repeat item CONTEXTS gt lt li 117 tal condition python item request tal define context CONTEXTS gt lt b tal content item gt lt span tal replace python context item gt lt li gt lt tal block gt lt ul gt lt h2 gt REQUEST lt h2 gt lt p tal replace structure request gt lt body gt lt html gt The test_context page template will produce the output shown in Figure 5 6 118 Debug information CONTEXTS e repeat lt SafeMapping instance at 0O2629B90 gt e contai
77. an event As usual the only required field is Title however if you want the event to show up in the calendar then you must provide a start and end time Events can span multiple days or be in 60 the past as long as the start date is before the end date To enter a date select the appropriate dates from the drop down menu or click the little date icon to open a graphical date picker Once the event is published it ll show up in the calendar Moving a mouse over the item in the calendar will show the start and end dates for the event as well as the event s title see Figure 3 22 December 2003 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 6 9410 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 2003 12 29 16 00 17 00 Monthly Staff Meeting Figure 3 22 Viewing events in the calendar 3 1 5 4 Adding and Editing Links Link content types are the primary way for users to share links These URLs can be resources on the Internet or an intranet an internal resource or anything to which the users have access To add a link select Link from the drop down menu If you re going to link to an Internet resource you should preface your link with the suitable protocol for example http For instance if I was visiting an interesting page on the BBC s Web site and wanted to share this I could add a link The value of the URL will be the text in the address bar for example http news bbc co uk as shown in Figure 3 23
78. and any other information you might want to add about the user You can then personalize the whole user interface for that user In addition with add ons you can use information you already have about users coming from many places such as relational databases Lightweight Directory Access Protocol LDAP Active Directory and more Chapter 8 covers how to register and configure users 1 1 3 6 Workflow and Security Workflow controls the logic of processing content through the site You can configure this logic through the Web using graphical tools Site administrators can make sites as complex or as simple as they d like for example you can add notification tools such as sending e mails or instant messages to users Chapter 8 covers workflow in great detail For every item of content in a Plone site you can set up access control lists to decide who has access to that item and how they ll be able to interact with it Will they be able to edit it view it or comment on it All this is configurable through the Web see Chapter 9 1 1 3 7 Extensible Since Plone is open source it can be easily altered You can change and configure almost any aspect of Plone to suit your needs Countless packages and tools for Plone provide a wide ar ray of options for smaller sites and for large scale enterprises Repositories of free add ons for Plone are available at http www plone org With development tools such as Archetypes cov ered in Chapter
79. and start Microsoft Internet Infor mation Services IIS which listens to port 80 The installer starts Plone on ports 80 and 8080 To test if something is using port 80 already the easiest way to test is by opening a browser to http 127 0 0 1 and seeing if it finds a page You can either disable that Web server or change the ports for Plone see Configuring the Web Server later in this chapter If you want to run Plone behind IIS or run both Plone and IIS on the same server at the same time then see Chapter 14 for more information At the moment however it s easiest to just disable that Web server Once you ve downloaded the installer double click the installer to begin see Figure 2 1 17 te Setup Plone BEI Welcome to the Plone Setup Wizard This will install Plone 1 0 5 Build 20030919 on your computer It is recommended that you close all other applications before continuing Click Next to continue or Cancel to exit Setup Figure 2 1 The start of the Plone installer The installer goes through the usual steps for installing software click Next to continue the setup or Cancel to exit The Plone installer lets you choose a location to install the software the default is c Program FilesPlone 2 see Figure 2 2 jis Setup Plone Oe x Select Destination Directory 3 Where should Plone be installed e Select the folder where you would like Plone to be installed then click Next
80. and upload some source code Actually Plone requires that there s one action called view and one called edit so these two fit nicely You also want a third action it s nice to be able to download the source in its original form With languages such as Python where the formatting is key this is really useful This action points directly to getRawCode which is the method for getting the raw code back again Each action has a permission associated as shown in Listing 12 3 I show exactly where that comes from later in this section Listing 12 3 The Factory Type Information and Actions factory_type_information id plone_product_name gt meta_type product_name description Provides syntax highlighted HTML of source code product product_name factory addPloneSilverCity content_icon silvercity gif gt immediate_view view actions id view gt name View action silvercity_view_form permissions view_permission id edit name Edit action silvercity_edit_form permissions edit_permission id source name Source action getRawCode permissions view_permission 336 NOTE At this point the product cant be imported from the Python prompt because the code is incomplete 12 1 1 5 1 Setting U
81. as page template macros on the file system So it s pretty simple to alter widgets or make your own If you click portal_skins portal_skins Actually the term macro 382 The view macro displays on the view page and is a read only user friendly view of the item The edit macro is the one shown on the edit page and it s the macro where a user edits the data The search macro is called when you re assembling search pages for the code it sometimes looks like the edit macro although it may not A string field may be edited as a string field and viewed as a string but it s searched using a drop down box to select from all the options available So in the example product assume you have a string field that s a person s e mail address and you want to show this is a clickable e mail link For this you ll make a new macro In this case you don t need to actually override the edit and search macros it s just a string after all So make a new a page template called email_widget pt as follows which you ll place in the skin of your product lt html xmlns tal http xml zope org namespaces tal xmlns metal http xml zope org namespaces metal 118n domain plone gt lt body gt lt div metal define macro edit gt lt div metal use macro here widgets string macros edit gt lt div gt lt div metal define macro search gt lt div metal use macro here widgets string macros search gt lt div gt For
82. at the time of writing without severely hacking a Plone site NOTE Basing the skin on untrusted client information is common practice but not completely secure because youre trusting the information from the client Making sure this is secure depends on your particular network settings In most cases you can handle this easily at the firewall or using a proxy server such as Apache which could be configured to block all external requests to http internal somesite org I discuss integration with Apache in Chapter 10 To activate this code assign an access rule to this object This means that each time this Plone site is accessed this Script Python object will be executed Each time the script is run the skin will be set according to the script To assign a rule to this script select Set Access Rule from the drop down menu and then enter the name of your Python Script object Now test by visiting your site and see what skin you get You do have to be careful with access rules because they occur on every invocation of that folder or Plone site you have to ensure that they re correct and that nothing bad can happen in them If you ve accidentally written a bad or incorrect Script Python object and can t even get access back into the ZMI to fix it then you can turn off access rules by restarting Plone with the following environment variable 195 SUPPRESS_ACCESSRULE 1 Appendix B explains how to set environment variables i
83. available online for you to download install and study Also Appendix B lists all the code 12 1 1 Writing a Custom Content Type For the Plone book Web site http plone book agmweb ca I wanted to be able to show the code from this book online I could ve taken the code and simply placed it into documents but that code would just show up without syntax highlighting Also all the whitespace in Python would have been removed For a great product such as Plone I needed something that looked good So I needed a content type that would take code syntax highlight it nicely and allow users to easily view it online Figure 12 1 shows the sample finished product 326 navigation Home C Chapters Software D Plone Source Plone Source The source for the large plone folder content type from Acquisition import ag_base aq_inner aq_parent from Computed ttribute import Computed ttribute from Globals import InitializeClass from PloneFolder import BasePloneFolder ReplaceableWrapper from PloneFolder import factory_type_information as PloneFolder_fti from Products BTreeFolder2 BTreeFolder2 import BTreeFolder2Base Pure laziness factory_type_information factory_type_information update PloneFolder_fti factory_type_information updatef id Large Plone Folder meta_type Large Plone Folder factory addLargePloneFolder global_allow 0 3 class LargePloneFolder BTreeFolder2Bas
84. be in Again looking at acl_users will tell you this because users can get extra roles in a group Finally remember that a user s 266 role can also be altered by local roles on folders or objects this is a little harder to narrow down because there s no easy to way to tell what folder or objects have local roles Once you re sure who the user is and the role they have on an object you ll be able to see what the permissions for an object actually are As you ve seen two similar objects for example two documents can have different permission and different roles The user who creates the document will have the owner role for that document and another user will just have the member role on it Because workflow changes the permissions on a document as it moves through workflow states this will also change the permissions 9 1 4 5 3 Locking Down Plone There isn t really an easy way to do this since there really is no concept of a locked down site However the basic principle is that users should be able to do the minimum they need to do and nothing more so you may want to double check the default settings and remove those security settings they don t need For the really paranoid you can also start removing features from the User Interface UI to stop users going wandering by modifying the Cascading Style Sheets CSS Of course remember that just removing the tab for an action or denying access to a page template is
85. before exposing it to the world is critical The install process for Zope 2 7 is pretty good and gets most of this right for you but there are a few things to note which I ll present to you now 267 9 1 5 1 1 User Running Zope You should ensure that the user running Zope has the minimum amount of security needed to complete the task The user running Zope will need to be read and write to all Zope directories on the file system The user will need to write the directories that contain the logs and database of your Zope instance those are the var and log directories of your Zope instance The best way to do this on Linux is to add a dedicated user account called say plone that will handle this you can then limit the access of that user in the unlikely event of Plone being hacked On Linux if you want to have Plone bind to low numbered ports below 1024 such as 21 or 80 then you ll normally need to run Plone as root It ll bind to these ports as root and then change to another effective user To do this you must specify a value for effective user in the configuration file zope conf It ll then do the bind and change to that user an example of this is effective user zope The best alternative isn t to do this at all but instead to run Zope on a high port such as 8080 you can then protect that port at the firewall and use Apache or other Web server to run on port 80 and proxy through to port 8080 Chapter 10 covers more about thi
86. button This starts a browser and accesses the Plone site you should then see the Plone welcome page Note that the address in the browser is http localhost this is the address to access your Plone site Clicking the Zope Management Interface button starts a browser and accesses the management interface the address in the browser for this is http localhost 8080 manage which gives you access to the underlying application server When you click the Manage button and access Plone itll ask you for your username and password This is the username and password you added in the installer The controller will know whether you ve installed Plone as a service or not as a service If Plone has been installed as a Windows service then you can stop and start Plone using the standard service management screens and commands If it hasn t been installed as Windows service you ll see a little icon appear in the task bar At this point if you want to edit content move on to Chapter 3 2 1 1 2 Configuring the Server on Windows The configuration for Plone is contained in a text file that you can edit to configure your Plone instance You can change the ports Plone listens to the log files used and a whole host of options On Windows some of the key features are available through the controller and the Graphical User Interface GUI If you want to alter some of the other configuration options refer to Appendix A for a full list of configuration optio
87. can a designer see how that would look without actually running the code For these reasons the Zope Page Templates system was created Page templates present a novel approach instead of providing another method of escape coding code is added to existing tag attributes Not only is the Zope Page Templates system free and open source it doesn t require Zope Currently versions of the system exist in Python Perl and Java 5 1 2 2 Introducing Page Templates and Content As you re now aware Plone is a content management system where users add content to a Plone site through the Web Those content objects are stored inside Plone and then rendered back to the world using page templates Returning to the earlier example of accessing Members andy My Portrait jpg I ll now discuss what actually happens to the content in Plone First Plone finds and calls the My Portrait jpg 112 object it s called because there s no specific method being called on the object When a content type is called a certain template is located and rendered The context for that template will be the image you want to access and the template will be the one for that image If a different action was being called on the image such as Members andy My Por trait image_edit then the action image_edit would be looked up for that object and the corre sponding template would be returned Chapter 11 discusses how this works in more detail So in all the temp
88. can add them initially If you can t see Topic in the list of items to add then you don t have the permission to do so To add a topic select Topic from the drop down list After adding the topic you can create key criteria on the criteria tab The list of criteria and types is available in the drop down box at the bottom of the page This is a rather confusing list I won t try to discuss it here Unfortunately what those terms are and what they mean is based heavily on the underlying technology such as catalog indexes and object attributes For this reason Chapter 11 covers this in detail For example to create a topic that shows all the images you need to add a criterion that searches for content based on portal_type For this select a field name of portal_type select String Criterion and then click Add These criteria will be added to the top of the page in the field to the right of portal_type enter Image and then click Save You now have criteria for your topic that will show all content that s an image Returning to the view tab you can now see all the images on a site As stated topics are quite complicated have a rather unfriendly interface and are recom mended for only advanced users Many people have found topics useful which is why they re still available in Plone however a more user friendly system will be developed in the future 3 1 7 Discussing and Finding Content Adding and editing content in Plone i
89. can do this However if you have given people the right to do that you don t want them to get access to certain things such as the file system In restricted Python some common Python functions have been removed for security reasons most notably dir and open aren t available This means that as with Script Python objects 148 they can t be introspected and access is limited to the file system A few Python modules are available to the user Most of these are for experienced developers for more information see the relevant documentation or module code string This is the Python string module http python org doc current lib module string html e random This is the Python random module http python org doc current lib module random html e whrandom This is the Python whrandom module You should mostly use random now http python org doc current lib module whrandom html e math This is the Python math module http python org doc current lib module math html e DateTime This is Zope s own DateTime module e sequence This is a Zope module for easily sorting sequences ZTUtils This is a Zope module that provides various utilities e AccessControl This gives access to Zope s Access module Products PythonScripts standard This gives access to the standard string processing functions of DTML such as html_quote thousands_commas and so on If you want to import a module that isn t in
90. characters for example An empty list or tuple An empty dictionary Python s None value TALES s nothing value The following evaluates to true The default value Any number other than zero Strings that arent empty Strings that are just spaces for example Anything else 5 1 3 2 3 tal content Adding Text The tal content statement is probably the most commonly used statement in a page template This statement is also one of the simplest replacing the content of an element with the value specified For example lt i tal content context title_or_id gt Some title lt i gt 121 The example output is as follows lt i gt The title lt i gt This will replace the text Some title with the value of the expression context title_or_id If the text to be placed contains HTML elements those elements will be escaped By default the text to be replaced is HTML escaped the structure prefix will allow the HTML to be entered without the elements being escaped For example lt i tal content structure here title_or_id gt Do not escape HTML lt i gt If the element with the tal content attributes contains other elements then all those elements will be replaced The tal content and tal replace tags are mutually exclusive they can t both be placed on the same element and an error will be raised if this is attempted If the value is default the content is unchanged 5 1 3 2 4 tal define Defining
91. contains the body of the document The format for the content is set using the Format field described next Format You have three choices for the format of body content Structured Text HTML and Plain Text These types of text are discussed in the Choosing a Text Format sidebar if you re unsure leave this field alone and type the body text as usual Upload document If you do have your document as a file on your computer you can upload it instead of typing the content into the Body Text field Use the Upload button at the bottom of the page to select a file The contents of an uploaded file will replace any content in the Body Text field Once you ve finished editing your document click the Save button to commit your changes You ll be returned to the view tab where you can see how the document will be shown to users see Figure 3 13 to edit it again click the edit tab 48 home news members amp andy you are here home members andym s home a test document navigation sharing Home 3 Members andym s Home A test document This is a test description This is some test body text Foras vulputate vulputate sudo letatio vel amet in cui illum camur ex m abigo brevitas feugiat hos ne iusto duis Iusto secundum brevitas lenis suscipit humo reprobo Minim antehabeo gemino tation aliquip transve rusticus pecus nisl Iusto in ulciscor illum blandit saepius Haero ut ut capto vel aliquam
92. data in relational database instead of Zope s standard database It has data transformation capabilities such as changing Microsoft Word in Hypertext Markup Language HTML for example Archetypes isn t just Plone specific but can also be used in other Zope frameworks such as the Content Management Framework CMF however at the moment it s used mostly by Plone Eventually when Plone moves to Zope 3 it s planned that the Archetypes and Zope 3 schemas will converge So using Archetypes is a good way to future proof your product so it s compatible with future Plone versions In this chapter then I run through building new content types with Archetypes This chapter really pulls together all the information you ve learned over the last few chapters and runs quite quickly through some basic concepts After showing how to install Archetypes I take you through how to create a basic content type 13 1 1 Introducing Archetypes Archetypes comes in the installers and packages for Plone so chances are you ll already have Archetypes installed in your distribution If you re unsure if this is the case you should be able to see Archetypes in the Products part of the ZMI control panel In these examples I ve tested Plone with Archetypes version 1 2 5 rc4 If you ve got Archetypes installed skip to the Developing with Archetypes section To install Archetypes you ll need to go the Web site at http sfnet projects archetypes
93. database packing and cache management Database Location C Program Files Plone Data var Data fs Database Size 18 8M Click pack to pack the Zope database removing previous revisions of objects that are older thar Figure 14 1 Packing a database Enter the number of days you d like to keep objects for and click Pack For example setting the number of days at zero the default will remove all revisions of objects Again it doesn t delete the object itself just those old copies A more common setting is something such as seven which will remove revisions older than one week By making a setting appropriate with your backup schedule you can ensure that you ll keep a copy of every object The pack will take a bit of time and processing power depending upon the size of your ZODB Plone will still work albeit slower so you may want to use ZEO to do this 14 1 1 3 Upgrading Plone Plone is continually being updated and improved so new versions of Plone come out quite regularly Before you upgrade to a new version of Plone though check that you actually need it Quite often releases have minor changes or changes that may not be relevant Each release has a change list accessible from the download page It s always worth reviewing this list to see if the upgrade is worthwhile After performing your backup download the upgrade Probably the easiest way to perform an upgrade is to repeat the same steps you performed on the installation F
94. deselected showFolderishChildrenOnly and showFolderishSi blingsOnly This made the contents show up nicely for example here s the software folder with just a few items selected enfoldsystems 4 1 3 4 Altering the Date Formats Throughout the portlets and the whole site Plone presents dates in a consistent format that are editable using formats set internally Whenever a date is shown in Plone it calls one of two formats You can find these formats by accessing the ZMI clicking portal_properties and clicking site_properties These are the formats 91 e localTimeFormat This is the time format to use for dates that should appear in a short format in Plone e localLongTimeFormat This is the time format to use for dates that should appear in a long format in Plone showing seconds The format for the date is based on Python s time format module The reference for the formats are at http www python org doc current lib module time html For the short date the default value is Y m d which means year month day as decimal numbers for example 2003 10 26 For long date the default value is Y m d I M p which means year month day hours minutes am pm for example 2003 10 26 07 32 PM The following is a quick summary of the options available e a Locale s abbreviated weekday name for example Mon e A Locale s full weekday name for example Monday e b Locale s abbreviated month name for example
95. directories for your Plone instance If you have a value for INSTANCE_HOME then your Products directory will be located in that directory If you don t have a value for INSTANCE_HOME you ll find the Products directory inside SOFTWARE HOME It s worth noting that almost all methods of installing Plone create INSTANCE HOME for you As shown in Figure 10 1 my INSTANCE_HOME is var book so my Products directory is var book Products Pot Contents a Undo l Control Panel at Control Panel Help The Control Panel provides access to system information and management functions such as database and product management Zope Version unreleased version python 2 3 3 linux2 Python Yersion 2 3 3 1 Jan 7 2004 14 54 36 GCC 2 95 4 20011002 Debian prerelease System Platform linux2 SOFTWARE_HOME opt Zope 2 7 lib python ZOPE_HOME fopt Zope 2 7 INSTANCE_HOME var book CLIENT_HOME fvar book var Network Services ZServer HTTPServer zhttp_server Port 9080 Z2Server FTPServer FTPServer Port 9021 Process Id 31499 49156 Running For 2 days 11 hours 59 min 2 sec Restart Shutdown B Database Management Version Management A WebDAY Lock Manager j Product Management 4 Debug Information Placeless Translation Service Figure 10 1 Locating your Products directory 276 To do the Zope part of the install take the downloaded product decompress it and place it inside the Products directory for your server Act
96. drives rather than trying to cut and paste into a text area When investigating this code I needed to find a simple way to turn code into HTML This is pretty easy to do for a language with simple syntax such as Python in fact Python can lex its own code but really you want to be able to do this for multiple languages such as HTML page templates JavaScript Cascading Style Sheets CSS and so on Fortunately the SilverCity module does this already and is available from SourceForge http silvercity sfnet It uses C libraries from the Scintilla text editor to lex the code Without having to worry too much implementation the upshot is that it ll happily spit out syntax highlighted HTML for nearly a dozen programming languages Looking at the list of requirements you ll see that they re pretty straightforward In fact the ID title and description are all defined in the Dublin Core implementation in Plone So you have to worry only about the source code and language Plone requires an ID and a title and it really helps to have a description 12 1 1 1 Starting the Content Type Now that you have an idea of the content type you ll create in this chapter you can start building it by writing Python on the file system This content type is also a product so you create a new directory in your product directory The name of the directory you ll create is the name of the product that Zope will import so choose your name wisely I toy
97. enabled login time This is the date the user logged in for this session e last_login_ time This is the date of the last time the user logged in fullname This is a user s full name error_log update This is used by the error log form ignore this property formtooltips In old versions of Plone there were options for displaying form help This is now no longer relevant so ignore it visible_ids This shows the IDs or names for objects By enabling this the first field on the edit form for each content type is Name and by changing this users can rename objects By default this is enabled wysiwyg_ editor This is the editor to use in forms You can add or remove items from this list using the Zope interface However adding or removing elements from here doesn t automatically make the user interface form that users 246 actually edit In Chapter 3 you saw that by clicking my preferences users can access and alter most of these properties If you want to alter these preferences then you ll have to customize that form The values given for these fields are the default values for a newly registered user for example by default all members are listed in the Members tab unless users explicitly decide otherwise So for example if you wanted all members not to be listed on the search by default then you need to change the setting in this form In the portal_memberdata form find the listed property and uncheck the v
98. enter a variable ID and click Add at the bottom of the page To determine what state an object is in at any time DCWorkflow stores the current state in a variable on the object The default name of that variable is review_state NOTE If you need to change this because it conflicts with another name you can do so at the bottom of that page However doing this will cause all your current objects to lose their state so be careful about changing that value Each workflow variable has the following properties Description This is the variable description e Make available to catalog These variables will be placed in a list exposable to the catalog This doesn t add indexes or metadata to the catalog you still have to do that manually Store in workflow This determines if the information is to be stored in the workflow or on the object Variable update mode This determines when to update the variable Default value This determines a default value as a string Default expression This is the default value as an expression If this is present it ll be used instead of default value for more information see the Editing Workflow Expressions section later in this chapter e Info guard These are security settings for accessing this variable These guard settings are similar to the guard settings for a transition however the guard occurs when accessing the variable here 8 1 3 2 5 Editing Worklists The Worklists tab
99. found doing a full backup writing full backup 3601549 bytes to home backups 2003 11 21 18 33 17 fs To run an incremental backup just omit the F full flag The script will compare the current ZODB with the last backup and only back up the differences If no updates have occurred then no backup will occur The following is an example backup after making a change in Plone python repozo py B v r home backups f var zope test var Data fs looking for files b w last full backup and 2003 11 21 18 39 09 files needed to recover state as of 2003 11 21 18 39 09 home backups 2003 11 21 18 33 17 fs 396 repository state 3601549 bytes md5 ab9e46bcdf52641ad6f71db62a9da333 current state 3624968 bytes md5 73c871bbe2528e152342abea9e25ab27 backed up state 3601549 bytes md5 ab9e46bcdf52641ad6f 71db62a9da333 doing incremental starting at 3601549 writing incremental 23419 bytes to home backups 2003 11 21 18 39 11 deltafs At this point you now have one full backup and one incremental The same script now can do a recovery of this data To do this pass the R recovery option and o specifying the output file like so python repozo py R v r home backups o var zope test var Data fs looking for files b w last full backup and 2003 11 21 18 50 21 files needed to recover state as of 2003 11 21 18 50 21 home backups 2003 11 21 18 33 17 fs home backups 2003 11 21 18 39 11 deltafs Recovering file to var zope
100. functionality to Plone Although the name product implies a cost that isn t the case most products are free and open source The term product actually describes something written on the file system and distributed for other Plone sites to use Installing a product generally involves the following two steps 1 Installing it so that it s registered inside Zope 2 Installing it into each Plone instance that wants to use it The large variety of add ons available means that it s pretty hard to give any hard and fast rules about what exactly needs to be done to install them As Pll repeatedly point out in this chapter always read the product s installation files which will usually explain how to install the product If you do need further help contact a mailing list or the product author for more information however ensure that you ve read the instructions first When you re installing products remember that you re installing code that could be incomplete and has no warranty on the quality The nature of open source is that people tend to write products and then leave them as they move onto other projects In an ideal world before you install anything you d take the time to have someone you trust read through it line by line In reality you can t do this Still most products are pretty good Just be careful to test products before you install them into your million dollar site 274 10 1 2 1 Finding Products Finding the
101. id portal breadcrumbs tal condition nothing tal define breadcrumbs python here breadcrumbs here portal_url portal_url here portal_url gt 185 This means customizing a page template which isn t a problem at all and is by now something with which you should be familiar The slightly different approach is that you can hide ele ments at the CSS level This still means the item is rendered and HTML is generated but it s then turned off for the client they can t see it Because the generation of the HTML still occurs this is a suboptimal solution but it s a neat trick Most elements in Plone have a unique Document Object Model DOM element ID for exam ple in the case of the breadcrumbs it s portal breadcrumbs as you can see in the previous code To stop showing the portal breadcrumbs simply add the following to ploneCustom css portal breadcrumbs display none 7 1 2 8 Changing Portal Tabs I ve already shown you how you can change the text of the portal tabs if you change the actions They re displayed using the style sheet not using tables although users may initially think so Looking at Table 7 3 you can see that the code for the portal tabs is portalTabs To make the border of the nonselected tabs dotted you can simply change the ploneCustom style sheet to the following portal globalnav li a border 1px dotted The tabs are a series of HTML list li and anchor a elements so by
102. if file file_code file read if there is a file and its not blank if file_code raw_code file_code if hasattr file name filename file name else filename file filename set the language to None so set by SilverCity language None self _raw raw_code our function generate_html does the hard work here html language generate_html raw_code language filename self _raw_as_html html self _raw_language language security declareProtected view_permission getLanguage def getLanguage self Returns the language that code has been lexed with return self _raw_language security declareProtected view_permission getLanguages def getLanguages self Returns the list of languages available langs for name description in list_generators these names are normally in uppercase langs append name lang value language 343 langs sort return langs security declareProtected view_permission getRawCode def getRawCode self Returns the raw code return self _raw security declareProtected view_permission getHTMLCode def getHTMLCode self Returns the html code return self _raw_as_html security declareProtected view_permission SearchableText def SearchableText self Used by the catalog for basic full text indexing return 4s Zs s self Title Q self Description self _raw InitializeClass PloneSi
103. in IIS The ASP script you installed then reads the request and forwards it to Plone It takes the response and passes it back to IIS and down the line back to the browser This means you ve added a simple proxy program to IIS You have a few key concerns here though The first is that a page can t be found in order for the proxy to occur otherwise the script will not be triggered This is good and bad You can add folders and images to IIS and they will be served out instead of Plone if the names match the request from the browser Second the incoming request is parsed and sent on this gets a little confusing in several situations with all the possible HTTP request configurations You ll also find that all your Plone requests are actually logged as 404 errors by IIS which confuses log file analysis tools Overall this setup has worked for most people who ve used it but whether it s an enterprise solution that could cope with every situation is unlikely However it provides a strong base for people to work with and develop 10 1 3 2 4 Debugging Proxy Servers Once you ve set the server up and restarted everything you ll want to test the server by using your browser to visit the site After doing this a few times you can use the following tips for when things don t seem to quite work as they should Testing the site The golden rule of debugging proxy servers is to always test the site by logging in and using your proxy server
104. installation instructions for many products tell you to create an external method To integrate with the Quick Installer you need to make a specific module called Install py in the Extensions directory That module has to contain a function called install The Quick Installer tool runs the install function and the output is placed in a file on the server The install method has to install the product into the portal types so add an FSDV that points to the skins directory and add this new directory to the skin layers Now import the functions and set up the variables as usual You have to import the fac tory_type_information from the product so that you can use it in the script as shown in Listing 12 8 348 Listing 12 8 The Start of the Installation Function from Products CMFCore TypesTool import ContentFactoryMetadata from Products CMFCore DirectoryView import createDirectoryView from Products CMFCore utils import getToolByName from Products PloneSilverCity PloneSilverCity import factory_type_information from Products PloneSilverCity config import plone_product_name product_name from Products PloneSilverCity config import layer_name layer_location def install self Install this product After this everything is generic and could be run on any product unless of course you want it to do something special on the installation To add your product to the portal_types tool you first check that your product isn t al
105. it in the root of the Plone instance with the ID caching policy_manager Before you can cache any content you must alter the cache settings for templates inside Plone By default Plone emits headers for content that turns off any caching at all If you don t do the following the rest of this section won t work If you click portal_skins and then click plone_templates you ll find the page template global_cache_settings This is used on every page that uses the main Plone template The template currently looks like the following lt metal cacheheaders define macro cacheheaders gt lt metal block tal define dummy python request RESPONSE setHeader CCC gt Content Type text html charset 4s charset gt lt metal block tal define dummy python request RESPONSE setHeader CCC Content Language lang gt lt metal block tal define dummy python request RESPONSE setHeader CCC C Expires Sat 1 Jan 2000 00 00 00 GMT gt lt metal block tal define dummy python request RESPONSE setHeader CCC C Pragma no cache gt lt metal cacheheaders gt This will mean that nothing is cached because the HTTP headers Pragma no cache and Expires have been set To disable this and make sure you can cache selectively customize this tem plate and remove the Pragma and Expires directives Your template should now look like the following lt metal cacheheaders define macro cacheheaders gt lt meta
106. list of objects such as search results providing summaries finding objects and so on When the catalog returns a set of results that accesses a series of lightweight objects called brains accessing these brains doesn t mean doing traversal to the object or performing any security checks 14 1 2 6 4 Too Many Features This may seem obvious but Plone ships with lots of features you may not necessarily need For example both the calendar and navigation portlet take up a large number of resources yet are generally of limited use Turning these features off if not needed will increase performance 14 1 2 6 5 Is Optimization Worth It Before you start any optimization you should perform a simple cost benefit analysis to see if the optimization is worth performing For example say you have a page that takes 0 5 seconds to generate Of that page on script takes 10 percent of the time to generate If you re able to double the speed of that one script that will shave only 0 025 seconds off the execution of that page In this case the benefit to performing the optimization is small because there are some basic costs such as the cost of a developer to do the analysis the cost of testing to check it works and possibly changes to documentation 410 Performing this work also creates substantial risk Changing code can break or introduce bugs into the application Given agile programming methodologies though these could be minimized
107. logo of your Plone site You can include an expression in the logo of your Plone site by adding the following to your page template lt p tal replace structure context logo jpg gt This will create the appropriate HTML for the image and show it on the page 5 1 3 Understanding the Page Template Basic Syntax Now that you ve seen how to make a page template I ll explain the basic syntax of it You can break the syntax of page templates into a few different components which I ll cover in the following sections 5 1 3 1 Introducing Built in Variables You ve seen the expression syntax so now you ll learn about the variables that are passed to it when you render a page template All of the following happen in the context of accessing the image Some Image jpg in the Members andy folder called with the URL Members andy Some Image jpg container This is the container in which the template is located With Plone this is usually the portal_skins folder You should avoid using a container because portal_skins can do unexpected things to the meaning of container for example a reference to the andy folder context This is the context in which the template is being executed In Plone this is the object being viewed if you re viewing a portal object for example a reference to the Some Image jpg object default Some statements have particular default behavior This is noted in each of the statements and this variable is a
108. lt VirtualHost 80 gt ServerName yoursite com other configuration options DocumentRoot var downloads RewriteEngine On RewriteRule download L RewriteRule http 192 168 2 1 8080 CCC VirtualHostBase http www mysite com 80 CCC Plone VirtualHostRoot 1 L P lt VirtualHost gt In this example you ll put the content in var downloads and the URLs to the downloadable through Apache content will all start with download The rewrite engine will see that the URL starts with download and then not apply any change to it that s what the dash means By specifying the L at the end of the line no more rewrite rules will apply so the proxy doesn t occur and Apache carries on like usual serving the file This trick is useful if you want to host other services in the same virtual host In one site I host Mailman a mailing list manager all the Mailman URLs start with mailman and pipermail After setting up Mailman correctly and doing all the configuration I added the following two lines to the configuration so that it d work nicely RewriteRule mailman L RewriteRule pipermail L Again the only catch here is that you can t add objects to Plone where the names may conflict with your rules such as adding folders with similar names For example mailman pipermail 294 or download in this example would be forbidden because users could never view those objects You cou
109. more sophisticated and less used tool called a topic is available A topic searches your Plone site and finds all objects that match a certain criteria allowing you to group lots of disparate content 3 1 6 1 Using Folders A folder is just like a folder or a directory on a hard drive except that the folder and its contents exist inside Plone You use a folder the same way when you need to categorize content or make things a little clearer you can group items and place them in a folder To add a folder to your site select Folder from the drop down list This will add a folder and take you to the edit properties page for that form A folder has just three rather simple attributes that a user can edit Name Title and Description I ve discussed all these attributes for documents and nothing is different for folders Folders have two green tabs that represent slightly different views contents and view Actually you may have already noticed that there s a contents tab accessible from any piece of content that you ve added to the site for example when you were editing a document the contents tab was there That contents tab will always take you to the contents for that folder 3 1 6 1 1 Viewing the Contents of a Folder The folder has the concept of a default page which is a page that will be shown to the user when they view a folder It s a concept taken from Web sites where viewing a folder on a Web site shows a default page if on
110. persistence form variable This is the name of the variable in the login form that will contain the persistence token The default is __ac_persistent Login page ID If a user needs to log in this is the page that they will be sent to in order to complete the login The default is require_login Logout page ID If a user is to be logged out then they will be sent to a nice page with a message The page is this ID The default is logged_out Failed authorization page ID When the authorization fails this is the page that will show By default this is blank as Plone does something different Use cookie paths to limit scope This sets the cookie to be local to the current folder and all folders below this Leave this at the default of blank so that you ll authenticate for the entire site regardless of where you actually click login To change the cookie that s being used rather than the default just change the value in this form and click Save However let me warn you that if you change the name of the cookie all the existing cookies on your users computers will be ignored and they ll all have to log in again If you wanted a different login page then you could either customize the require login page template or change the value of that variable 9 1 2 6 The Actual User Folder You can get access to the actual user folder for a Plone site by clicking the acl_users folder in the ZMI This opens the Group User Folder GRUF interf
111. plone portlets plone tableless plone templates x l Plone Tableless Delete Save Figure 7 2 The skins and layers in a standard Plone installation As Figure 7 2 shows the list of these layers is quite long Although this may seem intimidating this hefty number of layers gives the developer a large degree of flexibility and reuse Each skin displays on the left with a text area to the right displaying all the layers within that skin As I mentioned earlier Plone searches the layers from the top to the bottom to locate elements Each layer is the name of a folder or FSDV from the Contents tab In Figure 7 2 you can see a plone_ecmascript directory and in Figure 7 1 you can see the matching FSDV object An FSDV is a new object that provides a useful ability in Plone it allows direct access to skin elements that are defined on the file system instead of from the Zope object database as usual FSDVs make development and customization easier By reading objects directly from the file system it s much easier for developers to write and edit the code that produces the site When you install Plone the skin is written onto the file system When you customize an object you make a local copy inside your Plone database Using an FSDV allows you to maintain clean separation between code you ve downloaded from the Web and code that has been customized in your local instance Find Overvi 168 Plone 2 ships with two skins Plon
112. pointer to that behavior here This is equivalent to context loop This is equivalent to repeat modules This is a container for imported modules For example mod ules string atoi is the atoi function of the Python string module This includes 116 all the modules that are safe to import into the Zope Page Templates system For more information see Scripting Plone with Python in Chapter 6 nothing This is the equivalent of Python s None options These are the options passed to a template which occurs when the tem plate is called from a script or other method not through the Web repeat This is the repeated element see the tal repeat element in the Introducing TAL Statement Syntax section of this chapter request This is the incoming request from the client all the values from the in coming request are visible using the following test context script All the GET and POST parameters are marshaled into a dictionary for easy access Here are some examples request HTTP_USER_AGENT the users browser request REMOTE_ADDRR the users browser request someMessage the value of some message in the query string root This is the root Zope object For example root Control_ Panel gives you the control panel for Zope template This is this template being called For example template id is the ID of the template being rendered traverse_subpath This contains a list of the elements still to be traversed This is
113. producing the HTML the SilverCity library does this all for you To reiterate the earlier point in this module you have no reference to Zope or Plone this module is completely independent The actual details of this module aren t necessary to know as long as you understand you re importing a third party library It s traditional in Python scripts to put in at least one piece of test code You could write a complete unit test suite but that s outside of the current topic Instead you ll add a little bit of code to test two things that this works and the languages that are available like so if __name__ __main__ import sys myself sys argv 0 file open myself r read print generate_html file generator python print list_generators If you run this script it ll open itself and feed that into the HTML syntax highlighter A bunch of HTML will be spit out You could just place this in the Zope specific module you re about to write however having it all in a separate script makes it easy to test and alter later 12 1 1 4 Writing the Class A content type in Plone is just an object that has some particular attributes and some particular base classes You don t even need to worry about reading and writing from the database that s 332 all handled by the Persistencebase classes For the moment create a module called PloneSil verCity py in the package First import the source py module you wr
114. production Many people think it should be the default setup for Plone and it may be one day soon For the moment however ZEO comes with Plone on Linux but isn t installed It also works in Windows but isn t fully supported with services or easy installs In a standard Plone installation there s one instance of Plone talking to one instance of the ZODB While that one instance of Plone is accessing the ZODB it s locked and no other process can access it This limits the scale of the site and creates a single point of failure In a the world of relational databases this would be equivalent to only one process being able to access your database ZEO breaks this linkage and separates the access of the ZODB called the ZEO server Apache 1 Apache 2 Debug A A A Request Request d Y Ld ZEO Client 1 ZEO Client 2 ZEO Client 3 A A Caching ZEO communication Occasional debug use ZODB Figure 14 9 A standard ZEO setup Because multiple processes are able to connect to a ZODB you re now able to have several copies of Plone In essence you can now have two or three Plone instances that all share the same content Not only does this mean you can spread the load of your site over Finally one minor point is that restart times for a ZEO client are very quick The cost of having to load up the databases has been removed which means you can restart Plone sites quickly 421 14 1 3 1 Installing ZEO ZEO is included with Zope
115. property of the searchResults method is that if you don t pass any parameters to the func tion i ll look them up from the incoming request So if you wanted to allow a form to post parameters to your results then all you have to do is change the previous results line to the following lt ul tal define results python here portal_catalog searchResults REQUEST request gt Now you can redo your query and append any index to the URL For example if you called this page template testResults and appended Type Document to the end of the URL of your browser only the documents in your site would appear Since you can pass in almost any request values you can set up a search form that would pass this information through to the search form This is what the search and advanced search pages do you ll note that if you go to a Plone site and search for beer in the search box your URL will now have Searchable Text beer So Listing 11 4 shows a form to call your page template Listing 11 4 A Form to Call Your Template 325 lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtm1 xml lang en US lang en US metal use macro here main_template macros master 118n domain plone gt lt body gt lt div metal fill slot main gt lt p gt Select a content type to search for lt p gt lt form method post action testResults gt lt select name Type gt lt option tal repeat value python here portal_catalog uniqueValuesFor Type
116. provides access to all the worklists that are assigned in this workflow A worklist is a method of querying the workflow for information about the numbers of objects in that workflow For example I d like to be able to easily ask the workflow for all the outstanding credit card bills I have To add a worklist enter an ID and click Add Each worklist has the following properties e Description This is a description of the worklist e Cataloged variable matches This is the value that the worklist must match to be added in this worklist The variable matched is the workflow state vari able given in the variables list the default variable name for this variable is review_state 221 e Display in actions box This is information to display on the user interface Entering a value here also ensures that the transition will be entered as an action You can then get this transition as an action by querying for actions e Guard This is a guard for accessing this worklist Returning to the credit card example if I wanted to know all the credit card bills that need reviewing by me then I could place this information in a worklist First the variable re view_state would contain the current state for each item All the credit card bills that need reviewing would be in the review state Second Pd add a worklist called review_queue and the value for variable would be pending I could now ask the worklist for all the items in the review_que
117. r r M linkColor M link ctiveColor M link YisitedColor M borderWidth C borderStyle C borderStyleAnnotations C globalBorderColor r globalBackgroundColor lle im A M M a Figure 7 6 The properties of the folder Yalue Type Plone s color font logo and border default string Plone Default string logo jpg string Lucida Grande Verdana Lucida Helvet string 69 string Black string 85 string White string 436976 string Red string Purple string ipx string solid string dashed string f8cacbb string dee7 ec string de serem am Warning be aw This property list allows you to change the properties of mainColor to something different for example red or cc9900 Change the value of that property and click Save Changes Returning to the Plone site you should now see the nice new color In Chapter 4 you saw an example where to change a tab on the top of a page users could change the actions Although you may type an action with an uppercase first character such as Members it then displays in lowercase letters on the Web page This because CSS transforms the text to lowercase because of the textTransform property in the property sheet To stop this transformation change the property for textTransform to none In the style sheet properties are defined for all the colors spacing and fonts that are used in 176 a Plone site Table 7 1 describes all the parameters Table 7 1 CSS Pro
118. result of the migration a rather lengthy message will display on the screen If the final message is End of upgrade path migration has finished then the migration was successful Any error messages will be highlighted in red Repeat this process for each Plone site within your Zope instance If you re then happy with the migrated site stop running Plone in debug mode Restart Plone in your usual manner and carry on using as normal 14 1 2 Improving Plone Performance So you ve written a wonderful Web site millions of visitors come to the site and it just isn t quite performing as fast as you d like Well Plone is designed out of the box to be feature rich not fast since speed is greatly dependent on the application in question But many techniques can make Plone really fast and you can easily scale Plone In the following sections I cover how to figure out the slow parts of your site and then show you methods to improve it 400 14 1 2 1 Benchmarking a Plone Site Before you try optimizing a site the key task is to get a numeric value of the performance of the site Users will often give feedback such as it s too slow or takes too long to load These comments are next to useless for a developer you need to be able to quantify the speed so you can know how fast it is now and how fast you need to make it Only then can you begin to do the optimization For getting a benchmark you can use a tool calle
119. right person to add content using the Add portal content permission Further the default workflow is defined to use and alter these permissions These permissions were the ones you added to the factory type information If you wanted to make your own permission you could do so quite easily Suppose you wanted the Add permission to be Add Source Code and have its own permission Then you d change the file to read as follows add_permission Add Source Code After importing the product you d have a new permission in the Security tab matching that Add Source Code permission Why would you want to do this Well using a permission that everyone else uses is convenient However it may be that you want more granularity or different security For this reason you can just create your own security settings 337 12 1 1 5 2 Completing the Initialization Now you need to set up the initialization of the product You do this in the init__ py module so that when Zope reads this file at startup itll complete the initialization of the product as shown in Listing 12 4 Listing 12 4 The init__ py Module import PloneSilverCity from Products CMFCore import utils from Products CMFCore DirectoryView import registerDirectory from config import product_name add_permission contentConstructors PloneSilverCity addPloneSilverCity contentClasses PloneSilverCity PloneSilverCity contentFTI PloneSilverCity factory_type_informatio
120. right products to meet your needs is probably the hardest part about integration The Zope org Web site contains many products created and uploaded by users You can find these products primarily at http www zope org Products but if you look at the home page of Zope org you ll see product announcements on the right side of the page Some of these products are Plone related and others are Zope Content Management Framework CMF or Python related The other main area to find products is in the Collective project at SourceForge http sf net projects collective The products in the Collective project reside in SourceForge s Concurrent Versioning System CVS Although products often get released as tarballs CVS access is the best way to see the products there At this time no comprehensive product directory exists for Plone products or their state I hope one will be online at Plone org by the time this book is published As products are released people tend to put packages on the Files page but the best bet is to look in the CVS You can find a visual view of all the available files at http cvs sourceforge net viewcvs py collective One final CVS repository that contains useful code is Zope Corporation s CVS repository Almost all code that s made public is placed in this CVS repository If you re looking for the source to Zope 2 then this is also the place to go The Products directory contains all the products http cvs zo
121. role only to trusted developers and administrators A manager can delete or edit content remove users alter a site s configuration and even delete your Plone site 234 9 1 1 1 3 Groups Groups are a different concept from roles Roles imply that a user has different permissions from someone with a different role but a group is a logical categorization of users For ex ample the marketing department may be one group and the engineering department may be another group Each user can belong to zero to many groups Groups are optional you don t need to use them but the Plone team found them useful enough to integrate them Site developers can use the groups in anyway they choose such as to group a department or a certain class of users For most users using Plone for the first time I recommend leaving groups unchanged by default no groups are created for you NOTE You implement groups using Group User Folder GRUF The groups aren t part of Zope but are an extra tool for Plone GRUF was developed and contributed by Ingeniweb 9 1 1 2 Sharing Tab When I discussed publishing documents in Chapter 3 I skipped past the Sharing tab because it s a more advanced feature you may not always want to use The Sharing tab is an action in portal_actions so if you don t want it to appear go to that tool in the Zope Management Inter face ZMI and uncheck the visible option However the Sharing tab is quite useful because it lets y
122. s ZCatalog This search engine allows content to be cataloged in multiple ways and to be queried efficiently and quickly Chapter 10 covers the internals of how this works and how it can be queried When you re searching for content the content will be shown to a user if it s one of the two states published or visible At the top of your Plone site a search box provides an easy way to do simple textual searches in the same way as a search engine see Figure 3 28 For example enter Tuesday to find all content that contains the word Tuesday A result of all matching content will display click the title to get to the content 68 navigation Search results news eae T Did you not find what you were looking for Try the I kelase oo O r advanced search for more precise search options OOO March 17 ownloads Documentation 20 items matching your criteria EE 3 3 Development B Plone Keyword vents Manager 0 2 released Events G Orientation amp Safety Meeting by upholsterymike 2004 7 March 14 02 25 10 13 AM log in UpholsteryShop Oregon conducts an Orientation ae j aeg and Safety Meeting every Tuesday evening at manone 2 0 tarball andym 6 30pm at their shop location This is a mandatory March 12 Password attendance B Objectis free J Plone in TY by zwark 2 09 23 11 54 AM EA Obj hosting available in gt login On Monday 29th a ao me at 6 30 pm and Chinese gt Forgot your Tuesday 30th 1 20 am German Time the sci
123. see Figure 4 9 upcoming events ig Snow Sprint 2004 Schruns Vorarlberg Austria February 07 Figure 4 9 Events portlet The expression to add is here portlet_events macros portlet 85 4 1 3 1 3 Favorites In the top right corner of a Plone document you ll see a Plone icon A user can click this logo to add a favorite A favorite is similar to the concept of a bookmark or link to the page to which you want to return however this favorite is stored on the Plone site Figure 4 10 shows the icon to add a favorite home news members nye are here home welcome to plone Figure 4 10 The icon to add in a favorite The favorites are added to the user s home folder and they display in the favorites portlet along with a link to organize them see Figure 4 11 The favorites that are shown are particular to the favorites that user has saved so even if you have this item in the portlet list it won t show up unless the user has some favorites my favorites Welcome to Plone manager s Home Organize Favorites Figure 4 11 Favorites portlet The expression to add is here portlet_favorites macros portlet 4 1 3 1 4 Login The login portlet displays the login form so a user can log in using their username and pass word If they ve forgotten their password they have an option to get their password e mailed to them Even if you have this item in the portlet list however it won t show if the user is already
124. self portal_membership members pm listMemberIds out for member in members now get the actual member m pm getMemberById member get the editor property for that member p m getProperty wysiwyg_editor None out append s 4s p member if p is not None and p Epoz m setMemberProperties wysiwyg_editor Epoz out append Changed property for s member return n join out Put this code in a Python module in the Extensions directory of your Plone instance Call the module fixUserScript py Then in the ZMI add an external method with the following parameters e ID fixUsers e Module name fixUserScript e Function name fixUsers Click the Test tab to run the code It ll run through every member in your site and set the value for the WYSIWYG editor to Epoz It does this by first getting a list of every member there s a method on portal_membership called listMemberIds that does this for you For each of the members it examines the property used by Plone to determine the editor in this case the wysiwyg editor property If that property isn t Epoz then it calls setMemberProperties to change it This is a useful way to loop through all your members Then using the setMemberProperties and getProperty methods you can examine or alter any of the member properties that a user may have 9 1 4 3 Calculating the Other Users in a Group I discussed earlier with you t
125. show that If not then you can see if an e mail address exists for the current user The following changes to the form will ensure that the e mail address is filled in lt input type text name email_address tal define user context portal_membership getAuthenticatedMember email user email nothing tal attributes tabindex tabindex next value request email_address email nothing gt 9 1 4 5 Debugging and Understanding Security I ve found that security is not only one of the hardest parts of Plone to understand but it s one of the hardest to debug and test Because the model is granular and complicated it can be extremely difficult to find why and where an error occurs Sometimes the error message or information given is hard to decipher or is hard to find any information about at all Testing security is also slightly harder because in sites with lots of roles you should do a full regression test with each of those users in each of the situations Because of the cost involved though people often don t do these full regression tests Furthermore having a bug in security is probably the worst thing that can occur on a site if it leaks confidential information Plone will let you do whatever you want it will happily let you shoot yourself in the foot so be careful 9 1 4 5 1 VerboseSecurity VerboseSecurity is an add on product included by default with the installers You can also download VerboseSecurity from http hathaw
126. specifics for each server However to get virtual hosting to work you ll have to pass a URL to Plone that the VHM object understands It s worth noting that there s one other advantage of virtual hosting using a proxy server You do all the configuration of the domains outside of Plone in the proxy server This means your system administrator can now administer and use a familiar tool without having to worry about Plone Proxying works by taking an incoming request and manipulating it so that a request with a special URL is sent to Plone That request will be manipulated and contains all the information Plone needs to know to produce a response When that response is produced and sent back to the requesting person all the URLs have to point to your site correctly This will ensure that links within your pages are all correct A URL has the following three main components 286 e The IP or hostname and port for the server on which Plone resides e The IP or hostname for where Plone is meant to be residing so that all links in resulting documents have the correct URL e The actual object in Zope to access and the URL passed to it This information is passed to Plone by transforming the URL into one big complicated URL of the following format line breaks have been added to make this clearer http URL to server port VirtualHostBase protocol URL port path to virtual host root VirtualHostRoot actual URL
127. srcFldr obj aq_parent srcFldr manage_del0bjects id raise the object deleted method and pass the folder you want to return to raise state_change O0bjectDeleted srcFldr You could call this script deleteObject and successfully delete objects in the workflow Again by ensuring the error is raised Plone will know what to do in this case it takes the user to the folder containing that object 8 1 4 4 Sending E Mail Notifications If you have a Web site that a user doesn t visit regularly then putting information on the site about what has to be reviewed and when is rather pointless You can turn workflow into a rudimentary notification system by using it to send e mails to the users The notification channel of e mail is just one simple example this could also be an instant message a text message delivered to a phone and so on Ill leave other options to your imagination In this example you ll send e mail via the MailHost object on the server to every user who has the reviewer role in the system telling them about a new item that has been submitted for review This is actually a more complicated script than the ones I ve shown you so far since it runs through a few steps defining the variables finding the account name of every reviewer finding an e mail and sending an e mail Listing 8 3 shows the script Listing 8 3 Sending an E Mail Notification parameters state_change the objects we need 228 object
128. string M validate_email E boolean M left_slots here portlet_navigation macros port lines let here portlet_login macros portlet here portlet_related macros portlet M right_slots here portlet_reviev macros portlet lines here portlet news macros portlet here portlet events macros portlet here portlet recent macros portlet here portlet calendar macros portle t A Save Changes Delete Figure 4 7 The default portlet properties The left_slots properties refer to portlets shown on the left of the page and the right_slots properties list the portlets shown on the right of the page The portlets are shown in the order from top to bottom that they re listed in the properties notice that each portlet is on a new line However most portlets have some code to ensure that the portlet displays only if it makes sense For example a login portlet is pointless to show if the user is already logged in In this case the login portlet is included in the list of portlet but will show up only when needed Each portlet value is actually a special value called a Template Attribute Languages Expression Syntax TALES path expression Chapter 5 covers this in detail Site developers can add their own portlets to a site by creating simple macros and page templates The default portlets are as follows Warning be 84 left_slots This includes the navigation login and related portlets right_slots This includes the review news
129. td gt Since you can only show the user if one is found you ll ensure that there s a simple condition on this table tal condition userObj To show a user s picture you ll use the getPortrait method defined early This function returns the entire tag so the structure tag ensures the whole image is rendered correctly Next you want to show a few properties such as name and email The following shows one of these options getting the home folder lt li tal define home python getFolder userName tal condition home gt lt a href tal attributes href home absolute_url1 gt Home folder lt a gt lt li gt First you use a define to get the folder and assign this the variable home In a Plone site creating a home folder for a user is optional so you have to be sure that if you re linking to a 127 folder it exists Fortunately because of the TAL execution order the define comes before the condition Following this you show a link to the folder using the absolute_url attribute of a folder The page template goes through a few more lines of finding other useful and exciting properties to show the user As with most things in Plone the key is finding the correct API calls and then processing the output accordingly Finally the page ends by closing all the relevant tags If all goes well you should able to call the page by accessing the URL http yoursite user_info userName someuser where someuser is a
130. templates this page is a valid HTML page that can be edited by a designer When the macro is called the HTML outside the div tags will be discarded 6 1 1 1 2 metal use macro The metal use macro command uses a macro that has been defined using the define macro When a template defines a macro using the define macro command it s accessible to other templates through a macros property For example if you want to pull the portlet macro out of the portlet_login template you can do the following 130 lt div metal use macro context portlet_login macros portlet gt The about slot will go here lt div gt This will fetch the macro and insert the result in its place As shown the use macro command takes a path expression that points to the template and then to the specific macro in the template 6 1 1 1 3 Example Using the use macro and define macro Macros As an example of this the following is a template called time_template This template shows the date and time on the current Plone server This is quite a useful function to have so you can wrap this in a macro to be reused This is the example page template containing the define macro lt html gt lt body gt lt div metal define macro time gt lt div tal content context ZopeTime gt The time lt div gt lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt If your template is called time_template then you can reference this macro in another template You can now refer
131. test var Data fs Recovered 3624968 bytes md5 73c871bbe2528 e152342abea9e25ab27 For a full list of options run repozo py with the h command This prints a full set of instruc tions Logs exist in the log directory of your instance home by default and there are two log files an access log file and an event log file You set the location of these logs in the configuration file that you looked at in Chapter 2 22 log logs all incoming requests and event log logs all errors These log files should be backed up regularly along with any proxy server log files such as those that Apache or Internet Information Services IIS produces You should regularly back up code templates and custom products that reside outside the ZODB Even if you have these in source control such as Concurrent Versioning System CVS backing them up to make a valid snapshot of your installation never hurts If you have content other databases or other data that doesn t reside in the ZODB this should form part of the backup plan depending upon how often it changes This could include data in relational databases and content on the file system All of these are created by the site developer and don t exist in a standard out of the box Plone site If you re upgrading Zope or Plone it may be prudent to make a backup of all the files involved including Zope and Plone so that if the upgrade fails for some reason a full restoration is possible 14 1 1 2 Pa
132. the calendar and event slots weren t needed I expect new things to be added to the site but really they ll be minimal once the site is complete So I decided to remove all the right slots for my site I did this by going to the portal root object in the ZMI and clicking the Properties object Then I deleted right slots The navigation login and related portlets which normally occur on the left side are all useful to me so I kept those Here s how the portlet properties for the Plone book site look at this point 89 enfoldsystems 4 1 3 1 11 Having Different Portlets in Different Parts of Your Site The underlying Zope database of Plone provides a feature called acquisition In its simplest form this means when looking up an item such as right_slots Plone finds the closest object that contains the property So when looking for what portlets to show in the right column normally Plone finds the root object and lists those That s why you can change the properties in the root portal object to change the whole site You may notice that if you click the my folder link and go to your personal folder there s no calendar If you click Members and then click Properties in the ZMI you ll see that there s an entry for right_slots The entry for that folder is an empty list When the Plone site goes looking for a value to show for the right column s portlets it moves up the folder hierarchy until it reaches the Members folder The
133. the hostname being mapped and path is the actual path to the object in Zope For example www somesite com Plone To ensure that all variations on the name are mapped to the path you can use wildcards in the mapping For example the following maps all subdomains of somesite com somesite com Plone To add this mapping go to the Mapping tab enter each mapping on a new line and click Save This means you ll no longer be able to access the root of your Zope site using the addresses you ve mapped Fortunately you can still access the root of your Zope server using an IP address this will still work because the mapping isn t applied to numeric addresses Figure 10 6 shows how Figure 10 5 changes when you access the server through the IP directly and bypass the rewriting 285 Firewall Request External f Y internal Proxying server e g Apache Proxy after re write Zope v Virtual Host Monster Access to the root lt j Internal traversal Plone Figure 10 6 Virtual hosting with access to root You ve now mapped a named domain such as somesite com to point to a particular Plone in stance If an incoming request is sent looking for that site name it will be forwarded to the Plone instance 10 1 3 2 Configuring the Proxy Server Now that you ve added your VHM into Plone it s time to configure the proxy server But proxy server configuration depends upon the actual server you re using The following sections cover the
134. the issue 352 If you change something in a product the change doesn t get reflected in Python right away you need to use a product called Refresh to force that change This is an amazingly useful tool for new developers and you enable it by having a file called refresh txt in your Products directory You ll note that PloneSilverCity has one Next in the ZMI select Control Panel select Products select PloneSilverCity or your product name and click the Refresh tab If your product has a refresh txt file you can click the Refresh button Plone will then dynamically reload your product with all the new code If you re running Zope in debug mode then you can set the product to dynamically check every time it s run rather than having to come back to this screen each time Unfortunately everything with refresh isn t all rosy It does do some rather interesting things behind the scenes to Python to enable this to happen In fact the Refresh product can produce unexpected results in your product nothing that restarting Zope won t fix though Relatively simple products that just do data manipulation will be fine but some products aren t Chances are if you re just starting out your products will be simple and you ll be fine Finally if it something goes wrong and you can t figure it out you ll need to pull out a debugger You have so many ways to debug Zope that I ll just discuss the one I use the most the
135. the left portlets to the right side of the page then you could do this by changing ploneCustom css to the following portal column one float right portal column content float left This moves the leftmost column to the right and pushes the main section to the left 7 1 2 10 Hiding Help in Forms If you wanted to hide the help in all the forms you couldn t realistically change all the tem plates But you could employ a similar tactic to hiding the path bar and just set display none for the form elements The following has the desired effect of not placing the input element on a new line div formHelp display none Figure 7 9 shows the feedback page without breadcrumbs with the help hidden with dotted tabs and with the left slot moved to the right of the page all changed with only a few lines of CSS 187 home software chapters feedback Please send us any feedback you might have about the site Website Feedback Your email address Enter your email address Comments Enter the comments you have about the site Figure 7 9 The combined effect of some of the examples 7 1 2 11 How Do You Find Element X As I ve shown the templates scripts and images contained in the skins directory of a Plone installation create a Plone skin Many files live in that directory so going through every file would be long and counterproductive when those files change Instead it s useful to unde
136. the previous list then you can find excellent instructions in the PythonScript module You ll find them at Zope lib python Products PythonScripts module_access_examples py However a more simple method is available to you using an external method 6 1 2 2 Using External Method Objects An external method is a Python module written on the file system and then accessed in Plone Because it s written on the file system it doesn t run in restricted Python mode and therefore it conforms to the standard Plone security settings This means you can write a script that does anything you want and then call it from a page template Common tasks include opening and closing files accessing other processes or ex ecutables and performing tasks in Plone or Zope that you simply can t perform in any other way For obvious reasons when you re writing a script that can do this you need to be sure you aren t doing anything dangerous such as reading the password file to your server or deleting a file you don t want to delete To add an external method you go to the file system of your instance home and find the Extensions directory In that directory add a new Python script file for example Figure 6 5 shows that I added test py to a directory on my Windows computer 149 amp C Program Files Plone Data Extensions Fie Edit View Favorites Tools Help Back gt fe Search Folders rs ES Xx Eee Addr
137. the view you need to make the string show as a mailto link which is just the following simple adjustment lt div class field metal define macro Vview gt lt a href tal attributes href string mailto accessor tal content accessor gt email lt a gt lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt Now that you ve defined a page template that contains your code you can simply reference the name of the template as the macro in your widget In the following code you define the e mail field and a StringWidget as normal You then change your macro to use your nice new email_template macro like so StringField email validators isEmail widget StringWidget label Email macro email_template 383 At this point you re just changing the macro of an existing widget Making an entirely new widget is just a matter of defining a new widget and then registering it All widgets share the same base class The following is a new module called EmailWidget py that s placed inside the ArchExample directory It creates a new widget and then registers it into the registry Note that the macro property of the widget highlighted is set to the value of the template from Products Archetypes Widget import TypesWidget from Products Archetypes Registry import registerWidget class EmailWidget TypesWidget _properties TypesWidget _properties copy _properties update macro email_template
138. these steps to install Plone 1 Download Plone 2 from http www plone org download and select the tarball file 27 2 Unzip the archive using the following tar xzf CMFPlone2 0 tar gz 3 You ll find that a directory has been created called CMFPlone xxx where xxx is the version for example CMFPlone 2 0 4 Move the contents of that directory into your Zope installation s Product directory For example if the Zope Products directory is in var zope then do this mv CMFPlone2 0 var zope Products After completing this installation restart Zope Once Zope has restarted access Zope by open ing a browser and going to http localhost 8080 manage You ll need a username and pass word for this for example the username and password you gave during the Zope installation In the ZMI there s a drop down list of products you can add located in the top right corner Ensure that Plone Site is one of the options If so your installation is complete see Figure 2 12 Contents Properties Security Ownership Find Folder at Help Select type to add 7 Add Formulator Form a Group User Folder Type Name gig mage Mail Host C G Control_Panel Control Panel Page Template m Plone Portal Plone Content Plone Site C acl_users User Folder Plone Tool m e gt browser_id_manager Browser Id Manager RAM Cache Manager Script Python m error_log Session Data Manager x r index_html 1Kb 2003 10
139. to pay Curiously enough if you don t have a valid value there Google will still happily show the ads but not pay you Listing 6 1 Displaying Ads from Google lt div metal define macro portlet gt lt div class portlet gt lt script type text javascript gt lt google_ad_client yourUniqueValue google_ad_width 120 google_ad_height 600 google_ad_format 120x600_as gt lt script gt lt script type text javascript src http pagead2 googlesyndication com pagead show_ads js gt lt script gt lt div gt lt div gt To then include this on your site as detailed in Chapter 4 add the following portlet to your list of portlets 141 here googleAds macros portlet 6 1 2 Scripting Plone with Python At least four different levels in Plone exist for creating logic The simplest level for using Python in Plone is the Python TALES expression I discussed in the previous chapter However a Python expression allows you to do only one line of code often you ll want to do something more complicated Even more common is the problem that you really don t want to cram all the logic into the template Placing logic in your template is a bad idea in general any time you can move anything that isn t explicitly presentation logic out of the template you ve saved yourself a headache Separating logic and presentation allows you to easily allow different people to work on different parts of
140. to find matching names and e mail addresses You can add edit and remove groups by clicking the Groups tab To add a group click the Add New Group button This opens a form for a group the only required field is Title which should be a short descriptive name for the group usually a group is directly related to a business or 240 site activity Now that you ve added a group and have some users you can match users and groups Again you can do this using the Plone control panel You can either click a user and give that user some groups or click a group and put users into that group 9 1 1 3 1 When to Use Groups Using groups is optional and you may not ever choose to use them One strong use of groups however is to make a workspace In a basic Plone site users can add and edit content in their own folder each item of content in that folder is thus owned by the person who created it But this really doesn t scale too well after all the whole point is that you want a few people to be able to edit a document and share it of course This is where groups and workspaces come in Just like there s a folder for members that contains all the user folders for members there s also a folder called GroupWorkspaces This is created by default whenever a group is added and in that folder is another folder for each group So if you add a group called Marketing you ll be able to find a folder at Group Workspaces Marketing Any us
141. to groups If I wanted to allow the whole marketing team to edit my document I could do so To get the groups available just click View groups which opens a list of groups for this site and you can assign a local role to a group In Figure 9 3 I m giving Development the owner role on this folder 237 contents properties Available groups Select one or more Groups and a role to assign Iv m E Development Marketing Sales Systems r assign local role to selected group s Figure 9 3 Assigning a role to a group Finally in Figure 9 4 you can see which users and groups have the roles for this page and then remove them if you want Once you ve given someone else local roles on an object you allow them to access the Sharing tab Then nothing is stopping them from removing roles for you from the content Currently assigned local roles in folder Chapters These users currently have local roles assigned in this folder Assigned Roles Chapters admin z iA f gavin Development Leal Role s Role s Maal Owner Owner delete selected rple s C 238 Figure 9 4 Viewing and removing roles 9 1 1 3 Administering Through the Web Using the Plone interface you can easily modify the user that s assigned to certain groups alter user information add groups and so on You can do most of this through the Plone control panel just click plone setup and then select Users and Groups Administration You ll see
142. to performance you ll definitely need to know how to scale your server outward using multiple processes and how to cope with high cost requests For this you ll need Zope Enterprise Objects ZEO which is covered at the end of this chapter 14 1 1 Administering a Plone Site As it turns out the administration of a Plone site is quite simple you need to perform only a few tasks which are common to all services The tasks are as follows e You should back up the database regularly e You should pack the database regularly e You should back up and rotate the log files You should perform these actions regularly to maintain your site In enterprises you ll usually often have standard tools for backing up and rotating logs these tools are all easy to integrate since Plone data is all contained as files on the file system 14 1 1 1 Backing Up Your Plone Site You should run backups regularly on a Plone site most people run backups nightly Your application needs should determine the schedule for backups If large amounts of data are written into your data then perhaps more frequent backups are necessary In the case of a smaller site with less content a less frequent schedule such as once a week may be more suitable 394 395 In a standard Plone site only one file needs backing up the Zope database where all the content for the Plone site resides You can find this file by accessing the Zope Management Interface ZMI control p
143. to run Plone with the following environment variable ZOPE_SECURITY_POLICY PYTHON To get VerboseSecurity to work all you need to do is ensure that VerboseSecurity is in your Products directory for more details on this see Chapter 10 and then restart Plone Go to the cookie_authentication object which is the list of options for your site authentication and in the form change the option for login_page from require_login to empty as shown in Figure 9 14 264 Properties Undo Owner amp Cookie Crumbler at Plone cookie authentication Properties allow you to assign simple values to Zope objects To change property values edit the Name Yalue Type Authentication cookie name ac o string User name form variable acname lt i_CS S string User password form variable acpasswod ss string User name persistence form variable acpersistent string Auto login page ID TF string Logout page ID flogged out tt t lt sSS string Figure 9 14 Changing the login settings for your site Now you can go and re create the circumstances for the error you d like to debug Remember to log in as the user who got the error This is where it s handy to have two different browsers accessing your Plone site one for administering one for testing When the error occurs an HTTP authentication dialog will pop up on the screen At that point hit Cancel and you should now get a detailed error message such as that shown in
144. to try the following examples you ll have to restart Plone Only then will all the new changes be loaded and properly registered For more information on this see the Developing with Archetypes section later in this chapter 13 1 1 2 Explaining Schemas Fields and Widgets Merriam Webster s dictionary definition of a schema is as follows schema In Archetypes terms a schema Each field has one widget defined A widget Figure 13 3 shows the relationship between schemas fields and widgets 365 Schema ol Field gt Widget be Field Widget Figure 13 3 The relationship between schemas fields and widgets 13 1 1 2 1 Schemas and the BaseSchema To create a schema pass the fields you d like in the schema object as a tuple of fields For example the article schema has three fields group blurb and body The following code starts the schema Schema StringField group vocabulary ARTICLE_GROUPS widget SelectionWidget other fields here It s possible to add schemas together to get a summation of more than one schema This is exactly what ArchExample actually does it adds the schema defined in the content type to a schema called BaseSchema The BaseSchema contains the two elements every Plone content type should have a title and an ID The title is required so that something can display in the user interface and the ID or short name corresponds to the standard Plone conventions for a
145. to using the various Plone tools To set the expires headers to be 24 hours from now for all images for example you can add the following to your Apache site configuration 418 ExpiresActive On ExpiresByType image gif access plus 1 day ExpiresByType image png access plus 1 day ExpiresByType image jpeg access plus 1 day You can find more information on mod expires at http httpd apache org docs 2 1 mod mod_expires html Apache comes with several systems that can perform caching for you The standard Apache module mod_cache has two caching modes memory and disk This will cache all page re quests given a set of parameters for a given amount of time To set up a disk cache in the tmp apache_cache folder add the following to the site configuration CacheRoot tmp apache_cache CacheEnable disk CacheSize 256 CacheDirLevels 5 CacheDirLength 3 Unfortunately proving that Apache is actually caching the content can be a little hard per haps the simplest approach is to test it by watching the z2 log in Plone and seeing if it s being hit You can find more information on mod_cache at http httpd apache org docs 2 0 mod mod_cache html 14 1 2 12 2 Using Squid Squid is an open source proxy server that s used commonly with Zope It enables you to accelerate Zope by caching content that s produced inside Squid so that multiple requests are handled by Squid not Zope Again since Squid doesn t render dynamic content a
146. value than the name of the index For example you could make an index with the ID getVersion which looks at the value of version As you ll see later some indexes have advantages over others so it can be useful to have two different indexes pointing to the same value TopicIndex is a different type of index in that it builds up a series of sets at the time the content is indexed If you wanted to do a lot of searches for all images then you could add a search for o portal_type Image To do this you need to create a TopicIndex and then click the index from the Indexes tab you can even add multiple expressions to build up an index At this time TopicIndex indexes aren t used anywhere in Plone 11 1 2 3 1 How Do You Reindex All the Content on Your Plone Site If you ve made a large number of code level changes put in a new product renamed or moved your root Plone object then you may need to reindex all the content on your site In the ZMI click portal_catalog click Advanced and click Update Catalog This will run the process of updating your catalog CAUTION This is an even more intensive task than reindexing just one index and it can take a long time and use a lot of memory and processing power if you have a large database 11 1 2 3 1 1 Relational Databases vs Plone The development of content types in Plone is slightly different from developing using a re lational database A common development paradigm these days is LAM
147. where the object is called e Second the container is different and the container of My Portrait jpg is now different It s Members not andy So what s the point of all this Well you can now put an object in the root of a Plone site and any object can get to it because it s looked up through acquisition Although this probably makes sense acquisition can be quite complicated especially look ing through the context hierarchy which can occur If you want to learn more about it you can read Zope lead developer Jim Fulton s excellent discussion of acquisition at http www zope org Members jim Info IPC8 AcquisitionAlgebra index html 5 1 1 2 Introducing Template Expressions Before diving into the Zope Page Templates system you must understand TALES Often in an application you need to write expressions that can be evaluated dynamically These aren t scripts rather they re one liners simple expressions that can do something simple and easy in one line of code An expression is evaluated with a series of local variables passed into it These variables are determined by what s calling the expression Workflow passes one set of variables in and the Zope Page Templates system passes another For the moment I ll use examples that have context Remember as discussed the context is the context in which an object is requested 107 So far you ve seen some TALES expressions such as string portal_url Software
148. workflow all the states transitions and associated features The series of tabs across the top of the page outlines the functionality of a workflow quite well States Transitions Variables Worklists Scripts and Permissions I ll run through each of these tabs and some of the other options available Unless otherwise mentioned all the following tabs are accessible from this main workflow page Creating or editing workflow can require lots of clicking and can be a little confusing If you re a developer keen on using the file system then you can do all this from Python if you want I cover this for you later in this chapter in the Writing a Workflow in Python section Security La 20 20 215 8 1 3 2 1 Setting the Initial State To set the initial state go to the States tab and check out the states available next to one of the states you ll see an asterisk as shown in Figure 8 6 Properties States Transitions Variables Worklists Scripts eo Workflow States at Plone portal_workflow plone_workflow states pending Waiting for reviewer hide Member makes content private publish Reviewer publishes content reject Reviewer rejects submission retract Member retracts submission M private Visible and editable only by owner show Member makes content visible published Public reject Reviewer rejects submission retract Member retracts submission prveseseees hide Member makes content private
149. you can use simple Python expressions in page templates Of course sometimes a one line Python expression isn t enough So in the Scripting Plone with Python section Ill show you can take Python to the next level and increase the power of your scripting Finally Pll cover a common example showing how to put together a form in Plone This example demonstrates concepts learned in the previous chapters and ties it all together while showing you exactly how Plone handles forms 6 1 1 Understanding Advanced Plone Templating One of the nice elements of page templates is that different functions are clearly separated into different namespaces In the previous chapter you looked at the TAL namespace That s not the only namespace that page templates provide two other namespaces are key to Plone The first is METAL As the rather long name suggests it s similar to TAL in that it s an attribute language and inserts itself into element attributes However its primary aim is to ensure that you can reuse chunks of other page template code It does this using the slot and macro functions The second is I18N which allows you to translate the content of page templates This is used in Plone to localize the interface of Plone into more than 30 languages and for many users is one of the key features of Plone As you ll see the ability to localize text is of interest to all users even those building a monolingual site You ll start with METAL
150. 1 1 4 Example Creating a New Portlet with Google Ads In Chapter 4 you saw how to easily edit portlets in a Plone site adding your own portlet isn t much harder To write your own slot you need to make a new page template with a macro inside it Then a TALES expression that points to macro will be added to the list of portlet rendering the portlet to the page The basic template for a portlet is as follows lt div metal define macro portlet gt lt div class portlet gt lt Enter code here gt lt div gt lt div gt All you need to do is insert some suitable code into the portlet Google set up a text based advertising system in 2003 that places text on your site The ads are based upon what Google thinks your site is about based on the search results for your site The Google system is available at http www google com adsense To display ads and get paid for them you ll have to register with Google On the Google Web site it ll ask you to pick some colors and style Since you ll put this in a slot I recommend the skyscraper size tall and thin Make a copy of the JavaScript that the site produces Next you have to create a portlet portal_skins custom googleAds googleBox lt Enter code here gt The end result should be something like Listing 6 1 however your version will have a valid value for google _ad_client rather than yourUniqueValue That value tells Google which site ordered this ad and who
151. 110 3 293 565 Total 601 1236 411 2 1211 2043 The server may also have a limit on the number of connections or on traveling through internal firewalls When a process is bound by the time it takes to do an Input Output I O process such as this it s called I O bound 404 14 1 2 4 4 Your Application It could of course be that your application is actually causing the slowdown The examples from service companies about clients with problems are numerous and probably exagger ated Some of better known examples include the following e Copied code from a Web site that had a sleep call buried deep in the system which caused the script to pause for a few seconds A code review by someone spotted this and removed the offending line Multiple relational database lookups such as more than a dozen on one page A more intelligent design combined the lookups and allowed for caching A script that pulled information from the ZODB by waking up every object inside the database Using the catalog covered in Chapter 10 made perfor mance much faster e A query that gets all the records in a database but then shows only 100 ona page at a time discarding the other 99 900 This was solved by writing the SQL statements in more efficient manner Before jumping to conclusions about what s causing the problem it s worth profiling the site to determine where the bottleneck is 14 1 2 5 Profiling Plone Since you can quantify the time
152. 2 7 the version of Zope supported by this book In earlier version of Zope it was distributed separately At the moment there s no easy way to install ZEO on Windows the mkzeoinstance script doesn t work ZEO itself works just fine but you ll have to read the ZEO source to see how to do this Further zopectl doesn t work on Windows meaning the following examples don t work 14 1 3 1 1 Linux To create a ZEO server use the mkzeoinstance script located in the opt Zope 2 7 bin directory This assumes that Zope is already installed as described in Chapter 2 The script takes the following parameters e Directory This is the directory in which to create the ZEO server instance e Host This is the host and port for the server to listen on in the format host port The port will be the port that ZEO clients connect to and should be protected by a firewall since ZEO provides no security against unautho rized access These are optional The default port is 9999 e User and password This is the default user and password for the server in the format user password and is optional For example the following will install ZEO at var zeo on the default port cd opt Zope 2 7 bin mkzeoinstance var zeo This has created a new database with all the appropriate configuration This database is a new location but this is fine If you want to move an existing Zope installation to ZEO then you ll need to stop the running Zope and then
153. 4 Default Text Not Found Message Type a URL default asp en Figure 10 8 Setting up the redirect for 404 Save the changes by clicking OK At this point your list of errors should look like the list of errors in Figure 10 9 If this is the case then you should be set up correctly Access IIS through the browser and bingo you ll see Plone 291 Default Web Site Properties 21 x Web Site Operators Performance ISAPI Filters Home Directory Documents Directory Security HTTP Headers Custom Errors Error Messages for HTTP Errors Custom error messages can be an absolute URL on this server or a pointer to a file HTTP Error Type Contents 403 11 File C WINNTShelp iisHelp common403 11 htm 40312 File C WINNTShelp iisHelp common 403 12 htm 40313 File C WINNTShelp iisHelp common 403 13 htm 403 14 Default Forbidden Directory Listing Denied 40315 File C WINNTShelp iisHelp common 403 15 htm 403 16 File C WINNTShelp iisHelp common 403 16 htm NNTShelp iisHelp common 403 17 htm ult asp 405 File C WINNTShelp iisHelp common 405 htm 406 File C WINNThelp iisHelp common406 htm 407 File C WINNTShelp iisHelp common 407 htm 41 File CAWINNT Sheln iisHeln commans41 2 htm d Set to Default Figure 10 9 The error list What s happened here is that you re capturing the error for when an item can t be found
154. 4 1 3 Using Zope Enterprise Objects 1 Chapter 1 1 1 Introducing Plone A company without a Web site is unthinkable and most companies and organizations have more than one site Whether it s an external site for communicating with clients an intranet for employees to use or a site for direct client communication and feedback all Web sites have a common problem how to manage the content on them This is a challenge that can often cost organizations large amounts of time and effort Producing a powerful yet flexible system for these sites that meets ever changing requirements while growing to meet your company s emerging needs isn t easy No matter what the requirements for your Web site are or the amount of content or users Plone is a user friendly powerful solution that lets you easily add and edit any type of content through the Web produce navigation and searches for that content and apply security and workflow to that content Plone enables you to put together almost any Web site and easily update it This lets you build content rich sites quickly so you can gain a competitive advantage Finally probably the best things about this system are that it s free and it s open source With its large and impres sive feature set it s comparable if not better than many closed source content management systems that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars Mike Sugarbaker says the following when reporting on the Open Source Conte
155. 55 F 1 7 2004 1 10 AM 1 7 2004 1 10 AM 1 7 2004 1 10 AM 12 29 2003 4 55 F 1 5 2004 7 21 AM 12 29 2003 4 55 F 12 29 2003 4 55 F 1 6 2004 10 40 Pr 12 29 2003 4 55 F 12 29 2003 4 55 F 1 4 2004 2 32 AM 1 5 2004 5 42 AM 12 29 2003 4 55 F 1 5 2004 5 37 AM 12 29 2003 4 55 F 12 29 2003 4 55 F 1 7 2004 1 10 AM 12 29 2003 6 09 F 12 29 2003 4 55 F 12 29 2003 4 55 F 12 29 2003 4 55 F 12 29 2003 4 55 F Figure 10 10 FTP access in Internet Explorer If you need a username and password to access the server then you ll need to add them to the URL in the following format ftp user password localhost 8021 Many other FTP clients are available that will allow you to have a more sophisticated interface if you d like Many FTP clients are available in Linux for the command line or with GUIs such as gFTP and Konqueror 296 10 1 4 4 WebDAV Access into Plone WebDAV is a system for authoring content in systems such as Plone using HTTP This allows you to map a Plone server as a file system To enable this you ll have to edit the Zope configuration file as I detailed in Chapter 2 so that the zope conf file has the following in it lt webdav source server gt address 1980 lt webdav source server gt In Windows the WebDrive program is available at http www webdrive com A free trial is available so you can give it a try After installing WebDrive add a connection to the Plone server and then all you need to do then is access you
156. 7 3 Click Custom Level and scroll down to the Cookies section 4 Set Allow Per Session Cookies to Enable and click OK Internet Explorer 4 x 1 Select View gt Internet Options 2 Click the Security tab at the top of the screen 3 Click Custom Level and scroll down to the Cookies section 4 Select Always Accept Cookies or Prompt Before Accepting Cookies and click OK Mozilla 1 x 1 Select Edit gt Preferences 2 Find Privacy amp Security in the menu on the left If there s a plus sign to the left of Privacy amp Security click it 3 Select Cookies under Advanced 4 Select Enable Cookies for the Originating Web Site Only or Enable All Cookies and click OK Opera 1 Press F12 2 Click Enable Cookies Netscape Navigator 6 x 1 Select Edit gt Preferences 2 Find Privacy amp Security in the menu on the left If there s a triangle pointing to the right next to Privacy amp Security click it 3 Select Cookies under Privacy amp Security 4 Select Enable Cookies for the Originating Web Site Only or Enable All Cookies and click OK If you forget your password at some point you can get it sent to the e mail address provided when you registered with the Plone site To have your password mailed to you click the Forgot your password link located in the left column of the Web site This will bring up the forgotten password form as shown in Figure 3 5 enter your login name and a password will be e ma
157. 8 Using Actions in the File System Like validators you can specify actions in the metadata file The syntax for the actions section of your file would look like this actions action success traverse_to string script1 In the previous example when the form is submitted and the validation scripts return a status of success the traverse to action is called with the argument string script1 That argument is actually an expression The default action for the failure status is to reload the current form The form will have access to all the error messages via the state object in its options Again you can specify a particular action on a particular context for example to specify an action for success when on a document you can do the following action success Documnent traverse_to string document_script Again you can specify the action for the following button lt input type submit name form button buttoni value Button gt by adding the following to the metadata file action success buttonl traverse_to string scripti This example has no explicit context given so it s valid for any type of context start sidebar 7 1 3 8 1 Finding Example File System Skins and the Book Examples All the examples in this book have been collected in a skin for you to install You can find this on the Plone book Web site at http plone book agmweb ca Software PloneBookExamples and on the Apress book Web site at http www apress co
158. A skin determines exactly how that document displays to the user including the images and styles surrounding the content A skin groups elements wrapping that piece of content and presents them in a certain manner To generate the representation that a user sees a skin has many elements including the static items such as images and the dynamic pieces such as scripts In the previous chapter the feedback form was an example of adding a few elements to a skin to create new elements of a skin That example contained logic in the format of a Python Script object and new pages in the format of page templates You added those elements to the skin so that a user could interact with the form 164 165 You can use as much or as little of an existing skin as you want to assemble a new skin with Plone You can make the skin from minor tweaks or major changes as you can see on com munity sites such as http www zopezen org and http www zopera org Each Plone site must have at least one skin which will be used as the default but it can have as many skins as the site developer wants A user may optionally flip between skins should the site developer want to allow the user to do so although I ve found this is rarely the case The default Plone skin is the one you see on a Plone site such as http www plone org with the familiar blue and green interface But Plone doesn t have to look at all like or be even vaguely recognizable as a
159. All that s needed is an experienced CSS developer e CSS makes the site faster by sending smaller files Each Hypertext Markup Language HTML file is smaller since the layout for the site isn t contained in HTML markup but in the CSS which can then be cached e CSS allows you to customize the look and feel without breaking un derlying accessibility work 7 1 2 2 1 Code Layers When a Plone page is rendered at least three layers of code create a page For the example of the tabs that appear across the top of a Plone site this is how they re assembled So rather than asking yourself how can I customize the tabs you need to consider exactly what customization you want to perform This could mean changing the CSS the HTML the data or the underlying tabs The general rules are as follows In fact Plone is so customizable on so many levels that it s easy to worry about which bit to customize To make sure that future Plone template changes don t compromise your applica tion s design try not to customize the templates Instead I recommend you try the CSS or the actions first This way when the templates change in future versions of Plone there will be less chance of a problem 7 1 2 3 Customizing the Font Colors and Spacing The actual style sheet that does most of the work plone css has a number of variables in it populated using Dynamic HTML DTML I do not cover DTML in this book this is probably the only use of
160. City py module Specifically you need to add a factory function Using a factory is a well known pattern in object oriented design and it defines how an object will be created So to the PloneSilverCity py module add the following constructor to the module def addPloneSilverCity self id REQUEST None This is our factory function and creates an empty PloneSilverCity object obj PloneSilverCity id self _setObject id obj The addPloneSilverCity function isn t part of the PloneSilverCity class As a constructor for the class it s placed in the module outside the class This function is the first Plone specific func tion Three parameters are passed to the method the self object the ID string for the object and REQUEST The self object is actually the context you ve seen before just by a different name Since the objects will always be created inside folder self will refer to the folder in which this object will be created This function creates an instance of PloneSilverCity called obj and passes it to the _setObject method of the folder The _setObject method is particular to Zope it instantiates the object in the database and registers the object in the containing folder Next add the factory type information covered in Chapter 11 this is your first chance to create it yourself The factory type information contains all the information about the content type in a dictionary this information is loaded into portal_ty
161. Favorite 47 password Image 42 Q Quote 93 gt New user B Document 2734 By state published 3544 Search visible 2726 Go Advanced Search Figure 12 2 PloneStats on ZopeZen These are Web site statistics I can get those by parsing the Web logs for my Plone server Tools such as Analog Webalizer WebTrends and so on can happily parse your Plone or Apache Web logs for you Again you can find the entire code for this project in the Collective at http sf net projects collective in the PloneStats package 12 1 2 1 Starting the Tool You should place the tool in a product directory the same way you did with the content type by making a directory inside the instance home product directory Into that folder add the refresh txt install txt readme txt and init__ py files In that directory the main module is called stats py which contains all the code for creating the stats Again I ll cover how the module looks without any extra Zope code However since you re directly plugging into the other Plone tools running outside of Zope will make little sense Listing 12 13 shows the start of the tool This is a simple version that has two methods one to 355 return the number of content types by type and by workflow state and the other for users that returns the total number of users in the site Listing 12 13 The Basic Stats Object class Stats def getContentTypes self Returns the number of documents by
162. For example the metadata file would have the following line proxy Member Now this script would be executed as a member solving your security problem 9 1 4 Scripting Users So you ve got a whole bunch of users in your Plone site now you ll need some scripts on that site to aid in the administration of the users After a few hundred users it can be really hard to make changes through the Web so the following sections give a few example scripts that perform some important tasks 9 1 4 1 Registering Users in Bulk If you have a large number of users to register then you need a script to import them These users could be from any system you re upgrading to Plone However if you already have users in an external source such as LDAP a relational database or other source you could integrate directly with that source For now take a bunch of users in a comma separated file with the following content user name full name e mail and groups In this example you ll run through that list add each user with those settings and then change their properties so that they will have the correct settings The csv file will therefore look something like the following User Name Full Name Email Groups Andy Andy Mckay andy enfoldsystems com Systems Sales Development A csv file is a file of comma separated values and it can be created and edited in most spread sheet programs such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice or
163. However this is merely one example of a wide range of expressions The main use of TALES is in Zope Page Templates the HTML generation system for Plone Although its name may suggest it s suitable only in templates many tools in Plone use this syntax to provide simple expressions such as actions workflow and security Different kinds of expressions exist and I ll run through them one by one 5 1 1 2 1 Using Path Expressions The path expression is the default and most commonly used expression Unlike all the other expressions it doesn t require a prefix to denote the expression type The expression comprises one or more paths Each path is separated by the pipe symbol Each path is a series of variables separated by forward slashes The following are some simple examples context message context folderA title context Members andy My Portrait jpg When the expression is evaluated the path is split on the forward slashes It then starts at the leftmost value and traverses to find that object method or value It then places that object on the current stack and moves onto the next value it repeats that process until it reaches the end of the expression or can t find a matching value If the object it finds is a Python dictionary or mapping object it ll call that value of the dictionary One nice feature of a path expression in that the only restricted character is so names can contain spaces and periods and still be evalu
164. However as I noted in that chapter no pending state exists for folders Instead you have a slightly simpler workflow as shown in Figure 8 3 Owner and Reviewer Visible Initial a Retract r b Show Publish Hide Hide Private Figure 8 3 The folder workflow for content that comes with Plone 212 8 1 2 3 3 Other Workflows Numerous workflows are available to a Plone site including private workflow community workflow one step publication workflow and so on ZopeZen comes with a workflow and PloneCollectorNG also comes with a workflow DCWorkflow comes with four workflows Currently two workflows come in the PloneWorkflows product in the collective project on SourceForge http sf net projects collective the community workflow and one step publica tion workflow The community workflow is similar to the Plone workflow with a few changes The one step publication workflow has two states private and published At the moment you have no easy way to install and uninstall workflows and you have no real easy way to transition content between one state and another For example if you install the one step publication workflow into an existing state you also need to fix the states for all objects and move them into one of the new states In this case it s probably simple everything in a published state should stay as it is and everything else should move into the private state 8 1 3 Adding and Editing Workflow
165. I ve ignored them since they aren t relevant but the following is a list of the options contextType This is the type of the context object if any that template is executed in This is a shortcut to the content type of the context object If you wanted only this validation to occur on a link then you could set this value to Link button This is the button if any that s clicked to submit the form You could have different buttons on a form for example a Submit and a Cancel button Each of these buttons could then map to a different action clicking Cancel would take you to one place and clicking Submit would take you to another 158 validators This is a comma separated list of validators which are Controller Val idator objects that the template will acquire In the previous example you used the validator ID of test_validator NOTE When writing validation scripts use Controller Validator objects instead of Script Python objects Controller Validator objects are just like ordinary Script Python objects with the addition of a ZMI Actions tab 6 1 4 1 2 Specifying Actions Actions are the ending actions after the validators have been run and they depend upon the status that s returned by the validators The Actions tab for a Controller Page Template object shows all the actions for the page template in question You can specify actions with the same kind of specialization options as described previously via a Web
166. ML This is a standard for HTML and is valid Extensible Markup Language XML code This means you must follow these rules e All tags must be lowercase e Attributes must always be quoted for example lt input type checkbox checked 1 gt e Empty elements must be terminated for example lt br gt not lt br gt To define a page as XHTML you must give a DOCTYPE declaration and use the XML namespace set in the html tag Plone uses the following declaration at the top of every page lt DOCTYPE html PUBLIC W3C DTD XHTML 1 0 Transitional EN http www w3 org TR xhtml1 DTD xhtmli transitional dtd gt lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtm1 xml lang en lang en gt For more information on the XHTML specification go to http www w3 org TR xhtml1 xhtml 111 5 1 2 1 Another HTML Generation System In the first few years of the Web programmers were the prime creators of HTML Programmers rapidly threw together systems to generate HTML programmatically so they could get on with their real jobs With tools such as Perl s CGI modules programmers could write complicated server side code for content However soon everybody was generating content and the process had to be made easier This brought about the wave of escape coding languages These languages used a special kind of HTML markup that was processed to produce output As mentioned some of the most popular are Active Server Pages JavaServ
167. ML input box for a size and maxlength string TextAreaWidget A text area widget that allows You can provide allowed_content_types the uploading of the content in which is a list of strings each string rep multiple formats resents a meta_type of the type of content uploaded For each of the widgets listed in Table 13 3 Table 13 4 describes all the attributes that are common to all widgets You ve already seen the label attribute which sets the description on your widget In conjunction with the extra attributes for each widget you have a complete set of widget attributes Table 13 4 Possible Values for the Widgets Description Name Possible Values label The label that will appear in the user interface with this field modefhe modes that this widget will be shown in by default there are two modes view and edit popultthis is enabled the view and edit fields will be popu lated Usually this enabled but for fields such as a pass word field this shouldn t be the case Usually this is true by default postbHckhis is enabled then when an error is raised the field is repopulated for fields such as a password field this shouldn t be the case Usually this is true by default visibl f the attribute should be visible in the user interface This is a dictionary mapping the view mode to a string describing the visibility Choices are visible hidden shown in an HTML hidden form value invisible not shown at
168. Members jane myDocument as a list of the objects This allows you to query the catalog for all the contents of Members without having to ask the folder A Path index will return everything below the Members folder TextIndex This is an old text index that takes text splits it up and indexes that See ZCTextIndex 315 Name Description TopicIndex This builds up predefined result sets at cataloging time This is useful for often repeated queries ZCTextIndex This is a new index that provides full text searching capabilities effi ciently on pieces of text It supports a large number of features dis cussed in detail later You can see what indexes are defined in a catalog by clicking portal_catalog and selecting the Indexes tab This will give you a list of all the indexes defined in your Plone site The columns are the name of the index the type the number of hits and when the index was last modified The types of indexes were briefly covered previously but Table 11 2 describes what all the default indexes are in a Plone site Table 11 2 Default Indexes That Are Set Up in Plone Name Type Description Creator FieldIndex This is the username of the person who created the object Date FieldIndex This is the effective date if not present it s the last modified date Description TextIndex The description field SearchableText ZCTextIndex The description title and body of the object as one searchable lump of text
169. Memberships for andym Software a Up to Users Overview Search for new groups quick search A search E name O SB Development O S amp B Marketing O Sales i BB Systems add user to selected groups Current Group Memberships group name remove group Development E B Sales D Figure 9 6 Groups for this user To add the user to a new group select the checkbox for the group and then click add user to selected groups Likewise you can remove a user from a group by checking the box next to the group and then clicking remove selected groups You ll see a similar interface for group management if you click plone setup select User and Groups Administration and click groups Click a group and then click group members you ll get a list of the members in that group and you can add and remove members from there 242 9 1 1 3 3 Giving Groups Roles So you ve seen that users can have roles but also that groups can have roles This may seem a little odd to you but think for example of a group of supervisors that needs to be able to do anything to the content added by one of their staff members To do this in a site they ll need to have the reviewer role To set up a group of supervisors click plone setup select User and Groups Administration click groups and then click add new group Give that group the name Supervisor and complete the form On the next form you get a list of the groups and
170. Now that I ve discussed the default workflow I come to the key point that s probably most on your mind How can you change the defaults Well as with most of Plone you can add edit and delete all workflow through the ZMI The tool that controls workflow is portal_workflow In the following sections I cover how workflows are assigned and then go through all the settings for a workflow in detail 8 1 3 1 Setting Workflows to a Content Type After clicking portal_workflow you ll see a list of workflow assignments A feature of DCWork flow is that each content type has one and only one workflow assigned to it Figure 8 4 shows these assignments 213 Workflows Overview Contents View Properties Plone Workflow Tool at Plone portal workflow Workflows by type Discussion Item Default Document Default Event Default Favorite Default File Default Folder folder workflow sss SSSSCSSSS Image Default Large Plone Folder Default Link Default News Item Default Plone Site PT TempFolder Default Topic folder_workflow Default plone_workflow Change Click the button below to update the security settings of all workflow aware objects in this porta Update security settings Figure 8 4 The list of workflow by type On this page you ll see a list of each content type and the workflow that has been applied to it If a workflow isn t specified in other words the value is blank then no wo
171. OTE getPhysicalPath is a method of all objects in Zope that returns the location inside the Zope object hierarchy ignoring any virtual hosting that may occur 9 1 3 4 Proxy Roles In the previous chapter I disscused some neat methods of notifying users and moving content around when content is workflowed When this happens the script is executed as the user performs the workflow transaction In this case your script may do something your user may or may not have the right to do For example you may not want to allow a user to add anything to a folder called public except for workflow This is a problem you need to ensure the script can be executed with a higher role A proxy role is something your users won t interact with or know about but it s a method for you to get around this problem For example say you want a user to be able to pick a user 257 from all the other users in a site You don t want to give the user the right to view all users just list the users in this particular context To execute the script a user will need the List portal members permission to be able to get a list of members but you don t want to give this to anonymous users The script that executes that command will need to be given a higher proxy role probably Member To do this go to the script in the ZMI click the Proxy tab and click Member If this script is based on the file system then this information can be added in the metadata file
172. P a combination of Linux Apache MySQL and PHP or Perl In this paradigm data is stored in a table in the 318 database and a scripting language provides the application layer to pull the content out of the database and put it into templates You search the content by sending queries to the database in SQL using SELECT statements Plone does this differently with the use of an object database Any content item can contain any attributes of any type and the underlying object database takes care of persisting those attributes in the database For searching all the objects are then indexed in the portal_catalog tool You have to specifically tell the catalog exactly what attributes you d like to index Instead of doing SQL calls you d instead use the catalog to examine the indexes This difference can be confusing in the development stage especially since relationships be tween objects aren t created and maintained as they would be in a relational database ap plication Instead there are two common ways to maintain a reference using a catalog to maintain the relationship through keywords or other values or using a folder to group content Archetypes which Pll discuss in Chapter 13 allows you maintain relationships easily It does so through the catalog 11 1 2 4 Searching the Catalog Of course the biggest question is how to search the catalog and use the results The first of these tasks depends upon the indexes so I cover
173. Plone Folder is the product s meta_type and will appear in that field The actions appear as a list of dictionaries for each action and it s again straightforward with key value pairings for all the properties of an action I just showed the first action here View but by now this information should be familiar to you 11 1 1 5 Creating a New Content Type from an Existing Type Repurposing is taking the information for an existing content type and creating multiple slightly different copies of the same type If you wanted to make a type that was almost the same as a news item but not quite then repurposing may be a quick and simple option The one big drawback of this approach is that you can t really change much beyond the actions the skins and some of content type settings So before you proceed down this path please be aware that you re limited to these points you can t add new fields or attributes for example I ve seen many e mails on the mailing list saying Tve done this much but now I want to change the attributes of my press release So consider this a warning You can t If you want to do more check out writing content types in the next two chapters Say you wanted to make a press release type that s like a news item but it does the following e It has the name Press Release in the drop down list It has a different icon It has a different workflow from a news item It has a different view It keep
174. Plone site its look is entirely up to you Take for example the list of sites available at http www plone org about sites these sites each provide a different and custom experience for the user In most cases these sites can easily flip between skins and provide different looks for users Other sites use the power and flexibility of the Plone interface internally for creating and editing content while providing a totally different look to external users I ve seen many questions on mailing lists such as does Plone have to look like a Plone site Can it look one way to one user and another way to another user Can it look like my corporate site The answer to all of these questions is yes the only limit is your imagination and the amount of time you can spend on customizing your site 7 1 1 1 Using Layers Within a Skin A skin is divided into logical collections of templates and scripts called layers Altering these individual collections allows a user to easily add components to a skin or remove them The layers are represented in a skin by a hierarchical list of folders Each layer matches a name of a folder and each folder contains the skin elements For example a skin can have the following layers custom gruf plone_ecmascript plone_wysiwyg The order of the layers in that list is the key factor to how Plone finds the elements When an element such as logo jpg is requested from the skin the skin looks through the layer
175. Python debugger You can call the Python debugger by adding the following line to a piece of code import pdb pdb set_trace TIP It s uncommon in Python to put two lines into one by using a semicolon but here it s handy so that when you come to delete or comment it out later you have only one line to comment That will cause a breakpoint in the code execution and Zope will stop processing and open the debugger This is why you really want to run Plone from a console when developing This doesn t work with a service or a daemon because there s no console to which to connect Now if you re create your problem you ll be dropped into the Python debugger and you can debug your product For example in my now fixed up and correctly importing PloneSilverCity I added the following pdb trace function to the getLanguages method def getLanguages self Returns the list of languages available import pdb pdb set_trace langs Now when you run Plone and connect to the skin something you ll add a moment this function will be called and sure enough on the console you started Zope with you ll see the following Return gt var tmp python2 3 2 3 2 root usr lib python2 3 pdb py 992 set_trace gt None gt Pdb set_trace Pdb You can type help to get a list of help options The two main choices are n for next and s for steppng into an item For example 353 Pdb n gt var zope zeo Products
176. SQL then there s no reason one of these existing SQLStorage formats can t be used If you find that your database adapter needs to do something different then it wouldn t be difficult to alter the SQL statements inside SQLStorage so it worked with another database 13 1 7 Making a Content Type Persist in a Relational Database To persist the data you must set up a relational database and make a Zope connection to it In this case lll use Postgres mainly because I already have a Postgres database for other work available but also because Postgres is good 391 database for all levels of users To connect Zope to Postgres psycopg and ZPsy copg are probably to hardest to pronounce but most commonly used and best sup ported You ll also find Debian packages and even Windows packages available from http initd org software psycopg Install your database adapter and make a database connection from your Zope site to your relational database Again this is covered in great detail in the Zope Book at http zope org Documentation Books ZopeBook 2_6Edition RelationalDatabases stx But the short answer is go to the ZMI add the database connection from the drop down menu and then enter the configuration to point to your relational database If you re connecting as a certain user to your relational database you need to make sure that the user has the privilege ability to create insert update and delete tables The create and delete pri
177. TP This field specifies the port to access Plone for the user The default is port 80 the standard default for a Web server Although this port isn t required without it you won t be able to access Plone with a Web browser If this port is enabled and Plone is running the View Plone button is enabled on the Status page Zope Management HTTP This field specifies the port to access Plone as the man ager The default is port 8080 This port gives you access to Zope Management Interface ZMI for the root of Zope You can still get to this through the HTTP port however it s easier and more convenient to have a separate port If this port is enabled and Plone is running the Manage Plone button is enabled on the Status page FTP Access This field specifies the port to access Plone via FTP The default is blank meaning that this isn t enabled if you want to enable this the usual port is 21 You can use FTP to transfer large files to and from Plone WebDAV Source This field specifies the port to access Plone via WebDAV The default is blank meaning that this isn t enabled if you want to enable this the usual port is 8081 WebDAV is a protocol for remotely authoring content in Plone With WebDAV you re able to perform tasks such as mapping your Plone server to a Windows drive letter 22 2 1 1 2 2 Using the Emergency User Page Chapter 9 covers the Emergency User page but put briefly it allows you to get emergency access
178. The following are the default states Visible Content is created in the visible state All users can find visible content through the search function and can access it directly by visiting the object URL Visible content doesn t show up in the navigation tree Visible content is editable by their owners and site managers Pending Pending content includes items that have been submitted for publishing by site members From a user standpoint pending content behaves like content in the visible state The difference between the two types is that pending items are flagged for review site reviewers are prompted to publish or reject pending items Pending items are editable only by managers and reviewers Published Published items are visible to all site visitors They appear in search results and the navigation tree They may also appear in other areas specific to that type news items for example also appear when you click the news tab Published items are editable only by managers but owners can retract them for editing retracting reverts an item to the public draft state Private Items in the private state are visible and editable only by their owners and others with manager access to the folder in which they exist They won t appear in search results or on the navigation tree for other users Private items are editable by managers 3 1 4 8 2 How Does Content Get Reviewed If you re a reviewer then in the right column of the home
179. This rather confusing state of affairs is brought about by trying to produce easy systems for users to write rich marked up content in plain text without having to use fancy editors Unfortunately in most cases this really doesn t work training is required to understand the formatting Structured text requires quite a bit of understanding in itself because it has a frus trating syntax and doesn t internationalize well If I had to pick one format that I d recommend over all the others Pd pick HTML because it s widely understood and you can use What You See Is What You Get WYSIWYG editors such as Epoz to produce it HTML HTML is the most standard format if a document is entered as HTML it will be rendered in the same format This HTML shouldn t be a complete page but rather a snippet For example lt p gt Here is a sample in lt i gt HTML lt i gt for a demonstration lt p gt Ideally the HTML should also be valid Extensible HTML XHTML to comply with the rest of the Plone system if it s not your pages don t comply with Web standards Entering text as XHTML isn t for the faint of heart so in Chapter 9 you ll see how into integrate rich editing tools into Plone that allow users to easily write content in XHTML The following screen shot shows Plone using Epoz so users don t have to understand HTML enfoldsystems Plain Text Plain text is simple It does no major conversion or manipulation of the text enter
180. This will allow the site administrator to contact you and to send a password to you You can change this e mail address later by editing your member preferences This field is required Password and Confirm Password This is the password you want to use it must be more than four characters and can contain letters numbers and the underscore _ character Passwords are case sensitive in other words SomePassword isn t the same as somepassword These fields are required Send a mail with the password Check this box if you d like your password sent to the e mail address you provided This field is optional Once you ve completed this form click Register to submit your information If you ve made any errors on this form then you ll see a message at the top and the key fields that have an error highlighted In Figure 3 3 I entered a password but didn t enter a value for the Confirm Password field Again this is the standard way that Plone forms will show errors to you 35 navigation B Home Name Password Forgot your password gt New user Registration Form Personal Details Full Name Enter full name eg John Smith User Name Enter a user name usually something like jsmith No spaces or special c Usernames and passwords are case sensitive make sure the caps lock k enabled This is the name used to log in E mail Enter an email address This is necessary in case the password is los
181. URL The user returned by these functions is wrapped in the data from the portal_memberdata tool so that the properties are attributes of the user object So for example the following is a little Script Python object to get the e mail address for the user Bob parameters u context portal_membership getMemberById andy return u email 9 1 2 5 Cookie Authentication By default Plone uses cookie authentication for its users meaning that users must have cookies turned on in their browser to log in This authentication is provided in a Plone site by the cookie_authentication object which contains the necessary functionality for users to log in If you really want to use Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP authentication then you can simply remove this object however I really don t recommend it because HTTP authentication isn t good for most sites This object provides the following items that you can edit from the ZMI e Authentication cookie name This is the name of the cookie that will be used to persist user authentication It does this by persisting a token for the user which preserves a user s login The default is _ac e User name form variable This is the name of the variable in the login form that will contain the username The default is _ac_name 248 User password form variable This is the name of the variable in the login form that will contain the password The default is __ac_password e User name
182. Variables The tal define statement allows variables to be created and reused within the template For example lt p tal define title here title_or_id gt lt i tal content title gt The title lt i gt lt p gt In this example the variable title is created and assigned the result of here title_or_id later the variable title is used in a tal content statement By default the variable is created only locally within the scope of the current element So in the previous example only elements within the paragraph tag can use the title variable You can redefine the variable anywhere within the statement or reuse it in other elements as many times as needed To create a variable to be used globally you can use the prefix global This will allow access to the variable anywhere within the template not just within the defining element For example lt p tal define global title string Foo bar gt lt i tal content title gt The title lt i gt lt p gt lt i tal content title gt We still have a title lt i gt Furthermore Plone defines a large number of global definitions so that users can easily use them in their scripts As with any such definitions theyre subject to change so you should use them carefully These defines mean a large number of global variables are available For example to get the title of your Plone site you can just call the following lt p tal content portal_title gt You can find these de
183. Wars Episode II If you plan to do anything sophisticated with Plone take a day or two to learn the basics of Python Not only will this allow you to customize Plone substantially but it ll also familiarize you with objects and how they interact in the Plone environment Teaching you Python is outside the scope of this book instead I assume you have a basic knowledge of Python That fundamental knowledge of Python will be enough to get you through this book and allow you to customize the Plone installation easily Fortunately Python is an easy programming language to learn on average it takes an experi enced programmer a day to become productive in it New programmers take a little longer If you re installing Plone using the Windows or Mac installers then the correct version of Python will be included To download Python as separate product for almost any operating system go to http www python org The best way to master Python is to try it from the command Python interpreter If you have a Windows installation of Plone there s a link for the Pythonwin a Python Integrated Develop ment Environment IDE already in the Start menu go to Start Programs Plone Pythonwin see Figure 1 2 12 PythonWin Iof x File Edit View Tools Window Help Os BAY mploaoal SEa RS S Pythonin 2 3 2 49 Oct 2 2003 20 02 00 MSC v 1200 32 bit Intel on wing2 Portions Copyright 1994 2001 Mark Hammond mhammond skippinet co
184. Your structure is rigid and the schema doesn t change often al though Archetypes mitigates this aspect You have other applications that can or do access the relational database e There are tools or other requirements that are already fulfilled by a relational database e You have a large amount of repetitive data that s updated often In more a traditional CGI environment you d probably write some SQL statements for pulling the content out of a relational database You can do this if you really want to by us ing ZSQL methods These are useful for many situations and are covered in great detail in the Zope Book and several other books but they can t be used to directly store con tent A ZSQL method stores SQL statements and makes queries into your relational database based upon those queries This is great if you want to make simple queries into rela tional database but it doesn t persist Python classes or content types and it really isn t the Plone way of thinking You ll find an excellent chapter in the Zope Book on this at http zope org Documentation Books ZopeBook 2_6Edition RelationalDatabases stx SQLStorage uses the fact that Archetypes provides an extra layer on top of normal objects to allow for special persistence mechanisms Zope provides many different relational database adapters and SQLStorage plugs into those Currently there are two adapters Postgres and MySQL However if the database supports standard
185. ZEO clients can be connected to the server There s no need for the client and server to be on the same computer as long as the client can make a connection to the server If the clients are on the same computer each client will need to bind to different HTTP and FTP ports to avoid conflict with each other When your client starts it ll connect to the storage specified in your configuration instead of the standard local storage One common requirement is to allow a second computer to run intensive tasks such as updating the catalog packing the database or performing complex lookups without causing the other client s performance to degrade This is actually easy to do using the zopectl function cd var zope bin zopectl debug Starting debugger the name app is bound to the top level Zope object To pack the database you d then do the following 423 gt gt gt app Control_Panel Database manage_pack days 0 Because you re running on a ZEO client you have to tell the server that a change has been made and the caches have been updated To complete the transaction do this gt gt gt get_transaction commit gt gt gt app _p_jar close This is actually a useful thing to do if you re running a high performance site and need to pack the database The site will run a little slower when the transaction is committed but most of the hard work will happen on the client that s performing the pack This
186. _urli return printed Save Changes Taller Shorter Wider Narrower You may upload the source for test_py using the form below Choose an existing file from your lo the file should be a valid script with an optional data block at the start You may click the fo Figure 6 3 Editing a Script Python object You can edit the script directly through the Web If you make a syntax error you ll be told about it after you ve clicked Save Changes as shown in Figure 6 4 144 Edit Bindings Test Proxy History Undo Script Python at Plone portal_skins custom test_ py Saved changes 2004 01 04 15 29 Title Parameter List Bound Names context container script traverse_subpath Last Modified 2004 01 04 15 28 invalid syntax Script Python line 2 Errors an indentation error import Import a standard function and get the HTML request and response objects from Products PythonScripts standard import html quote request container REQUEST RESPONSE request RESPONSE Return a string identifying this script print This is the script meta type s script getIdi if script title print s html quote script title print in container absolute_urli return printed Figure 6 4 A deliberate indentation error in the Script Python object If your Script Python has no errors you can click the Test tab to see what the output is In this case the sample
187. a Plone site if you really wanted to do so Will members of your site add multiple copies of this item If yes then you probably want to write a content type Is this a service that other content types could use If yes then you probably want to write a tool Will you want multiple copies of something but don t want members of your site to be able to add and edit it If yes then you probably want a Zope object However you may want to rethink exactly what you re doing What usually happens is that an application is broken down into several bits one or two tools and one or two content types Chapter 12 covers writing a content type that takes source code such as a snippet of Python and then syntax highlights the code If you needed that syntax highlighting in other places then you could turn it into a tool that multiple content types could use In short tools are the best way to add functionality to a site rather than to any particular content type The definition for creating a content type is usually dictated by the requirement that users need to add edit and control these objects It can be tempting to start creating a content type for every type of object but as with all development you need to be careful Would it possible to use one content type instead of two with only minor differences Knowing how to configure this will come from experience but the next few chapters will certainly help 11 1 1 2 Content Type Configurat
188. abled by default e Skin cookie persistence If a user can select a skin then select this to have the cookie last indefinitely This means that a user will always see this skin when logging into a site This is disabled by default Select the changes you d like to make and click Save to commit the changes To improve performance sites use image and style sheet caching To ensure that you re seeing the new skin as it should be clear your browser s cache on Internet Explorer pressing Ctrl F5 will do this 4 1 3 9 2 Setting a Different Logo Changing the logo of a Plone site from the Plone logo is a simple operation but the steps can get a little confusing so you should following them carefully First access the ZMI click portal_skins click plone_images and then click logo jpg This will open the page for that object It should look something like Figure 4 21 ae Customize E w Filesystem Image at Plone portal_skins plone_images logo jpg Id logo jpg Content Type imagejpeg Dimensions 219 x 57 Size 6 998 bytes Last modified 2002 09 24 16 00 44 GMT 7 Source file CMFPlone skins plone_images logo jpg Customize Select a destination folder and press the button to make a copy of this method i custom Customize 99 Figure 4 21 The default logo This object represents the logo as it s used in Zope In Figure 4 21 you can clearly see infor mation about the image its size its type and its location on the
189. account password to authorize the installation your account must have administrator privileges to do this If your account doesn t have administrator privileges log out and log back in as someone who does and then relaunch the installer You may want to move the installer package to Users Shared before you log out so you can access it from the other account Once the installation is authorized you ll see the screen shown in Figure 2 10 Installer requires that you type your passphrase 24 install Plone Welcome to the Plone Installer S introduction Welcome to the Mac OS X Installation Program You will be se guided through the steps necessary to install this software iil z n Continue Figure 2 10 Welcome to the installer The installer goes through the usual steps for installing software Click the Continue and Go Back buttons at the bottom as necessary most of the steps are self explanatory However when presented with the choice of volumes to install Plone on you must choose the partition on which Mac OS X is installed see Figure 2 11 image img 3294f0211 png Figure 2 11 Choosing the boot volume The installation takes about five minutes depending upon the speed of your computer When the installation has finished Plone isn t started by default The ReadMe rtf file in Applica tions Plone contains a lot of useful information about running and managing your Plone in stallation including how to star
190. ace which gives you a variety of options The GRUF interface is actually quite similar to the user options you have through the Plone control panel You can add and edit users and groups through a pretty straightforward inter face Clicking Users and Groups will allow you to edit these items If you click the Contents tab you ll get a choice of users or groups click Users and then click acl_users Finally you ll get to the actual user folder for a user This looks like the standard user folder You ll see a list of users and to edit a user you just click the username as shown in Figure 9 9 249 Root Folder Contents 5 User Folder at Plone acl_users Users acl users Properties Security S acl_users T temp_folder Zope Corporation Refresh The following users have been defined Click on the name of a user to g Eoia l A luke C ralph Add Delete Figure 9 9 Editing the user record From here you can alter a user s password or the roles You ll note that at this point the group Management is actually represented as a role to ensure that no name collisions occur The name is mangled to be group_Management If you wanted to make this user a member of this group then you could do so here There isn t much you can do here though that you can t do at the highest level so I wouldn t go down to this level unless you have to do something such as change the password or set a domain 9 1 3 Sett
191. ace from the statement For example lt a href tal attributes href context absolute_url gt Link to here lt a gt This will change the href attribute of the link to the result of here absolute_url The href at tribute has already been defined on this element so if a designer opens this page the designer will see a valid element although the link may not make sense until the page is processed Some example output is as follows lt a href http plone org Members andy book gt Link to here lt a gt Since each element can have multiple attributes tal attributes allows you to alter one or more attributes simultaneously by having multiple statements To change multiple attributes at once separate statements with a semicolon If the attribute or statement contains a semicolon you can escape this with another semicolon immediately after it appears For example to change both the href and title element do the following lt a href tal attributes href context absolute_url title context title_or_id gt Link lt a gt The example output is as follows lt a href http plone org Members andy book title Plone Book gt Link lt a gt The tal attributes and tal replace tag are mutually exclusive since replace eliminates the ele ment If the Zope Page Templates system detects this it ll raise a warning and it ll ignore the tal attributes tag If the expression evaluates to default then no change will be made F
192. ad it has just been accessed for example via a link this isn t optional At the beginning of the form you set the variable errors The errors dictionary comes from the state object that s passed into the templates The state object is a common object to all the templates and scripts in this system 6 1 4 1 1 Creating Validators Once the user clicks the Submit button on your form the data will be run through the validators and be validated Validators are optional Data doesn t need to be validated but of course any 156 application should do that as appropriate The Validator tab for a Controller Page Template object gives you a link to the possible validators A validation script is the same as a normal Script Python object that has one extra variable state The state variable is how you can pass results of the validation Listing 6 7 shows a simple validation script for checking to see if you ve been given a number Listing 6 7 Validating That a Number Has Been Provided title A validation script to check we have a number parameters num context REQUEST get num None try int num except ValueError state setError num Not a number new_status failure except TypeError state setError num No number given new_status failure if state getErrors state set portal_status_message Please correct the errors return state This state object contains basic information about what h
193. add a transition enter an ID and click Add at the bottom of the page as shown in Figure 8 8 218 ERRE Properties E oy Workflow Transition at Plone portal_workflow plone_workflow transitions publish Id publish Title Reviewer publishes content Description a Destination state published gt Trigger type C Automatic Initiated by user action C Initiated by WorkflowMethod Script before None Script after None Guard Permission s Review portal content Role s Expression Display in actions box Name formatted Publish URL formatted content_urls content_publish_form Category workflow Save changes Figure 8 8 Transition details page If you now click a transition you ll open the following details for that transition Title This is the title for this transition Description This is the detailed description for this transition Destination state This is the state that will be the target for this transition The initial source state is defined by assigning the transition to the state 219 Trigger type This indicates how the transition will be triggered Automatic means that this will happen as soon as it moves into this state Initiated by user action is the most common choice and means a user has enacted the transition by clicking a link Script before This runs this script before this transition occurs Script after This runs this script after this transition occurs
194. aid View View Of course this is a rather contrived example but it illustrates how you can apply workflow to basic states More transitions can occur here for instance I d be more than happy for someone else to pay my credit card bill for me but that s so unlikely that you shouldn t add it to the workflow or security Before showing how to create and edit workflows I ll now show you the default workflows that ship with Plone 8 1 2 3 Introducing Plone Workflows Plone ships with a set of default workflows for your Plone site These workflows provide a logical way of moving content through a Plone site A standard Plone site ships with two workflows the default workflow and the folder workflow The following sections present each of these in turn 8 1 2 3 1 Default Workflow Chapter 3 covered the default workflow and the default settings when publishing content I discussed the security and settings for each state in the workflow However a picture is worth a thousand words so Figure 8 2 shows the workflow state 210 Owner Reviewer aai Visible Initial d Submit Show gt Pending Hide Y Private lt j Hide Figure 8 2 The default workflow for content that comes with Plone Retract Publish Figure 8 2 shows the main states and the transitions This figure has a gray dotted line that represents a sort of security divider To the left of the line is where owners of the content usually interact with the
195. ake more sense if you re familiar with Python However at each stage I ll explain the concept behind the code so even if you don t understand Python you should be fine The rest of the book references the Template Attribute Language Expression Syntax TALES and Script Python objects so you should take the time to get familiar with them in this chapter You should have a head start I already introduced TALES in the previous chapter because it s used for generating portlets and actions 5 1 1 Understanding the Underlying Templating Machinery Diving straight into how Plone templating works would likely leave you confused so IIl start by going through the underlying templating machinery In an ideal world this is something you shouldn t have to worry about but in practice I ve found that it s the first block people hit when trying to learn to use Plone Plone is rather unique in that everything in Plone is an object If you re unfamiliar with the concept of an object there isn t much to know an object is just a thing that encapsulates some behavior Each object has methods that you can call on the object One example is a computer mouse A computer mouse could have methods such as move click and right click In Plone a document is an object of a particular type All this means is that the document isn t just a static bit of text instead it s something a little more complicated and far more 104 105 use
196. al define results python here portal_catalog searchResults Type Event gt or by calling a separate Script Python object that returns the results For example in the following the script is called getCatalogResults parameters kw enter your query into the kw dictionary return context portal_catalog kw In a page template you d get the results in the following manner 324 lt div tal define results here getCatalogResults gt After doing this you need to loop through the results using the standard tal repeat syntax You can access each metadata column directly in the Template Attribute Language TAL by making a path expression to the column So given a brain you could get the title from the metadata by calling result Title Listing 11 3 shows an example page that loops through the contents of getCatalogResults and displays each item in a simple unordered list Listing 11 3 Looping Through getCatalogResults lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtm1 xml lang en US lang en US metal use macro here main_template macros master 118n domain plone gt lt body gt lt div metal fill slot main gt lt ul tal define results here getCatalogResults gt lt li tal repeat result results gt lt a href tal attributes href result getURL tal content result Title gt lt span tal replace result Description gt lt li gt lt ul gt lt div gt lt body gt lt htm1 gt One
197. al repeat Performing Looping The tal repeat allows looping through objects and is one of the more complicated statements A statement contains the value to be assigned for each iteration of the results separated by a space from the results being iterated through Here s an example of looping lt table gt lt tr tal repeat row context portal_catalog gt lt td tal content row Title gt Title lt td gt lt tr gt lt table gt In this example the expression here portal_catalog returns a list of results Because the repeat starts on the table s row tag for each row in the list of results a new row in the table will be created Rather like tal define each iteration of the results is assigned to a local variable in this case row This example will show one row for every item in the list of results You can access some useful variables from the repeat statement such as the number of the current iteration You can access these through the repeat variable which gets added to the namespace For example to access the current number you use the following lt table gt lt tr tal repeat row context portal_catalog gt lt td tal content repeat row number gt 1 lt td gt lt td tal content row Title gt Title lt td gt lt tr gt lt table gt The full list of variables available in repeat is as follows e index This is the iteration number starting from zero 124 e number This is the iteration n
198. al title_or_id gt lt li gt lt ul gt 5 1 3 2 8 tal replace Adding Text The tal replace statement is similar to tal content with one difference it removes the entire tag For example lt p tal replace context title_or_id gt Some title lt p gt This will render the result of the expression context title_or_id but will remove the paragraph tags from the result This is equivalent to the following 125 lt p tal content here title_or_id tal omit tag gt Some title lt p gt If the element with the tal replace statement contains other elements then all those elements will be replaced You can t use the tal replace statement with tal attributes or tal content theyre mutually exclusive and an error will be raised if you place both on the same element 5 1 3 3 Introducing Execution Order The order that TAL attributes are written isn t the order in which they re executed because they re really XML elements and XML doesn t care about attribute order The order in which they re executed is as follows define condition repeat content replace attributes omit tag You can t use the content and replace statements on the same element because they re mutually exclusive Using the attributes state ment on the same element as a replace or an omit tag is meaningless since the attributes are removed The on error tag isn t mentioned because it ll be used when the first error occurs in any of the previous el
199. al_workflow portal_skins and portal_actions for example Zope object This is an object that lives inside Zope It can be accessed through the Zope Management Interface ZMI and provides functionality for users However it isn t something that s accessed or controlled by Plone If you go to a Plone site and access the ZMI you ll see a large number of these objects in the ZMI Tools are one such object the Plone site is another and the cache managers are another A great deal of overlap exists between these objects for example Plone has an image content type and Zope has an image object The two do similar tasks and work in a similar way but only one can be accessed through Plone NOTE Although everything inside a Plone site in the Zope Object Database ZODB is a Zope object I use this term to describe objects that aren t tools or instances of a content type 305 11 1 1 1 When to Make Content Types So you re building your killer application in Plone that s going to bring you fame and fortune How do you structure it and what do you build Well this depends upon what you re building and you ve factored out development so far The following questions may help you decide Are you just changing skins and simple behaviors such as portlets You can do almost anything you want except write a tool or a content type in a skin You can change all the Cascading Style Sheets CSS templates and scripts that come with
200. all Any string for example Start Date for a field start_date A list of modes as strings by default it s view edit True or False True or False For example view visible edit hidden means that the view will show but the edit page will hide the value 372 13 1 1 3 Some Example Field and Widget Combinations This section contains some useful combinations that seem to be commonly used and that you may find as useful examples For this example make a drop down list of your favorite fruits You ll define the vocabulary attribute as a list of strings Each of the values in the list is a string of the fruit type hence the field type is a StringField Because youre defining the widget as a SelectionWidget it ll show up as a drop down list like so StringField fruit vocabulary Apple Orange Mano Banana widget SelectionWidget label Favourite Fruit The ImageField is a useful one for creating and maintaining images in a Plone site To have a nice simple field that users can upload images into use the following ImageField portrait widget ImageWidget label My picture The following is quite a complicated content type Most content types will have one main field that can take data If you think of the basic document type you ll notice a body field that you enter and edit This one body field is the main text of the content type So
201. alue in the form Then click Save Changes and all new users will no longer be selected The portal_groupdata tool contains the corresponding data for groups The default properties for a group are as follows e title A title for the group e description A description for the group e email An e mail address e listed Whether to list the group to users These tools store the user and group data on these tools and not in the main acl_users folder If you want to move user information between Plone servers then you ll need to move these tools as well just moving the acl_users folder isn t enough You can do this by importing and exporting these tools however before you import into the new Plone site you must delete the existing tool or an error will be raised 9 1 2 3 Portal Membership The portal_membership tool handles a few more properties specifically it matches the member data with the members Accessing portal_membership from the ZMI gives a large number of options the following are the most important e Set members folder This is the folder to put member folders into This folder must exist By default this is Member e Control creation of member areas By default a member area for each user is created when joining That creation is optional however Uncheck Turn folder creation off to disable this The default is that it s on Under the Actions tab you ll find a whole series of actions that relate to users when they
202. anagement Interface ZMI and click por tal skins You ll see two key screens in the ZMI the first the Contents tab shows all the folders and file system directory views FSDVs located within this tool see Figure 7 1 Contents Properties View Security Undo Owner Plone Skins Tool at Plone portal skins Type Name Size j cmf_legacy G custom ij gruf plone_3rdParty plone_calendar plone_content jj plone_ecmascript plone_form_scripts j plone_forms j plone_images plone_portlets plone_prefs j plone_scripts plone_styles plone_templates plone_ui_slots plone_wysiwyg Rename cut Copy Delete Import Export Select All Figure 7 1 The contents of the portal_skins tool in a standard Plone installation Le OLE CI Le OL OL OL OL OO OO iLi 167 All of the folders and file system directory views on the Contents tab aren t layers by default but now you can turn them into layers Further the second important screen the Properties tab shows all the skins and layers you ve defined in your Plone site see Figure 7 2 Contents Properties View Security Undo Ownership Plone Skins Tool at Plone portal_ skins Skin selections Name Layers in order of precedence plone ecmascript plone _wysiwyg plone prefs plone portlets plone templates plone 3rdParty CMFTopic ha l Plone Default plone ecmascript plone _wysiwyg plone prefs
203. anel selecting Database Management Data fs var You can use your own scripts or tools for backing up or use a tool from Zope As an example of the first option Listing 14 1 shows a Linux bash script I use to back up a Zope site Listing 14 1 Bash Script for Backing Up bin bash script to copy gzip and then copy Zope databases to remote server make up a filename fn uuidgen fs copy it locally you 1l want to change the path cp var zope test var Data fs tmp fn gzip the file up gzip tmp fn scp over to my backup server and then remove the temporary file change the destination file scp tmp fn gz backup backups agmweb ca Zope rm tmp fn gz For the second of these choices a Python script called repozo py is available in the Zope Object Database ZODB for backing up You can find this script online at http cvs zope org ZODB3 Tools repozo py It works quite happily on Windows and Linux This script can do a whole host of things such as full backups incremental backups and database restores To back up a database with this script you first need to make a directory to store the backups in the following examples this directory is home backups However this location is up to you To do a complete backup of a database run the following python repozo py B F v r home backups f var zope test var Data fs looking for files b w last full backup and 2003 11 21 18 33 17 no files
204. archResults print Number of results len results return printed 323 NOTE len is a Python function that tells you the length of an item To get just the first ten items use a Python slice like so results context portal_catalog searchResults return results 10 To do further filtering you could manually filter the whole list like so results context portal_catalog searchResults for result in results 10 Title returns a string so we can use the find method of a string to look for occurence of a word if result Title find Plone gt 1 print result Title return printed To get a random object from the catalog use the random module like so import random results context portal_catalog searchResults r random choice results object r getObject return object 11 1 2 5 Tying It All Together Making a Search Form In the previous discussion I showed you how to get some results out of the catalog and I used Script Python objects to demonstrate that But you re probably asking yourself how can I do this from a page template I ll start at the other end and first assume you have the results from a catalog query and loop through them in a page template using tal repeat This is how a lot of portlets are put together the published and events portlets both just do queries and then show the results Those portlets embed the query in a page template either by calling it directly lt div t
205. around which contains informa tion about the status of the object the success of any validations and any message that are to be passed The following sections run through these steps to show how a form can be validated and then I ll show a full example in the E Mail Example Sending E Mail to a Webmaster section 6 1 4 1 Creating a Sample Form and Associated Scripts The beginning of this process is a form Although this is actually a Controller Page Template object it s written using standard TAL code To add one select Controller Page Template from the now familiar drop down box and give it an ID of test_cpt A form in Plone is actually a rather lengthy piece of code if you want to utilize all the options available to you This piece of code is reproduced in full in Appendix B and is the code used in the later example lt form method post tal define errors options state getErrors tal attributes action template id gt lt input type hidden name form submitted value 1 gt lt form gt Looking at this code you should note that to work in the framework a few minor differences exist between this and what you may consider a standard form First the form is set up to sub mit to itself this isn t optional Second a special hidden variable exists called form submitted The Controller Page Template object checks the request variable for the value form submitted to see if the form has been submitted If inste
206. ars telascience org listspacer gif transparent padding 0 height 21px border 0 margin 0 O 1px 6px clear both To set the image at the left end of the tab you use the start image You set the start image by setting the value on the li element rather than the anchor element like so portal globalnav li display block float left height 21px background url liststart gif transparent no repeat padding 0 0 0 33px margin O0 0 5em 0 0 Finally you set the right part of the tab by adding an image to the anchor element You do this by altering the anchor element inside the tab The following code shows where you set the background image to be the right part portal globalnav li a display block float left height 21px background url listitem gif transparent right top padding 0 33px 0 0 border 0 line height 2em color black font size 90 margin 0 Now you ve replaced the rather standard looking Plone tabs with great looking buttons 204 7 1 4 4 Creating the Splash Page This page has one other key element The front page of the site is a splash page which shows a nice graphic and invites the user to enter You can add this by going into the ZMI and removing the index html object that s normally there Once removed create a new file called index_html In that file create custom code to make the home page including a custom CSS The main element of that is one image plac
207. as happened during the validation chain The state object stores the errors for each field the status and any other values For example if the number given can t be turned into an integer you set the status to failure and give an error message for the field using the setError method Later this error message will be shown for the field At the end of the script any errors returned so far are retrieved via the getErrors method To add the previous script click portal_skins click custom and select Controller Validator from the drop down box Give it an ID of test_validator You can now return to the Validation tab of your Controller Page Template object and add a pointer to this validation script as shown in Figure 6 7 157 Edit Test Validation Actions Properties History fe Controller Page Template at Plone portal_skins custom test_controller Form and Script Validators This tool lets you set or override the default sequence of validators that are executed when a Cc Controller Python Script is executed Learn more Edit Form Script Validator Overrides Template Context Button Yalidators I test_controller Any ftest validator Save Delete Add a New Form f Script Validator Override Template test_controller Context type Any Button Yalidators Add Figure 6 7 Adding the test_validator to the Controller Page Template object You have a couple of choices for a validation In the example
208. ase It s like creating a file on the file system realizing it s wrong and then leaving it there To solve this the portal_factory tool allows you to temporarily create objects It ll create a temporary object and then let you edit it Only once you ve clicked the edit button will your object be created To assign an object to portal_factory go to the portal_factory tool and in the form select all the content types for which you d like to use this tool The only catch is that you must ensure your edit scripts correctly integrate with the tool as shown in this example 12 1 1 9 Installing the Product into Plone You have a standard way for installing a product into Plone you go to the Plone control panel and click the product to install it That script uses the portal_quickinstaller tool to do the installation For this product to work you need to expose functionality that the tool can read After all you want as many people to use the product as possible If you re writing something that s for internal use only and you re never going to distribute to anyone else you can skip this stage But you ll need to do these steps by hand anyway and it s always better to have a script for the installation NOTE Quick Installer makes an external method of this install function and runs it for you behind the scenes It performs a few other tasks as well This means you could make an external method to do this if you wanted That s why the
209. ate the cache contains an old version Users accessing the site will get the old version rather than the new version With caches under your control such as Squid you can send PURGE commands to the caching server to tell it to remove the objects from the cache For the Accelerated HTTP Cache Manager add the URLs of the caches to the Notify URLs via PURGE An example is as follows http 192 168 1 1 80 example org In this example the IP is the address of the cache and the domain is the site to be purged For Squid to run the PURGE directive you must ensure that Squid is configured If Squid was on localhost this would be as follows acl PURGE method purge http_access allow localhost http_access allow purge localhost http_access deny purge http_access deny all The Caching Policy Manager currently has no PURGE mechanism however the Collective has a new tool called CMFSquidTool that does this work for you It watches for changes on content and when that occurs sends a purge to a Squid cache for you I haven t tried this new tool yet but it s definitely worth a look if you re using Squid 14 1 2 12 3 Avoiding Having to Clean Squid Caches The best way to avoid cleaning caches is to be more selective on the caching Both the Caching Policy Manager and the RAM Cache Manager provide methods for being selective about what to return from a cache Both the Caching Policy Manager and Squid support the Vary tag If a Vary tag is spe
210. ated When the end is reached it ll call that object if it can be called If it s a noncallable object it ll get the object s string value and this is what will be returned If at any time there s an error in this lookup the most common being that the requested attribute doesn t exist then it ll move onto the alternate expression if there is one You can specify an alternate expression by separating it with a pipe symbol For example context folderA title context folderB title The previous example will render folderA s title if it exists or folderB s title if the first one doesn t exist It ll repeat this process for each expression until there are no more expressions or until one of them evaluates successfully 5 1 1 2 2 Using Not Expressions A not expression has the prefix not at the beginning and simply inverses the evaluation of the TALES expression that follows the prefix Because the Zope Page Templates system doesn t have an if statement you can use this to test for the opposite of a previous condition For example not context message nothing 108 5 1 1 2 3 Using Nocall Expression By default when a path expression reaches the last item in the path sequence it calls the item if possible The nocall prefix prevents this from happening A nocall expression is rarely used in Plone but it does have occasional uses For example you can use it to reference another object but not render it Here
211. ates usr bin python from Products PageTemplates PageTemplate import PageTemplate import sys def test file raw_data open file r read pt PageTemplate pt write raw_data if pt _v_errors 154 print Error in file for error in pt _v_errors 1 print error if __name__ __main__ if len sys argv lt 2 print python check py file files sys exit 1 else for arg in sys argv 1 test arg For every file passed through to the script the ZMI will compile the page template and see if there are any TAL errors Taking the bad_template pt file from Listing 6 4 you ll get an error python zpt py tmp bad_template pt xxx Error in tmp bad_template pt TAL TALDefs TALError bad TAL attribute contents at line 10 column 39 In this case it has picked up on the incorrect spelling of tal content as tal contents This error is something HTML Tidy doesn t catch Unfortunately the processing stops at the first syntax error If there are multiple errors only the first is picked up meaning sometimes you have to check the syntax several times 6 1 4 Using Forms Forms are an integral part of any site and almost everyone needs to create a method for creating and altering forms in your Plone site With the form framework in Plone you can change the validation that process forms have where they take the user to and so on This framework isn t just specifically designed for stand alo
212. ation is turned on however then users can give only a name username and e mail as shown in Figure 9 8 244 home software chapters feedback you are here home navigation i i 3 Registration Form 2 Home 2 Personal Details login Full Name Enter full name eg John Smith Name Password User Name Enter a user name usually something like jsmith No spaces or special log in passwords are case sensitive make sure the caps lock key is not enable gt Forgot your E mail password Enter an email address This is necessary in case the password is lost Y not give the address away to any third parties or expose it anywhere gt New user password will be generated and e mailed to you to complete the regis Figure 9 8 Registering a user with e mail validation turned on After clicking the link in the e mail they ll then be taken to a login screen and the registration process can continue as normal To enable validation in the Plone interface click plone setup and select Portal Settings Under Password Policy select Generate and e mail members initial password and click Save to commit the changes If you d like to view or edit the e mail users get then you can edit the page template that generates it You can find the template by clicking plone_skins clicking plone_templates and then clicking registered_notify_template Begin Sidebar If you want to add any other actions for users before they jo
213. ay freezope org Software VerboseSecurity As the name suggests it provides a detailed error message when you can t do something in Plone because you aren t authorized If you have given too lax of security settings this product won t help you though VerboseSecurity can run on a Plone server without causing a performance hit so you can happily run this on your production and development server There might be a minor bit of extra overhead caused when someone isn t allowed to perform something and an error is raised and the new security modules kicks in However since the error message is detailed you won t want to expose this to users It explains far more about your system than a user should ever know It ll never reveal passwords just 263 information about the users roles and permissions Of course your production server will always be working perfectly so there will be no need to install it on your production server The original implementation of the permission checking routines were written in Python As the API stabilized and the developers realized the overhead that security caused it was rewrit ten in C By default the faster C implementation is running but this means that VerboseSecu rity can t patch the permission module to be more verbose I ve rarely had to turn to this level of detail though usually I ve found I can get enough information already However if you need more information you ll need
214. back regarding Generating to You can now close Pythonwin and restart Plone 13 1 6 Testing the Content Type To test your content type you ll need to restart Plone ensure that the product is registered as usual and install it using the Add Remove Products screen To add a new Word document go to the Plone interface and in the drop down box select Word Document it s pretty obvious since you ll also see a little Word logo Next select your file from the file system and click Save to upload your file Once this has been done the file will be uploaded and you ll be taken to the view page This may take a little bit longer than you expect it has to upload the document to the server and then perform the transformation But you ll be taken to the view page for your content type and sure enough it ll be shown in HTML as shown in Figure 13 4 387 contents properties references Professional Resume Title Professional Resume Body Max Benson Experience 199071994 Arbor Shoe Southridge SC National Sales Manager Pad Increased sales from 50 million to 100 million Pad Doubled sales per representative from 5 million to 10 million Figure 13 4 The uploaded file Now that it s uploaded you ll want to edit it for this your best bet is to use External Editor If you have External Editor installed on your local client click the pencil icon in the top right corner and the file will open in Word as sho
215. bject usually the main content such as the binary contents of an image or the text contents of the template To create an object in your empty FSDV just go to the skins directory and start adding files that match the objects you want to make Once the file is loaded into Zope as a Zope object that extension is stripped off For example some_template pt becomes a file system page template with the ID some_template Table 7 4 describes the extensions Table 7 4 Extensions Extensions Object Type Equivalent Zope Ob ject pt zpt Atml htm Filesystem Page Template Page Template cpt Controller Filesystem Page Tem Controller Page Tem plate plate Py Filesystem Script Python Script Python Cpy Controller Python Script Controller Python Script Vpy Controller Validator Controller Validator doc pdf swf jar Filesystem File File cab ico jS csS Filesystem File File gif jpg jpeg png Filesystem Image Image props Filesystem Properties Object Folder with Properties zsql Filesystem Z SQL Method ZSQL Method dtml Filesystem DTML Method DTML Method So to get an image in your directory view dump in a gif or jpeg file If you want a Script Python object then add a file ending in py 7 1 3 6 Setting File System Object Metadata Extra content for an object such as title security or cache is stored in a separate file That file is given the same filename as the original file with metadata added to the en
216. ble means that from a few style sheets users can completely customize many aspects of a site 101 Again Chapter 7 covers what all the elements do in this section I ll quickly show you how to change the CSS code for a Plone site First access the ZMI click portal_skins click plone_styles and then click ploneCustom css This opens the page for that object This style sheet is actu ally straightforward in fact it s empty Plone is using the cascading property of CSS Because the Hypertext Markup Language HTML for Plone first imports plone css and then ploneCus tom css any changes to the latter overrides the standard style sheet Why is this a good thing It means you can make small incremental changes to ploneCustom css without breaking or altering the core style sheet So to customize the ploneCustom css object click portal_skins click plone_styles and then click ploneCustom css Next click the Customize button Again this object has been customized and instead of being at portal_skins plone_styles ploneCustom css you ll notice you re now at portal_skins custom ploneCustom css Because file objects can now be edited through the Web you can directly edit the style sheet through the Web As an example make the background have an image in the middle of it this isn t necessarily the best user interface but it s a clear example of how to customize the CSS code First you need to upload an image to Plone To do this cl
217. box on the left shows users what options they have This means that using the Accelerated HTTP 417 Cache Manager or caching the whole template using the RAM Cache Manager wouldn t work This would cause users to see others users options Instead the ZopeZen skin caches the getNewsAndReplies Script Python object by adding it to the RAM Cache Manager Doing so ensures that the majority of the expensive work rendering the page is cached Since the news items will be same for every user there s no point in caching based on any REQUEST variables so AUTHENTICATED_USER was removed from the list of REQUEST variables for the cache Profiling the front page reveals that without the cache it can produce 1 06 requests per second With the caching the site can produce 4 96 requests per second which is a significant difference for a minor change 14 1 2 12 Using Caching Servers Since you can now send cache headers according to sophisticated rules you can now use an other server to cache requests for Plone As fast as Zope is it ll never be faster than Apache Squid or IIS for serving out content These servers can serve static and cached content quickly and simply Partly it s because these servers are written in C but it s also because they do less work for each request There are no security checks database lookups or language negoti ations to be performed Also since you ve read Chapter 10 you ll also already have a proxy s
218. ce multiple requests have been run select the Aggregates tab which is the easiest to understand In the list of pages called will be the URL tested Click that link to view the results for that URL You should now see something like Figure 14 4 406 Change the display to Show min max as well http localhost total 3 23s 13 4 Elapsed Time Spent Percentage Action 1 71995 19 0 1 71995 0 39475 1 0 browserDefault 2 1281s 7 99955 71 1 document_view 1 29275 7 3 3 42085 0 17565 0 5 hide_columns 0 39125 3 2 3 9876s 0 36065 0 9 navigationParent 0 36615 3 8 4 71445 0 1930s 0 5 selectedTabs 0 1110s 2 6 5 01835 0 76255 2 0 breadcrumbs 0 0398s 0 996 5 8206s 0 5130s 1 3 showEditableBorder 0 1435s 2 896 6 47715 0 8398s 2 2 toLocalizedTime 4 48525 23 3 11 8021s 0 2573s 0 79 getPreviousMonth 12 0624s 0 146is 0 5 getNextMonth 1 1671s 27 1 xl Figure 14 4 The results of the profile In this example you ll see the elements that Call Profiler is able to detect Unfortunately the results can be a little complicated to decipher At first glance the results add up to more than 100 percent In this case document_view takes 71 1 percent of the processing time However this is misleading because values below that figure relate to document_view not the whole page In this example for the whole page everything before browserDefault takes 19 9 percent of the request T
219. cess of paying a credit card bill into a workflow The next step is to think about roles and security for this credit card bill This workflow now contains the business logic for an application for processing credit cards 8 1 2 2 Understanding Roles and Security in Workflow In any complicated system you ll have users of all roles and groups These roles give Plone a large amount of flexibility with security but they also can make it more complicated Chapter Paid 208 9 covers security local roles and groups but this section covers some key points about how these topics relate to workflow When a piece of content moves from one workflow state to another the workflow process can change the security settings on that content The security settings determine what user can perform what action on what piece of content By manipulating the security settings through workflow you can cause the security to change on a piece of content through its life cycle Users from static systems or Zope often get confused because in Zope all pieces of content have the same security settings throughout their life cycle Returning to the credit card example you can infer the security settings for the credit card bill One way to represent this is to produce a table that expands the security in general terms for the transitions that can occur at each of the various states as shown in Table 8 1 Table 8 1 The Transitions and Entities That Can Make Them
220. changing the CSS for these elements you can change the tabs appearance Later in the Case Study Examining the NASA Skin section IIl show how to change these tabs into images By using CSS you can also move any element s location with the position attribute Next move your tabs to the top of the screen above the logo and search box To do this you use the absolute value of the position which lets you define the position by using the left right top and bottom attributes Add the following to your ploneCustom style sheet to place the portal tabs at the top of your Plone site portal globalnav position absolute top Oem This is a powerful technique for moving elements You have multiple options for positioning the elements including relative positioning but that takes a little work with CSS to get the positioning just right 186 7 1 2 9 Moving the Left and Right Slots I discussed the left and right slots in Chapter 4 and I ve shown you how to add a new slot to the list of slots You may have noticed that the terms left and right slots can be a little misleading The default is to show the slots in those positions but it s easy to move them NOTE This works only when you re using the Plone Tableless skin This isn t the default setting so you ll have to change the skin in the portal_skins tool as discussed earlier in the Managing Skins with the portal_skins Tool For example if you wanted to move
221. cified Squid will extract the headers specified in the Vary tag from the request Those headers are then checked against the cache if they match the page is returned from the cache If they don t the request is passed on down the chain to Plone As an example in the Caching Policy Manager the Vary tag has the value of Accept Language When a request comes into Squid the page will be cached according to the Accept Language setting in that request header When a user requests a page with a different setting a new page will be returned This means you can cache the pages based upon language ke The least aggressive value for Vary is which will cache any request that s the same as any other request Different requests are passed straight on to Plone Although this is the least aggressive caching system it does ensure that the user will see only up to date content The RAM Cache Manager REQUEST methods are the same concept as Vary except the tool accepts a list of Zope request variables The result of a cache lookup is then based upon those 420 variables The default value is AUTHENTICATED_USER which means that each authenticated users will see their own versions of the cache Nonregistered users anonymous will all see the same content 14 1 3 Using Zope Enterprise Objects The final key to scaling and administering Plone is using Zope Enterprise Objects ZEO This is a key tool in so many areas of Plone for development and
222. cking the ZODB The ZODB records every change to every object in the system Each time an object changes a new copy is appended to the end of the ZODB file That file is the Data fs file I discussed in the previous section If the database has large pieces of content or has a large number of changes then this can cause the ZODB to really grow A large ZODB isn t a problem it works just fine and startup times are similar unless the index has been removed Pack times will get longer the larger the database is and it does make sense to occasionally go and remove those old copies of objects that are no longer used to make the database smaller It s key to remember that all you re doing when you re packing is cleaning your existing database and throwing out some old copies 397 14 1 1 2 1 The Old 2GB Limit on Databases A problem exists with older versions of Python before Python 2 1 on Unix and before Python 2 2 on Windows which weren t capable of large file support When the ZODB reaches 2 gigabytes GB the Plone site dies and can t be restarted To test if you re running a Python version that has large file support open a file in Python and see if its size is reported as an integer or a long like so gt gt gt import os gt gt gt from stat import ST_SIZE gt gt gt type os stat tmp test txt ST_SIZE lt type long gt This Python has large file support enabled and can support files larger t
223. click Files and get the latest Archetypes release In my example this is archetypes 1 2 5 rc4 tgz You ll need to unzip it like so tar zxf archetypes 1 2 5 rc4 tgz cd archetypes 1 2 5 rc41 At this point you ll need to decide what to install The minimum to install is the Archetypes directory and the generator and validation modules To install these modules move them into the Products directory of your instance home Again in my case this is var zope so my command is as follows mv Archetypes var zope Products mv generator var zope Products mv validation var zope Products 362 ArchExample and ArchGenXML are both optional and you don t need them for Plone to work however I cover both of these as examples in this chapter so you ll probably want to install them To install ArchExample move the ArchExample product into the Products directory of your instance home like so cd mv ArchExample var zope Products If you want to use ArchGenXML you don t need to install it anywhere in particular so place it in any directory where you won t forget it I usually just place it into the Products directory of my instance home along with everything else It doesn t do any harm there and I won t forget it For example mv ArchGenXML var zope Products As stated in the ArchGenXML documentation ArchGenXML does require PyXML to be installed Again if you used an installer such as the Windows or Mac
224. congit m Figure 4 20 Site actions Similarly document actions are in portal_actions and have the category document_actions You can again edit the order icons and text and add or remove icons from the interface all through editing those actions 4 1 3 9 Changing Images and CSS The look and feel of a Plone site is a big subject that takes three chapters of its own Chapters 5 7 The following sections cover the basics and rather than trying to explain everything just show how to quickly make a few changes A skin is a series of CSS images templates and scripts that come together to form a look and feel for the user The idea of a skin is that you can change the skin and hence change the look and feel of a site without having to change the content 4 1 3 9 1 Changing the Skin You can change the default skin for a site using the portal skin form which is accessible from the control panel You can represent a Plone site in a few different ways by applying different colors style sheets and templates to a site 98 The portal skin form provides the following three choices e Default skin This is the default skin to show to a user when they access the site There is only one skin that s given by default which is Plone Default e Skin flexibility This sets whether you re going to allow users the choice of choosing their skin If this is enabled a user can go to their preferences and choose a new skin This is en
225. content To the right of the line is where reviewers usually interact with the content NOTE The owner of the content is the person who created the content originally An owner is one particular member of a Plone site Although many members exist in a Plone site only one person can be the owner of a piece of content in a Plone site Because the owner role is calculated when an object is created the owner role is special Just like with the credit card example an associated set of permissions exists for the default workflow Table 8 4 outlines all the permissions and the states Table 8 4 The Default Workflow Permissions Pub State Anonymous Authenticated Owner Manager Reviewer Pending View View View Edit Edit Private Edit Edit View 211 State Anonymous Authenticated Owner Manager Reviewer Published View View View Edit View Visible View View Edit Edit View View refers to the following permissions Access Contents Information and View Edit refers to the following permission Modify Portal Content As you can see from Table 8 4 by default only when content is in the private state is it truly hidden from everyone else When content is in the published state only the manager can edit it Later in the Editing Permissions section I ll show you how to change these permissions easily through the Web 8 1 2 3 2 Folder Workflow I also discussed the folder workflow in Chapter 3 when I covered publishing content with you
226. could be a totally separate machine from your site and is an excellent way to distribute the load For debugging getting to this prompt is extremely useful as you can now examine the objects inside that app object You ll find that they match the objects you see in the ZMI For example gt gt gt app objectIds acl_users Control_Panel temp_folder What s the API for that app object You can use the built in dir function in Python to examine the object and even use the _doc__ method to see the comment strings contained there in like so dir app gt gt gt dir app COPY COPY__roles__ Control_Panel DELETE gt gt gt app valid_roles __doc__ gt Return list of valid roles One good example of a ZEO based application is CMFNewsFeed http sf net projects collective This connects to Plone using a ZEO client That sepa rate client then goes and collects all the news feeds it can find and inserts the data into the site By doing all the collection and cataloging in a separate process this ensures that the main site s performance isn t degraded ZEO is an indispensable tool for developers It allows you to interact programmatically with your server while it s running If at this point you re still confused about Plone and the object database then for experienced programmers ZEO is normally an eye opener 14 1 3 3 Load Balancing and Failover Although ZEO provi
227. ct the object is executed in its context The term context is something you ll hear a lot of in Plone It s merely the current context of the object being executed In this case it s Plone The context changes a lot as you move through a Plone site If you called the URL Plone Members login_form in a browser then the context would be Plone Members As mentioned traversal is how you can programmatically access objects in Plone in the same manner as you do in a URL This is similar to accessing items in a file system if you wanted to access a picture in My Documents on Windows you d enter a directory such as c Documents and SettingsandymMy DocumentsMy Portrait jpg You could access an object in Plone by entering Members andy My Portrait jpg This would work if you had a series of folders and objects that looked like the following Members _ andy _ My Portrait jpg In the file system version you go through the computer s hard drive directory by directory In Plone the same thing happens it s just that Members and andy are objects One catch is that Zope is case sensitive In Windows you can type My Portrait jpg or my portrait jpg That won t work in Plone however you have to provide the same case as the object ID For this reason it s recommended that you try to keep all URLs lowercase so your users have less chance of making a mistake Plone and Zope have added a twist called acquisition to this whole publishing syst
228. cts that provide extra functionality to Plone You ll find a directory of Python packages at http www python org pypi 10 1 1 Open Source Licensing Most open source packages are released with a particular license that describes how the pack age may be used Before you use any third party code you should check the license to see if it s compatible with your needs Plone is licensed under the General Public License GPL which you can find at http www gnu org copyleft gpl html and inside the LICENSE txt file of your Plone installa tion If you re the developer of a Plone Web site then you can happily create and develop Web sites without any issue Users of your Web site will never have to worry about the license for the code they just use the Web site normally As with most licenses the license limits the redistribution and sale of other people s code Usually licenses are easy to read and understand but if you re unsure you should probably have a qualified legal professional look at the license I ll limit myself to describing the main licenses that exist in the Zope world and point you to where you can find more information Zope Public License http zope org Resources ZPL Python License http http www python org 2 3 license html GPL http www gnu org copyleft gpl html Lesser GPL http www gnu org copyleft lesser html 10 1 2 Installing Plone Products A product is a module to install into Plone that provides more
229. d If the original file is logo jpg for example then the metadata will be contained in logo jpg metadata The metadata file is in the Windows ini format of key value pairs This format has been extended to contain information about forms for the Form Controller object which you ll see in the next section All the choices even the presence of this file are optional The following is a sample file default title Test object 197 RAMCache proxy Manager cache security Access contents information 1 Manager Anonymous The following are the values you can set in that file title This is the title that s applied to the object in the ZMI and in Plone this will show up in the Plone templates cache This is the ID of the cache object in which you d like the object to be cached By default Plone comes with two cache objects a RAM Cache Manager and a HTTP Cache Manager Chapter 14 discusses the function of these two objects proxy This is the proxy role you d like to apply to this object See Chapter 9 for more information security This is the security area which allows multiple lines of security settings The key contains the name of the permission The right side contains the acqui sition setting followed by the roles delimited by commas For example View 0 Manager means only users with the member and manager role can see an object and security settings aren t acquired for that permission 7 1 3 7 U
230. d ab or Apache Bench This is a tool that comes with the Apache server If you have Apache 1 3 or later installed on Linux ab is included On Windows it s included with the Apache 2 release Running ab is straightforward just pass the uniform resource locator URL you want to test like so ab http localhost The ab tool will output some information first about the site you tested like so Benchmarking localhost be patient done Server Software Zope unreleased Server Hostname localhost Server Port 80 Document Path Document Length 20594 bytes Then it ll output some aggregate statistics like so Concurrency Level 1 Time taken for tests 0 771151 seconds Complete requests 1 Failed requests 0 Write errors 0 Total transferred 20933 bytes HTML transferred 20594 bytes Requests per second 1 30 sec mean Time per request 771 151 ms mean Time per request 771 151 ms mean across all concurrent requests Transfer rate 25 94 Kbytes sec received This tells you how long the request took the number of errors and the time it took to get a request which is probably the key statistic The most useful value to reference is usually the Requests per second Requests per second which in this example is 1 30 sec The ab tool provides some more statistics that give information on how long it took to connect process and get a result for each request For example Connection Times ms mi
231. d ensure that your permissions have been applied to existing objects Now owners can edit their documents while they re in the published state 8 1 3 2 8 Editing Workflow Scripts Scripts are an opportunity for the developer to perform some logic upon a transition That logic can be almost anything you want You could be checking that some conditions have been performed for example is the document spell checked or that some special actions have been performed When the object is transitioned the script will be called When a script is called one extra parameter is passed to that script That extra parameter provides access to all sorts of transition related elements and attributes That parameter is called the state_change parameter and it has the following attributes status This is the workflow status object This is the object being transitioned in the workflow workflow This is the current workflow object for the object being transitioned transition This is the current transition object being executed old_state This is original state of the object new_state This is destination state of the object kwargs These are keyword arguments passed to the doActionFor method getHistory This is a method that takes no parameters and returns a copy of the object s workflow history getPortal This is a method that takes no parameters and returns the root Plone object ObjectDeleted folder This tells workflow that the objec
232. des the ability to run Plone on many servers it doesn t provide any load balancing for the user Load balancing is the act of sending incoming requests to different servers and spreading out the load of producing pages Sophisticated tools test to see if the server is up before sending it a request You have hardware and software options for load balancing For example Squid can perform dynamic failover Pound is one example load balancer you can find it at http www apsis ch pound index html 424 The Internet Cache Protocol ICP is a protocol that Squid can use to check that a Plone site is running prior to forwarding a request to it In highly dynamic sites this can be a necessity You can find more information about ICP and Zope at http www zope org Members htrd icp intro
233. different from the security settings of an object in another state If you click portal_workflow select the Contents tab click plone_workflow and then select the States tab you ll see all the states available Click a state and then select Permissions and you ll see the permissions for that state as shown in Figure 9 13 Sa Properties Permissions Workflow State at Plone portal_workflow plone_workflow states published When objects are in this state they will take on the role to permission mappings defined below O are shown Permission Roles Acquire permission Anonymous Authenticated Nv settings Vv Access contents information wv C E Change portal events E E E Modify portal content C E M view Iv E Save Changes Figure 9 13 The permissions for the published state As you can see when an object is moved into the published state anonymous users will be allowed the Access contents information and View permissions This means people can view the content You ll note that members or owners can t edit their own content because they don t 256 have that permission The permissions applied by workflow are set on the Permissions tab where you can set all the permissions that will be managed by the workflow After you ve changed the security settings you need to go to the plone_workflow tool and click Update security settings otherwise the object s security and the work flow will be different NOTE Becaus
234. discussion of workflow by presenting a couple of these options 230 8 1 4 6 1 Writing Through the ZMI Probably the simplest but most laborious way to write workflow is to use the ZMI Although the ZMI drives many people crazy it s a simple way to set up the options Unfortunately once you ve started writing through the ZMI you re stuck in that paradigm In other words there s no easy to edit or alter that workflow on the file system I discussed editing a workflow through the Web with you earlier in this chapter of course To export a workflow from the ZMI click portal_workflow and select the Contents tab Select the created workflows you d like to export by checking the boxes on the left of the ZMI and then click import export At the top part of the export page select Download to local machine and click export A file with extension zexp will be created that can be saved and redistributed Selecting XML Format will provide a file in Extensible Markup Language XML format with an xml extension If you re provided a workflow in a the zexp or xml format then importing the workflow into your Plone is straightforward Place that file in the import directory of Zope on the file system This can be the instance home directory or the Zope directory Then click portal_workflow select the Contents tab and click import export At the bottom part of the page you ll see a small form that takes an import filename Enter the name o
235. e BasePloneFolder UiA large plone folder meta_type Large Plone Folder BTreeFolder28ase has no __implements__ implements __ BasePloneFolder _implements__ def init__ self id title BTreeFolder2Base __ init__ self id BasePloneFolder __ init__ self id title self id id self title title as per CMFBTreeFolder Dy def checkid self id allow dup 0 Figure 12 1 An example Python script uploaded into Plone From this design you can extrapolate a few requirements for this product Specifically this product will have the following attributes ID Each piece of code will have a unique ID This attribute is required Title Each piece of code should have a title This attribute is required Description Each piece of code should have a description describing what it should do This attribute is optional Source code Each piece of code will have one source code attribute that contains the source for that content type This will be optional but making it required is reasonable 328 e Language This is the language for the source code for example Perl Python Hypertext Markup Language HTML and so on Of course the content type should interact with Plone so that you can use the power of Plone You ll need to ensure that the product can be searched can interact with security can interact with workflow and is correctly persisted Further itd be nice if users could upload scripts directly from their hard
236. e color 6 1 1 2 5 il18n target This sets the target language for the text about to be translated It isn t used in Plone 136 6 1 1 2 6 i18n attributes This allows the translation of attributes within an element rather than the content For exam ple an image tag has the alt attribute which shows an alternate representation of the image lt img href someimage jpg alt Some text i18n attributes alt alternate_image_label gt Multiple attributes should be separated with a semicolon just like tal attributes work 6 1 1 2 7 i18n data This provides a way of translating something other than strings An example is a DateTime object An i18n data statement requires a matching i 8n translate statement so that a valid message ID is available For example lt span i18n data here currentTime 118n translate timefmt i18n name time gt 2 32 pm lt span gt beep 6 1 1 2 8 Translation Service Now that I ve covered the tags lll cover the mechanism for performing the translation By default Plone comes with an I18N mechanism This allows you to internationalize the user interface so that messages tabs and forms can all be translated At this stage this doesn t cover the actual content that users add If you add a document in English and view the page asking for it in French you ll get the English document with French text around the outside see Figure 6 1 137 home actualit s membr
237. e Default and Plone Tableless Plone Default uses tables to render the main body flanked by two table cells on either side containing the left and right slots For browser compatibility this is the default setup However if you switch to Plone Tableless then you ll get a skin that looks the same except there are no tables used to produce the page which gives you as the site developer more flexibility At the time of writing the Plone Tableless skin can be a little problematic on some browsers such as Internet Explorer I hope in the future that the Plone Tableless skin will become the default To change the skin scroll to the bottom of the form where you see the Default Skin value and select the default skin from the list of choices If you select the Skin Flexibility option then users will be able to choose their own skin from the my preferences section Returning to the Contents tab of the portal_skins tool you can see that some of the folders for example custom are standard folders that exist in Zope These have the normal folder icon Others for example plone_images are FSDVs that point to areas of the file system These have the folder icon with a green lock inside it This lock indicates that you can t add or edit elements in an FSDV through the Web you can do it only through the file system To see where the files for an FSDV reside on your hard drive click the Properties tab of the FSDV For example from the Contents tab of t
238. e Page Template extension pt For example you can use Scite a free text editor To use this editor for page templates you d have to change the file to read as follows meta type Page Template extension pt editor scite For External Editor to work each invocation of the editor must open a separate process This means that the External Editor client program can monitor that process to see when it s fin ished This causes problems for some editors that try to open multiple files in the same process For example to load VIM in KDE you must run a separate shell as follows editor konsole e vim 301 10 1 4 5 3 Editing a Word Document Editing a Microsoft Word document is actually really easy to set up all you need is Microsoft Word installed on your local computer Upload your Microsoft Word document to Plone as a standard file and then view the file in Plone Click the little pencil icon in the top right corner of your page Microsoft Word will open on your computer and the document from the server will display You can now edit the content as much as you want and clicking Save will automatically save the file into Plone 10 1 4 5 4 Editing Page Templates Through External Editor To create a page template use the ZMI Sure enough when viewing the folder containing the page template you ll see an extra pencil icon to the right of the object Clicking the pencil will activate External Editor and open the page template in
239. e Templates system using the example I gave of a Python expression in the previous chapter that adds two numbers As you saw you could make a page template for this that looks like the following lt p gt 1 2 lt em tal content python 1 2 gt lt p gt The equivalent using a Script Python object looks like the following Change the test_py script to the following line return 1 2 As you saw at the beginning of the previous chapter you call an object by giving its path as an expression So in a page template you can now do the following lt p gt 1 2 lt em tal content here test_py gt lt p gt The object test_py is acquired in the path expression and called and it then returns the Python back to the template and prints You ve now called a script from your template This is obvi ously a rather simple example but my point is that there s a great deal you can do in a Script Python object that you just can t do in a page template In a Script Python object you can specify the title parameters and bindings setting by using the notation at the top of a script When you save a script with that bit of text at the top Plone will remove that line and instead change the appropriate value on the object This syntax is used a lot in the Script Python object in this book to ensure that you have the right title and parameters So you could rewrite the previous script as follows title Returns 1 2 para
240. e ZMI eventually If you haven t gone to the ZMI before then you ll find that there are a few simple ways to get there the easiest way is to log in as a user with the manager role click plone setup and then click Zope Management Interface You ll note that the address of the ZMI is the uniform resource locator URL of your Plone site with manage on the end of it The ZMI for your Plone site should look like this enfoldsystems 75 You may have a problem with virtual hosting which occurs with the Windows and Mac in stallers Virtual hosting is the ability to have the Plone site as the root object rather than the root of your Zope instance For more information on virtual hosting see Chapter 10 So to get to the root you need to access the manage port On Windows select Start Plone Plone Manage Root You ll note that this sets the address to http localhost 8080 manage For information on virtual hosting with your installation see the specific documentation You ll need to get to the root of your Zope installation for two reasons First you ll need to get to the Zope control panel Second you ll need to get to the root of your Plone site to make rename and copy Plone sites The Zope control panel gives you database information and access to products and other add ons you ll need access to this for Chapter 10 as shown here home news admin you are here home navigation Plone Setup Home a charters Co
241. e format which are normally items such as Plain Text HTML and so on You ll replace this with a drop down box for all the languages that the main SilverCity library has available The getLanguages method written earlier returns a list of all the languages Each item is a dictionary that contains the value for example CPP and a nice name for example C or C Listing 12 6 loops through the getLanguages method written earlier You can also define a variable for the current language so that as it loops through the languages you can highlight the current language Listing 12 6 Adding a Drop Down List for Selecting the Language lt div class field gt lt label for language i18n translate label_silvercity_language gt Language lt label gt lt div class formHelp i18n translate help_silvercity_language gt Select the name of the language that you are adding lt div gt lt select name text_format tal define 1 here getLanguage gt lt option tal repeat item here getLanguages tal content item name tal attributes Vvalue item value selected python test item value 1 1 0 gt lt select gt lt div gt When the edit page gets submitted you need to set up the validators and actions to do some thing with the form The validation should check that a valid title and a valid ID have been given To the silvercity_edit cpt metadata file add the following validators validators Save validate_id va
242. e hard work here html language generate_html raw_code language filename self _raw_as_html html self _raw_language language NOTE Well versed Python developers may raise an issue with using file name and file filename Zope file objects have an attribute called filename which represents the filename while in Python the attribute is called name This code will then work in straight Python or Zope So now you have a Python class that encapsulates the object At this point you should be able to run this from the Python prompt quite easily and test that it does what you want For example python 334 Python 2 3 2 1 Oct 6 2003 10 07 16 GCC 3 2 2 20030222 Red Hat Linux 3 2 2 5 on linux2 Type help copyright credits or license for more information gt gt gt from PloneSilverCity import PloneSilverCity gt gt gt p PloneSilverCity test py gt gt gt p edit python print hello world gt gt gt p getRawCode print hello world gt gt gt p getHTMLCode gt lt span class p_word gt print lt span gt lt span class p_default gt nbsp lt span gt lt span class p_character gt hellonbsp world lt span gt gt gt gt p getLanguage gt python 12 1 1 5 Turning the Package into a Product Now you have a simple package but this isn t yet a Plone product You have to initialize it with Plone This means adding extra information to the PloneSilver
243. e is present often that default page s name is index htm or index html If a folder has a default page then clicking the view tab will show that default page If the folder doesn t have a default page then it ll show a folder listing of all the content in that folder When looking for a default page to display Plone looks through the folder for content with a certain name and shows this item The page name is usually index html or index_html however the site administrator can add or alter these names This contents view of a folder allows a user to perform a variety of tasks such as move content rename it delete it publish it and change the order it s listed As shown in Figure 3 25 you ll also see a simple table of the folder contents Each row of the table shows the title of the content plus an icon the type its size when it was last modified its current workflow status and order selectors On the left is a checkbox to select the items you want to change and a series of options across the bottom Rename Cut Copy Delete and Change Status These functions are all pretty self explanatory and you can apply them to multiple objects at once by clicking several checkboxes 64 home news members you are here home members andym s home navigation contents Home Members andym s Home 3 andym s Home a Up one level Select gt add new item Li title size El B andym s Home Page 2 1K E
244. e look at Zope and Plone see little folder icons and assume they directly relate to the folders and items on the file system However this is really not the case If you were using a relational database as most Content Management Systems CMSs do would you still want to do this Many people jump into this thinking it s a problem but the following are reasons why you d want to do this You have lots of really large pieces of content Plone can manage really large files without a lot of problems Databases of more than 10 gigabytes aren t un common and work just fine If you re getting really large pieces of content for example one client I work for uses Plone to manage its DVDs the actual content of the DVDs that is then take a look at CMFExternalFile and Apache For really large stuff using Apache or another service to serve your content is a good way to go You want to manage content using programs that read from the file system such as Microsoft Word You can use External Editor to edit content stored in a Plone site using your local programs If you have Microsoft Word installed you can upload a Microsoft Word document and then edit it in Microsoft Word on your computer You re sick of editing code through the Web in little text areas Again look first at External Editor Second why are you doing work through the Web anyway As I demonstrated in Chapter 7 you can write all skins and CSS templates on the file system
245. e of the template In Figure 5 5 you ll see that the heading has been replaced with the ID of the template and the main paragraph now includes the ID of the template Zope This is Page Template fest Figure 5 5 Generating the page The management screen for a page template also has the following important features Title This is the title for this template and it s optional If you change this in the previous example for instance after clicking Test you ll note that the resulting HTML has changed Content Type This is the content type for this template it s usually text html Browse HTML source This will render the template unprocessed as HTML This is how the template would appear if it were loaded into an HTML editor Test This will process and render the template Expand macros when editing This checkbox will try to expand macros I recom mend leaving this unchecked most of the time Macros are an advanced feature and are discussed in Chapter 6 115 Now that you ve created a page template you ll make a few modifications to it This will demonstrate the topics covered so far in this chapter For example if you want your page template to demonstrate 1 2 you could add the following line to your page template lt p gt 1 2 lt em tal content python 1 2 gt lt p gt Then click the Test tab to see if it works You should see the following 142 3 To see an example of a path traversal print the
246. e the permissions change when the object is transitioned any other permission changes to the object you may make through the ZMI are removed if and only if those permissions are managed by the workflow For this reason you should always resist the urge to make minor tweaks to the security of content types in the ZMI stick to changing the Plone site object and the workflow 9 1 3 3 1 Guards All the transitions have a guard on them that lets the administrator select the permissions allowed before a user can perform the transition When checking if a user can perform the transition it will check in the following order check the permissions check the roles and then check the expression If any of these checks pass then the transition will be run The following are all the settings for a guard e Permission This is a list of any of the acceptable permissions separated by semicolons for example Review portal content Modify portal content e Roles This is a list of roles that are acceptable roles for this transition sepa rated by semicolons for example Manager Reviewer e Expression This is a workflow Template Attribute Language Expression Syn tax TALES expression that will let you come up with a custom condition For example the following transition will occur only if this is in folder called Members it s not really a permission but it s a neat trick python if Members in state_object getPhysicalPath N
247. e them Role s These are the required roles Multiple roles should have a semicolon to separate them Expression This is a workflow expression For more information on this see the Editing Workflow Expressions section later in this chapter For each value specified the guard must evaluate as true before continuing If a test of any of the values fail then the transition won t execute Usually you ll find most guards have only one or two values specified 8 1 3 2 4 Editing Variables The Variables tab lists the variables that will be created and changed in the workflow I haven t discussed variables much with you up to this point instead I ve focused on states and transi tions This section covers variables It isn t always possible and I don t recommend that you try to encapsulate all the information you ll need in a workflow within just states and transitions Instead you can use variables to store some workflow related information For example in the credit card bill example the bill could be paid by several methods Internet banking check and so on You could store the 220 amount method 100 for example in a variable Should the bill be rejected or altered that amount would be updated The point of a variable is to have something that changes between each state and transition So returning to the main workflow page click the Variables tab to get a list of all the variables To add a variable
248. e them Local roles are ideal in cooperation projects and as every item has a history and an undo option it s of the changes To give a person a local role in this folder just search for the person s name or email address in the fi you will be presented with a page that will show you the options available Search Terms Search b User Name gt Search Term Pa perform search View groups Groups are a convenient way to assign roles to a common set of users gt view groups Currently assigned local roles in folder Chapters These users currently have local roles assigned in this folder Assigned Roles Chapters Pa p delete selected role s Figure 9 1 Accessing the Sharing tab To find a user to assign a role to enter a search term such as Gavin which opens a list of users that match your search criteria you can then click the user and select the role from the drop down list For example in Figure 9 2 I m giving Gavin the owner role on this folder 236 contents Search results Select one or more Members and a role to assign Manag lv E E andym gavin luke ralph andy clearwind ca gavin clearwind ca luke clearwind ca ralph clearwind ca assign local role to selected user s View groups Figure 9 2 Assigning a role to a user In my earlier example I wanted to assign rights to an individual user but that can be annoying with large numbers of users unless you ve assigned them
249. e to users so that when they log in they have this role Not assignable roles are roles you don t grant specifically to a user but that occur within a Plone site For example you don t assign the anonymous role to a user The following are the not assignable roles Anonymous This is a user who hasn t logged into the site This could be a user who has no account or one who has merely not logged in yet Authenticated This role refers to any user who is logged into the site whatever their role By definition a user is either anonymous or authenticated the two are mutually exclusive Because the authenticated user doesn t provide much in the way of granularity it isn t recommended for most applications The following are the assignable roles Owner This is a special role given to users when they create an object It applies to a user for that object only the information is stored on the object You don t normally explicitly assign someone as an owner Plone does that for you Members This the default role for a user who has joined your site Anyone who joins using the join button in the Plone interface has this role Reviewer This is a user with more permissions than a member but less than a manager Reviewers are users who can edit or review content entered by a member they can t change the site s configuration or alter a user account Manager Managers can do almost anything to a Plone site so you should give this
250. each of the indexes and show how to search them The second of these tasks involves manipulating the results so I then show you how to do this All of the following examples are in Python because this is the best way to search a catalog I also show a quick example of how to hook this into a page template I fully recommend using Python for manipulating the catalog because it really is the best place to do things allowing you the best flexibility without having to worry about the syntax In general you achieve searching by calling the method searchResults on the portal_catalog object and passing through a series of keyword parameters A couple of reserved keywords exist but the rest are mapped directly to the indexes of the same name So if you wanted to search the SearchableText index you d pass through to the search method a keyword parameter for SearchableText The reserved keywords are as follows e sort_on This is the index to sort the results on assuming that the index allows sorting full text indexes don t allow sorting e sort_order This is reverse or descending if not specified the default is ascend ing e sort_limit This is an optimization hint to make sorting a little quicker So a general search for all items that mention Plone and are published in Date order looks something like this context portal_catalog searchResults review_state published SearchableText Plone sort_order Date 319 The
251. ebsite Feedback lt legend gt The following is the start of the row for the e mail address You ll define a variable here called error_email_address that s set to an error string if there s a suitable string in the errors dictionaries That error value will be generated by the validator should there be an error lt div class field tal attributes class python test error_email_address field error field gt tal define error_email_address errors email_address nothing gt The following is the label for the e mail address field In this label you ll include a div for the help text The span element will become the now familiar red dot next to the label so that the user knows it s required lt label i18n translate label_email_address gt Your email address lt label gt lt span class fieldRequired title Required gt Required lt span gt lt div class formHelp 118n translate label_email_address_help gt Enter your email address lt div gt Next you ll add the actual element lt div tal condition error_email_address gt lt tal block i18n translate content error_email_address gt Error lt tal block gt lt div gt 161 lt input type text name email_address tal attributes tabindex tabindex next value request email_address nothing gt lt div gt At the top of this block you test to see if there s an error If there is the class for the element changed to be the fie
252. ect doesn t currently allow for authentication with the server If this is needed change the settings on the server 4 1 2 3 Logging Errors The error log catches errors that may occur in a Plone site these are features such as Page Not Found 404 errors unauthorized errors and so on This isn t designed to trap errors from forms For instance if somebody doesn t enter a required field in a form then this won t be reported this isn t an error since it s captured by the validation framework This error log is designed to catch internal server errors that may occur From the Plone interface click plone setup and then click Error Log to see the errors reported by the Plone site Click the exception in the list if there s one reported to see the error Figure 4 5 shows an error that occurred when incorrectly filling out the mail settings form It s a long page that includes a complete Python traceback and the incoming request 79 home news amp admin you are here home naviastion Exception Details Home a Back to Error Log 3 Chapters Software Time 2004 01 03 14 25 10 278 US Pacific User Name User Id admin admin Request URL http gloin 8080 Plone prefs_mailhost_set Exception Type ValueError Exception Value invalid literal for int Traceback innermost last a Module ZPublisher Publish line 100 in publish a Module ZPublisher mapply line 88 in mapply a Module ZPublis
253. ects and an and or operator or is the default This would allow you to find all objects that have almost any combination of keywords To find all objects that have the subject Africa and sun use the following results context portal_catalog searchResults Subject query Africa sun operator and 11 1 2 4 3 Searching a PathIndex A path index allows you to search for all objects in a certain path It will return every object below a current location so if you ask for all objects in Members it ll return everything in everybody s home directories For example for all objects that have Members in their path use this results context portal_catalog searchResults path Plone Members If you want to further restrict this you can do so by passing through a level parameter that sets where you expect the value to be The level is a number representing its position in the path from the left when splitting it up by forward slashes For example in the previous code Plone is level 0 Members is level 1 and so on Similarly to KeywordIndex you can pass through an and or operator To get all objects in the Plone Members danae folder and the Plone testing danae folder use the following 321 results context portal_catalog searchResults path query danae level 2 11 1 2 4 4 Searching a ZCText Index ZCTextIndex is the most complicated of all indexes and takes a whole host of options
254. ed it s just plain text The only modification made is that new lines are converted into HTML when rendered so that new lines appear in the Web browser No other altering happens For example Here is a sample in plain text for a demonstration Structured Text Structured text is a system for writing plain text documents in a particular format which can then be interpreted in different ways For example if a piece of text needs to be highlighted then it can written as italics this will then be shown as italics This series of rules means that a user can write a page that contains formatting information easily For a full list of structured text rules and examples please see Appendix A The following is a sample of structured text Here is a sample in structured text for a demonstration 50 3 1 4 6 Setting Document Metadata Any piece of content can have any number of properties assigned to it These properties are known as metadata and provide information such as keywords copyrights and contributors of an item This entire set of properties is optional and is usually used only if there are special requirements for this piece of content especially since this information isn t normally shown to the person viewing the content So the main reason for entering this data is to add information for tasks such as searching or categorizing the content You can access properties on an object by selecting the green properties tab This
255. ed there by the following CSS div background url splash jpg transparent no repeat width 260px height 335px position absolute The remaining CSS handles the placing of the text and links within that image This page has no Plone elements at all it s static HTML 7 1 4 5 Conclusion This looks like a reasonably complex site with relatively simple CSS that does most of the hard work By using CSS you ve changed Plone s look and feel without having to know a great deal about Plone beyond the HTML Also by ensuring that the images are placed using CSS you maintained key accessibility functions Thank you to NASA and all the people involved from the Plone community for helping with this site and case study These include but are not limited to John Graham Alma Ong Joe Geldart Michael Zeltner and Tom Croucher 8 Chapter 8 8 1 Managing Workflow One of Plone s many strengths is the workflow component Workflow fits into one of the core themes of content management which is the separation of logic content and presentation This chapter therefore covers Plone s workflow in detail The chapter starts by covering some key definitions related to workflow as well as the key tools involved so that you can begin to conceptualize workflows Once these concepts are clear I then discuss how to add and edit your own workflows Throughout this chapter I reference simple changes you can make to the workflow that co
256. ed with the idea of calling the product SourceCode or PloneSourceCode but decided those would be too confusing they could also mean that the product is the actual source code for Plone Instead PloneSilverCity seemed to be a nice name that gave credit to its origins and was sufficiently obscure that no one would confuse it with something else After creating the directory I usually add a few files and directories that Pll need Every package needs an _ init__ py file in it The name of this file comes from Python and indicates that this directory is a Python package and hence importable When the package is imported Zope executes this file Inside that file you ll insert the product registration code so that the product will be registered with Zope Being user friendly you can also add a few text files such as readme txt install txt and so on One other text file that s also useful to add is refresh txt This file lets you hook into Zope s Refresh module and lets you dynamically reload the product as you write it This is mind bogglingly useful for your first few steps in writing a class and I ll show how to configure this in Zope later At the moment you have a directory called PloneSilverCity in the product directory that con tains the following files all empty readme txt refresh txt install txt and init__ py This is now a valid Python package that does absolutely nothing but not for long 329 12 1 1 2 Developing with
257. ehabeo gen transverbero Acsi uxor haero minim luctus lobort Iusto in ulciscor illum blandit saepius Haero ut vicis metuo suscipit consectetuer iriure scisco imputo bene letatio nunc ut patria venio molior e Figure 3 12 Editing a document Now you can edit the document in your Web browser using the form provided If you look at the URL in the address bar of your browser you ll note that a short name for the object has been created for you something such as Document 2003 12 29 43787 The following is a list of the fields and their meanings Short name The short name will become part of the document s URL so keep the name short and descriptive preferably without spaces Keeping to these rules will make URLs easier to read For example use something such as audit report 2003 If you don t provide a name Plone will create one for you 47 NOTE This field won t appear if you selected No for the short names in your pref erences page Title This is the title for the item and it ll be shown throughout the site for example at the top of the page in the search interface in the title of the browser and so on This field is required Description This is a short lead in to the document usually about 20 words to introduce the document and provide a teaser for the remainder of the document This is useful for pages that show summaries of documents such as search results and folder contents Body text This
258. elp External Methods alow you to add functionality to Zope by writing Python functions which are exposed as callable Zope objects The module name should give the name of the Python module without the py file extension The function name should name a callable object found in the module Id est etemal Title PT Module Name fest sss FunctionNamefeadFile Ss Add Figure 6 6 The newly added external method After clicking Save Changes you can hit the Test tab to see what happens when it runs In this case you should get a line or two of text Since you have the External Method module in Plone you can access it from a page template in the same way as any other object A path expression to here test_external would do the trick in this case For example lt h1 gt README txt lt hi gt lt p tal content here test_external gt The real power is that you can pass code off to the unrestricted Python mode and from there to any function you want without having to worry about security Although this may seem like a cool function external methods aren t used a great deal in Plone because complicated logic is usually moved into a Product object and simple logic is kept in a Script Python object If you find yourself using External Method objects a lot consider one of the tools discussed in Chapter 12 6 1 3 Useful Tips Because page templates are valid Extensible Markup Language XML and can be used inde pendently of Zope or Plone
259. em The concept behind acquisition is one of containment Objects are situated inside other objects 106 called containers In the previous example the andy object is a container inside the Mem bers container inside the Plone site container which in turn is inside the Zope application container In a standard object oriented environment an object inherits behavior from its parent In Plone and Zope an object also inherits behavior from its container An object goes through a container hierarchy to figure out how to get these behaviors So take the example of accessing Members andy My Portrait jpg What if the object Some Image jpg didn t exist in the andy folder but instead exists higher up in the hierarchy Well acquisition would find it for you Take the following hierarchy Members _ andy _ My Portrait jpg In this case if you executed the URL Plone would traverse to andy and then try to find My Portrait jpg but sure enough it doesn t exist in the container So it d look in the containment hierarchy which is the Members folder and it finds and returns My Portrait jpg The result is that the user will see the image just like usual However if you compare this to the earlier example where the image was contained in the andy folder you d find that the following key differences exist e First the context is the same even though the object is in a different place Context is based on the location from
260. ements 5 1 3 4 Example Displaying User Information To illustrate the points you ve learned so far you ll now create a page template that performs a simple task displaying information about a user in the system In this example a company is using Plone internally as an intranet Each employee is registered in Plone and given a login however there s no simple page that shows employees or how to contact them You ll create a simple user information page that shows a user s e mail address home page picture and when they last logged in The first prototype of this page is easily accomplished with TAL TALES and a bit of knowledge of the basic Content Management Framework CMF tools Unfortunately because the Appli cation Programming Interfaces APIs are rather convoluted for those tools some of this code is a little longer than it should be At this stage don t worry too much about the API of those tools these will be covered in Chapter 9 If you just take the API for granted for the moment you can concentrate on the TAL First you need to create a page template click portal_skins click custom add a page template and give it the ID user_info Second you ll edit it as follows For a full listing of this page template please see Appendix A Examining the full listing you ll see that it starts with HTML and body tags For convenience you ll put the main definitions in a div tag lt div tal omit tag tal define
261. en objects are in this state they will take on the role to permission mappings defined below O permissions managed by this workflow are shown Permission Roles Acquire permission Anonymous Authenticated Manager Member Ow settings Iv Access contents information E O M C F E Change portal events E O M E E Modify portal content C r iv E M view Iv O Iv E l Save Changes Figure 8 7 State permissions page If you change the permissions for a particular workflow state you ve created an issue that needs resolving Any existing content in that state won t have the new workflow permissions set on it The content will have the old workflow permissions and you ll need to update them When you ve finished making all your changes go to the root workflow page and click Update Security Settings as shown in Figure 8 4 Performing that update may take a while depending upon the number of objects to be altered The Variables tab allows you to assign a value to a variable when the object is in this state The workflow determines the list of variables available to each state For more information on these see the Editing Variables section 8 1 3 2 3 Editing Transitions The Transitions tab lists the transitions that will occur in this workflow In the beginning of this chapter I showed you how a transition represents the changes that will occur to the object Each transition has a few variables that are shown on the summary page To
262. ence this macro in multiple templates This is an example template lt html gt lt body gt lt div metal use macro context time_template macros time gt If there is a message then the macro will display i here lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt When this template is rendered the HTML produced by Plone looks like this lt html gt lt body gt lt div gt lt div gt 2004 04 15 17 18 18 312 GMT 7 lt div gt lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt 131 6 1 1 1 4 metal define slot A slot is a section of a macro that the template author expects to be overridden by another template You could think of it as a hole in your page template that you re expecting something else to fill in All define slot commands must be contained within a define macro For example lt div metal define macro master gt lt div metal define slot main gt lt div gt lt div gt 6 1 1 1 5 metal fill slot This completes a slot that has been defined with the define slot command A fill slot must be defined with a use macro command When the define macro part is called the macro will attempt fill in all the define slots with the appropriate fill slots Here s an example fill slot lt div metal use macro master gt lt div metal fill slot main gt The main slot will go here lt div gt lt div gt 6 1 1 1 6 Example Using Macros and Slots Returning to the previous example you ll now enhance it a little If you
263. end schema onto the end of the schema then this will also be added as a metadata column name A unique name for this field mode The read and write mode of field as a string the default is to be read and write multiVeflukis field can have multiple values this is useful for things such as drop down lists mutatdihe name of the method to alter the value of the field so you could change how this field is set prima True on a field then this will be the field that responds to File Transfer Protocol FTP and WebDAV requests There can be only field that does this if multiple are defined the first one in the schema will be used You normally do this for the main body attribute requir amp ecifies that some value for this field re quired schemBPtace the field into the grouping of other fields called schematas default metadata user_information searchAbboolean that specifies if this field will be added to the searchable text and can be used in the searches validate validations that will be performed on the field as a tuple of strings it starts at first and validates against each validation vocabwidist of values that a user can choose from for example the values to show in a drop down list storagWhere to store the value the default is At tribute Storage which stores the field as an attribute of the object The name of any index such as Key wordIndex or KeywordIndex schema Any string lowercase conf
264. ented by selecting Roles for a permission in addition to selecting Permission Roles Acquire permission Anonymous Authenticated settings M Access Transient Objects E a iv Access arbitrary user session data E E M Access contents information E C M Access future portal content 0 C M Access inactive portal content D D M Access session data E E M Add Accelerated HTTP Cache Managers E E Id Add Archetypes Tools O O a Add BTreeFolder2s D E M Add Browser Id Manager E r Acquire Anonymous Authenticated iv Add CMF Action Icons Tools C O M Add CMF Caching Policy Managers E 0 Figure 9 10 Security settings In Figure 9 10 you can see that this object has a series of security settings This is displayed as a grid of checkboxes on the left are the permissions in alphabetical order and across the 251 top are the roles again in alphabetical order This page is rather large and cumbersome so there are two useful shortcuts Click the permission to get all the roles for that permission for example Figure 9 11 shows the settings for the Access future portal content permission Contents View Properties Security Undo Plone Site at Plone Roles assigned to the permission Access future portal content M Also use roles acquired from folders containing this object Save Changes Figure 9 11 Settings for a permission And you can click a role to get all the settings for that role which is much easier than a long list as shown in
265. entific TV magacine NANO will report about Plone and the Castle Sprint on the March 11 B mxmDynamicPage password 2 0 Plone content B Plone on TY by zwark 2003 09 23 11 54 AM type for dynamic lists PSR f released gt New user a B Bug fix Day for Plone 2 0 by limi 2004 01 16 09 32 PM March 11 ARGSISGINETE To get Plone 2 0 ready for i Oe a bug day has f p been scheduled on the coming Tuesday Check the Mores You can submit bug reports and feature requests to the Plone link for the date time where you live Please show up on IRC Figure 3 28 A search for Tuesday on Plone org upcoming events The search provides a quite sophisticated search with features similar to most search engines You can make this simple query quite complex For example you can use the following options Globbing You can use an asterisk to signify any letters For example entering Tues matches Tuesday and Tuesdays You can t use the asterisk at the beginning of a word though Single wildcards You can use a question mark anywhere to signify one letter For example entering ro e matches rope rote role and so on You can t use the question mark at the beginning of a word though And You can use the word and to signify that both terms on either side of the and must exist For example entering Rome and Tuesday will return a result of when both those words are in the content Or You can use the word or to signify that eit
266. eps you need to take If you change something in a skin then just running in debug mode will ensure that the changes are propagated If you change something that s passed onto the portal_actions tool such as actions or icon then you need to restart Plone and reinstall the product through Add Remove Products If you change a schema then you just need to restart Plone and all new instances of your class in Plone will be updated However what about all the old instances of the product Fortu nately Archetypes has provided a dynamic update tool that goes through all the old instances of your product and updates them to the new schema In the ZMI click archetype_tool 381 13 1 3 1 Using Unique IDs The concept of unique IDs is simple but something that was missing in Zope Origi nally Zope developers assumed using the path to an object would do unfortunately this has shown to be inadequate As a simple example consider what happens when someone moves the location of a document your unique reference to that document has been lost A unique ID is a truly useful tool to have Archetypes creates a unique ID on every object it creates and saves it for you on the object It also saves it in a separate catalog for you called uid_catalog You can see the uid_catalog in the ZMI and it s like the portal_catalog object except it s missing a little bit of extra Application Programming Interface API wrapping and all the indexes that the f
267. er Pages and even whole languages based on the concept such as PHP Zope followed this trend with Document Template Markup Language DTML These systems take HTML and intersperse it with custom tags such as lt gt or lt dtml gt This system was popular because it was easy to understand and users who already knew basic HTML could grasp the idea of a few more tags Designers could ignore the content of these tags and let the programmers deal with them Programmers could alter the relevant code parts without upsetting the content However these systems have the following problems e The HTML templates can be hard to scale as more and more content gets added to the script Pages quickly become huge and hard to manage Logic and content aren t neatly separated They can be separated with some of these systems however the ability to intersperse any HTML with a piece of programming code is too easy Often content presentation and logic become one large entangled mess Pages can t be easily edited Often pages or templates come with the note just leave these bits alone cause editing them would break the code What You See Is What You Get WYSIWYG editors can be set to not alter some tags but they can easily break others In large organizations users with different roles all have to edit the same page It can be hard to see a default result Take for example a database query that shows the result in a table How
268. er color of notification elements eg status message and the calendar notifyBackgroundColor The background color of notification elements helpBackgroundColor The background color of the calendar pop up widget discreetColor The color of the credits document byline form help portalMinWidth The minimum width of the portal columnOneWidth The width of the left column columnTwoWidth The width of the right column 7 1 2 4 Customizing the CSS If you have small customizations place them in ploneCustom css This is a second style sheet that s loaded after plone css By using the cascading functionality of style sheets you can apply any changes to ploneCustom css to the overall style sheet 177 For example to change the byline that appears on the bottom of every page simply change ploneCustom css Again access that file through the ZMI and then click Customize This will create a copy of that style sheet in the custom folder To alter the byline move it to the left side of the page and make it bold as shown in Figure 7 7 contents viem edi navigation Home C Chapters Plone CD Software This site provides examples links Plone All the software mentioned in the bi For a chapter by chapter listing of c index Created by admin Last modified 2004 03 31 08 33 AM Figure 7 7 The new bold byline on the left You do this by adding the following div documentByLine text align left font weight bo
269. er in the Marketing group will have the right to add edit and delete content in the Marketing workspace in other words you now have a folder for that group This is the same as adding a group and then assigning a local role for that group to that folder This is just one example of how useful a group can be another is using groups in workflow In the previous chapter I discussed workflow and how you can send an e mail to certain people when something happens If a member of the Marketing group added an item for instance then you can send an e mail to all the users of that group rather than just everyone The Calculating the Other Users in a Group section shows how you to do this On the Plone Web site for example the users are in development groups that are responsible for parts of Plone such as the release team and the documentation team 9 1 1 3 2 Administering Groups You can administer groups in two ways from the Plone control panel You can either go to a user and click the groups for that user or go to a group and click the users for that group Either way you can easily add and remove the groups for a user To add a user to a group however go to the user search page and click a user then click the Groups tab which will show the groups for that user For example Figure 9 6 shows the groups for the user andym 241 home software chapters feedback amp admin you are here home ENNA navigation ee Group
270. er of objects in memory from all caches 0 Target number of objects in 5000 Change memory per cache Total number of objects in each cache Number of object in Number of ghost GET HET memory objects Total in Figure 14 2 Changing the cache parameters in the control panel Further the fewer threads Zope uses the less potential memory usage will occur Although Zope is multithreaded most of the time only one Zope thread will actually be used Reducing the number of threads to three provides a more memory efficient server Instead of trying to run a large number of threads it s recommended to run ZEO clients to serve more requests The Zope Enterprise Objects section covers this in more detail 14 1 2 4 3 Network Connection The network connection can be critical to the performance of any application you re only as fast as the slowest connection between you and the client When you re optimizing a Plone site take into account the amount of time needed to connect If it takes two seconds to actually connect optimizing code is rather pointless Here again the ab tool can help When running a benchmark of Plone org from British Columbia the server is located in Texas you can see in the following output that the me dian wait for connections over the network was 125 milliseconds Connection Times ms min mean sd median max Connect 90 133 40 2 125 211 Processing 511 1103 400 2 1113 1846 Waiting 202 310
271. erField age validators isInt widget IntegerWidget label Your age Where did isInt come from Well isInt is the name of a validator registered in the validation framework Only a few are in there but they re quite useful Table 13 5 describes them For the exact details of some of these I recommend reading the code and looking at the regular expressions you can find these in the validation validators __init__ py module in your Products directory Table 13 5 Available Validations Name Description 374 isDecimal This validates that the string is a decimal including positive and neg ative exponentials and so on isInt This validates that it s an integer isPrintable This validates that this is a letter or a number isSSN This validates that it s nine numbers the length of a U S Social Se curity number isUSPhoneNumber This validates that it s ten numbers and is optional isInternationalPhoneNiimbenlidates that it s at least one number and is optional isZipCode This validates that it s five or nine numbers isURL This validates that the input starts with http ftp or https isEmail This validates that this conforms to the standard e mail syntax You can also register your own validations A validator is actually a simple class that imple ments the ivalidator interface Two are already done a RegexValidator that verifies a regular expression and a RangeValidator that verifies a ra
272. error string No message gt Message lt p gt If there s an error evaluating the request message expression here then the on error attribute will be activated This causes the contents of the tag to be replaced with the text No message Unfortunately the on error statement is rather limited The tag can t distinguish between different errors and allows only one expression to be evaluated and used This limitation is by design so that the tag won t be overused Error handling should really be handled in the logic of your application Fortunately for all expressions you can supply alternatives in the statement if the first part of the statement evaluates to something other than true or false in other words if an error is raised Each alternative is separated by the pipe character and multiple alternatives can appear in a statement If you re relying on variables from the incoming request then always add a nothing to the end to ensure that an attribute error isn t raised For example 123 lt p tal content request message tal condition request message nothing gt There s a message lt p gt lt p tal condition not request message nothing gt No message lt p gt This second example is more verbose but desirable for a couple of reasons e The designer is able to see the positive and negative condition e You can handle a more complicated error condition than just printing a string 5 1 3 2 7 t
273. ers folder and started adding a folder for each chapter Because I haven t made a default page Plone will happily create a listing of all the chapters The 71 description for each chapter is the name of the chapter for example Introducing to Plone and This Book and the short name is the chapter number this will keep my URLs nice and short for example Chapters 3 I ve left everything in the visible state so after this it s just a matter of adding content 4 Chapter 4 4 1 Making Simple Customizations After you ve figured out how to add and edit content you ll want to start customizing your site This chapter explains how to perform simple customizations in Plone using the options available to administrators Performing the customizations in this chapter requires a user to be logged in with the manager role as discussed in Chapter 2 These customizations are all configuration options you can make through the Web Rather than explain all these parts in detail this chapter gives an overview of many subjects and explains how to accomplish certain tasks while showing some of the under the hood machinery These topics are then expanded and explained in later chapters throughout the book The first and most useful place to look is the Plone control panel which offers a variety of options for the site administrator All the parts of a Plone site are designed to be easily changed and customized the blue tabs you can see acros
274. ersonal tools You are not logged in Login Join You are here Home Welcome to Plone Welcome to Plone E eS This welcome page is used to introduce you to the Plone Content Management System This is the 2 0 version of Plone Itis fetched from CVS hourly and the system is reconstructed Please help u 4 C of 4 2 44 Figure 7 4 Plone without style sheets TIP If you want to reproduce this turn off style sheets in your browser Internet Explorer doesn t let you easily do this but Firefox http www mozilla org products firefox the Mozilla based open source browser lets you easily do this In Firefox select Tools Web Devel oper Disable Disable Styles With a large number of CSS and other developer tools Firefox is the browser of choice for many Plone developers The difference is striking to say the least CSS provides not only the visual representation of pages but also the layout By changing the CSS you can change this visual representation and layout on a Plone site within the constraints of CSS Having the presentation of Plone produced by CSS is an impressive achievement 172 used by many talented user interface developers The following are some of the benefits of having a CSS layout e CSS provides a layer of separation between the presentation and the templates that generate the presentation e You can make a large number of changes without having to touch the underlying templates
275. erver installed 14 1 2 12 1 Using Apache Apache is the standard open source Web server The following sections document techniques using Apache 2 0 server on Linux With only minor syntax modification most of these tips work on 1 3 For more information on different Apache servers and platforms please see the excellent Apache documentation at http www apache org The ability to deflate or gzip your pages is useful for saving bandwidth Before a page is sent by the server it will be sent down the wire where the client will decompress the page This makes pages quicker to download and incurs fewer bandwidth charges for the site s owner since the files are smaller First enable the mod_deflate module This will depend upon your particular setup For example on Linux do the following LoadModule cache_module modules mod_deflate Second just add the following to your server configuration to deflate all Hypertext Markup Language HTML Extensible Markup Language XML and plain text AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text html text xml text plain Some clients handle the deflation slightly differently so it s worth reading the mod_deflate documentation for more detailed examples http httpd apache org docs 2 0 mod mod_deflate html In previous sections you ve seen how you can send expiration headers by manipulating tools in Plone Apache can also send these headers easily using the ExpiresActive directive this is an alternative
276. es vous tes ici accueil welcome to plone ae Welcome to Plone Accueil This welcome page is used to introduce you to the Plone Content Man ouvrir session This is the 2 0 version of Plone It is fetched from CVS hourly and the sys Nom d utilisateur Please help us test the system by using it and reporting bugs that are n plone org collector Mot de passe Join and login There is an publicly available reviewer account that is s approve items you submit for publishing There is also a predefined mem Fy ouvrir session a login member s Mot de F a password member oubli y a login reviewer Nouvel utilisateur a password reviewer Packages updated hourly a CMEPlone 2 0 tarball a CMEPlone 2 0 zipfile Migration You can find migration information from Plone 1 0 x to Plone 2 0 at the P Please work with us to improve the migration experience before 2 0 is re Figure 6 1 Plone org in French Plone reads the HTTP headers that a browser sends to the client requesting a language If your browser is in English then you won t see much To change the language settings in Internet Explorer do the following Once you ve done this pick your favorite Plone site and visit it in your browser The translations for Plone are handled through a tool called Placeless Translation Service PTS You can locate the PTS tool in the Zope control panel at the bottom of the page you ll see an option for
277. es and limitations that are key to understanding workflow in Plone The workflow product used in Plone is DCWorkflow which is an open source product released by Zope Corporation Other workflow systems are available and some of them are being incorporated into Plone such as OpenFlow http www openflow it However for the moment DCWorkflow is powerful and simple enough to provide all the functionality most users will need DCWorkflow assumes there s one object in the system that s the target of the workflow for example one piece of content or one widget It further assumes that all objects of the same type go through the same workflow By repurposing content see Chapter 11 for more on this you can have similar content use different workflows Since the DCWorkflow system is included in Plone there s nothing extra to install It s repre sented in the Zope Management Interface ZMI by the portal_workflow object 8 1 2 1 Conceptualizing a Workflow Before explaining a workflow I ll explain a few simple pieces of terminology states and tran sitions A state is information about an item of content at a particular moment in time Examples of states are private public pending and draft All workflows have at least one starting state in which all the content starts The workflow will then move the content through a series of states either by user interaction or by some automation process When the content reaches an end state
278. es require an extra stage of review or when published send e mails to certain 311 users You can now make a new workflow as I described in Chapter 8 and assign it to your press release Adding a new view means customizing the newsitem_view page template and renaming it to something meaningful such as pressrelease_view You may want to alter that file to add some information about the company at the bottom of the page For example lt h2 gt About ACME Widget Company lt h2 gt lt p gt Our company is the prime maker of widgets in the world Founded in 1980 we ve been providing excellent widgets to all parts of the globe For more marketing information please contact Joe Bloggs marketing director lt p gt After you ve saved your changes to your new page template return to the settings for the press release in portal_types and go to the Actions page Change the action for viewing a press release from pointing to newsitem_view to pointing to pressrelease_view Now whenever you view a press release that view page will display as shown in Figure 11 1 navigation Home Chapters 3 Members 3 Software Example press release Example press release Consequat saepius dignissim abdo ymo torqueo laoreet transverbe iaceo Huic wisi importunus cogo damnum duis vereor tego patria praemitto lenis os vel eum ideo inhibeo haero uxor blandit quae co diam Nobis dolore sino vero quia lobortis adipiscing Le
279. esn t exist as a metadata column then you ll get an AttributeError The following are a few methods available from a brain that are useful e getPath This returns the physical path for this object inside Zope e getURL This returns the URL for this object with virtual hosting applied e getObject This returns the actual object e getRID This is a unique ID for the object in the catalog and it changes each time the object is uncataloged It s for internal purposes only So if you wanted to get the object for each result you can do so as you ll see in the following example However there s a reason the catalog doesn t do this it s expensive in terms of computation because it involves waking up an object from the database and all the objects in between and making lots of security checks If you can try to make your metadata contain the right information you ll have a much faster application Obviously sometimes metadata can t contain everything but it s worth considering in the design To get each object use the following results context portal_catalog searchResults for result in results object result getObject print object return printed Since you have a Python list of these brains it s now straightforward to manipulate the results in a manner that you see fit To find out how many results were returned you can just call the len function on the list like so results context portal_catalog se
280. ess a C Program Files Plone DatalExtensions co a a accessRule py 1 KB EEA 10 16 2002 8 07 PM READE txt 1KB Text Document 10 16 2000 5 10 PM Extensions OKB pythonwin 1 4 2004 5 23 PM Select an item to view its description See also My Documents My Network Places My Computer a 3 object s 443 bytes A My Computer yy Figure 6 5 A new external method test py You can now open test py and edit it to your heart s content writing any Python code you want The only catch is that you must have an entry function that takes at least one argument self This argument is the external method object in Plone that you ll be adding shortly The fol lowing is an example entry function that reads the README txt file out of the same Extensions directory and spits it back to the user you ll have to change the path to point to your file def readFile self fh open r c Program Files Plone Data Extensions README txt rb data fh read return data Now that you ve done that you need to map an external method to this script This is a Zope object so return to the ZMI click portal_skins and then click custom Finally select External Method from the Add New Items drop down list When you add an external method you need to give the name of the module without the py and the entry function so in this case the add form looks like Figure 6 6 150 Add External Method H
281. etails Title Description 4 brief description of th f My Network P File name Files of type fan Files Image Select the image to be added by clicking the Browse button Browse No image has been uploaded yet gt save gt cancel Figure 3 18 Uploading an image It s common for image filenames to end with an extension such as gif jpg jpeg png or pict You can display images inside Plone on a Web page without having to download them to the local computer if the type of the image uploaded is viewable in the user s Web browser The most common image types are gif jpg and png which are visible on almost computer system Figure 3 19 shows an image of the Plone logo 57 home news members Bandym you are here home members andym s home plone logo navigation sharing Home Ca Members andym s Home Plone Logo Size 6998 Figure 3 19 Viewing the image You can t edit images directly instead you can edit the image on your hard drive using any program such as Adobe Photoshop or GNU Image Manipulation Program GIMP Once com plete clicking the edit tab allows you upload your new image into Plone If you do a lot of image manipulation you can refer to Chapter 10 which covers External Editor a tool that lets you edit images using a program without having to upload and download them 3
282. events recently published and calen dar portlets All the available portlets aren t configured in Plone by default The following sections describe portlet slot in Plone Each section describes the portlet and shows what it looks like Then I give the path expression that you need to add to the slots property so it ll show up in your Plone site For example to show the calendar portlet on left side enter here portlet_calendar macros portlet in the left_slots property and click Save Changes If you want to remove it from the right _slots property then you could remove the same line from the right_slots property and click Save Changes 4 1 3 1 1 Calendar The calendar portlet is one of the default portlets that displays the calendar on the right of the Plone page This portlet shows published events for that month in a little calendar The calendar portlet will appear regardless if there are events to show in the calendar You can further configure the calendar using the portal_calendar tool in the ZMI see Figure 4 8 January 2004 Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa I 2 3 45 6 7 8 910 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 Figure 4 8 Calendar portlet The expression to add is here portlet_calendar macros portlet 4 1 3 1 2 Events The events portlet displays a list of the upcoming published events If you have this item in the portlet list it won t show up unless there are some published events to display
283. ext title_or_id new_context absolute_url CCC new_context plone_utils contentEdit new_context id id title title description description return state set context new_context CCC portal_status_message Source code changes saved The script does a few things First it gets the filename if one exists if no ID is given then the 347 ID is set to that filename This means if a user uploads library c the ID for that object will be library c Second it tells portal_factory to create an object see the Portal Factory sidebar for more information on what that means Then it calls the edit method on the object something you wrote earlier and it calls contentEdit on the plone_utils tool Without looking into the depths of the plone_utils tool contentEdit takes the keywords given and if the class implements Dublin Core then it will change those attributes Since you set up the _ implements __ attribute earlier the edit method in Listing 12 7 will do the work for you Any changes to title ID or description will be changed in the object 12 1 1 8 Portal Factory One problem exists with the way objects are created Before you can even get to the edit form you have to create an object Then the edit form for that object will display In practice people accidentally create objects get to the edit form and then realize it was the wrong type This is annoying and leaves spare objects lying around in your datab
284. f Python code This isn t something you d normally use while profiling a site however for completeness I ll describe it in this section To activate the Python Profiler you need to add a variable to the configuration file In the zope conf file of your etc directory enable the publisher profile file command To do this define a file to which it ll write On Windows this could be c zope output on Linux it s tmp zope output Add the following line on Linux publisher profile file tmp zope output Then restart Plone but it will run very slowly If you re running a large number of requests and want to examine the results then the file specified in the environment variable will contain output of the data As in previous examples call the page that s being profiled using the ab tool or a Web browser Then access the control panel through the ZMI select Debug Info and then select the Profiling tab you ll get output from the Python Profiler as shown in Figure 14 6 408 Sort time Limit 100 strip Dirs V Mode stats z Update 451057 function calls 350852 primitive calls in 17 180 CPU seconds Ordered by internal time List reduced from 1284 to 100 due to restriction lt 100 gt ncalls tottime percall cumtime percall filename lineno function 21821 540 0 890 0 000 3 530 0 007 visitor py 50 dispatch 13551 5768 0 730 0 000 3 040 0 005 visitor py 46 default 1064 88 0 450 0 000 1 110 0 013 pos
285. f security settings changes however I urge you to back up your Plone site I show you how to do this in Chapter 14 9 1 3 2 1 Stopping Users Joining Your Site To stop users from joining your site you set the Add portal member permission in the root of your Zope for anonymous users You can either deselect this for anonymous users there or go to your Plone site and turn off the Acquire Permission setting 9 1 3 2 2 Stopping Users Searching Your Site To stop users from searching your site you set the Search ZCatalog permission to anonymous users in the root of a Plone site So change the permission there by deselecting Anonymous or any other user 255 9 1 3 2 3 Stopping Anonymous Users from Accessing Your Site Altogether Ah well stopping anonymous users from accessing your site is a little tricky because it s quite complicated to remove anonymous access to your site completely users still need to be able to access your site to be able to log in What you really want in this situation is to be able to restrict access to your content You can do this be restricting the permissions on your workflow 9 1 3 3 Security and Workflow As I pointed out in Chapter 7 workflow manages the security of each object in the workflow It does this by changing the actual permissions on an object I ve just shown you how to view the security settings for each object so you can now see how the security settings for objects in one state can be
286. f the filename there and leave Take ownership of imported objects selected Click the Import button to import the workflow The workflow will now be imported and given the name specified in the export 8 1 4 6 2 Writing a Workflow in Python Using Python is probably the favorite way of programmers to write a workflow since it can all be done in Python and easily distributed First make a Python module on the file system At the top of the file import the appropriate tools as follows from Products CMFCore WorkflowTool import addWorkflowFactory from Products DCWorkflow DCWorkflow import DCWorkflowDefinition Second make a function that creates the workflow Appendix A lists the API for writing a workflow in a little more detail But you could just cheat and look at all the great examples available in the PloneWorkflow s project in the collective http sfnet projects collective or even the ones contained in Plone For example def sample id Sample workflow ob DCWorkflowDefinition id ob states addState private ob states addState public add transitions return ob Finally register the workflow in the system like so 231 addWorkflowFactory sample id sample_workflow title Sample workflow This script will need to be as part of a product installation Chapter 12 covers writing and installing products Now of course a shortcut is available which is called DCWorkflowDump Thi
287. f the better known are JavaServer Pages Active Server Pages and PHP To users of the other systems the Zope Page Templates system at first looks rather odd but quickly you ll see it s an extremely powerful system The simplest template looks something like the following lt p tal content here message gt The title lt p gt If the value of message resolved to Hello World then the following would be output when the template was rendered lt p gt Hello World lt p gt For a moment Ill gloss over a few of the finer points and show what has happened here A standard paragraph was written in HTML yet the content of that paragraph isn t the text shown in the output To the opening paragraph tag a tal content attribute was added and the here message expression was written for that attribute The content of the paragraph was output however as the value of the message variable in this case Hello World At run time the template is evaluated and the tal content attribute is called The tal part stands for Template Attribute Language and has a range of commands including content You ll see all these commands later with them you can do almost anything you want to do the HTML tags You can create loops alter tags alter attributes remove tags and so on Before the template runs this will show up as valid Extensible HTML XHTML and will show up in an editor as a paragraph with that text All these page templates are valid XHT
288. f you re unfamiliar with this process 7 1 3 3 Making a New Skin on the File System Throughout these chapters I ve been using the ZMI But what most Plone developers use for any serious work is the file system Making a skin on the file system is actually easy Go to the instance home directory of your Plone installation Inside the Products directory make a new directory the name of this directory is the name of the product so the conven tion is something short with no spaces or underscores and mixed case PloneBookExample CMFPlone and PloneSilverCity are all examples Inside that folder make a new file called __init__ py and a directory called skins In the _ init__ py file you need to add the following two lines from Products CMFCore import DirectoryView DirectoryView registerDirectory skins globals Next restart Plone and then click portal_skins to add an FSDV This will open a list of the registered directories Scroll down until you find the one that matches the directory you registered this will be the name of the directory with skins on the end Enter an ID that makes sense and click Add You now have an empty directory where you can go to add layers of your skin 7 1 3 4 Debugging Skins Another reason I ve repeatedly been using the ZMI with you rather than the file system is that it gives feedback about errors and gets you comfortable with placing objects inside others A further positive feature abo
289. file system In the middle of the page is the Customize button click it This will create a copy of the object called logo jpg in the custom folder see Figure 4 22 NOTE If at this point you get an error message about a bad request return to por tal_skins custom and you ll see an object called logo jpg Click that object There can be only one object called logo jpg in the custom folder and the error is warning you that this procedure has been performed already If you want to customize the original object in other words repeat these steps you ll have to delete the object inside custom Edit View Properties Security m Image at Plone portal_skins custom logo jpg You can update the data for this image using the form below Select a data file from your local c upload to update the contents of the image Title Content Type image jpeg Preview Last Modified 2004 01 03 18 48 File Size 6 998 bytes Save Changes File Data Browse Upload Figure 4 22 The customized image This page may look similar to the previous page shown in Figure 4 21 but there are a couple of differences First if you look in the top left corner of the page you ll see that the meta_type and location of this object has changed No longer are you in portal_skins plone_images logo jpg rather you re in portal_skins custom logo jpg Second you ll now see a Browse button that lets you select an image and upload it meaning you can change th
290. fined in Chapter 9 you can go to any piece of content and will see the edit tab At that point click Edit to alter the document and make your changes 55 3 1 4 9 Sharing Your Document This allows you to assign more rights to other users or groups of users of the system to your document This is an advanced feature and is covered in more detail in Chapter 9 3 1 5 Adding and Editing Other Types of Content I ve just covered how to add and edit documents in detail All the other content types are similar They all have the same or similar actions to edit it s just the forms and the data in them that change In the following sections I ll cover some of these other types of content All the following types of content use the same workflow process so they need to be published in the same manner as documents 3 1 5 1 Adding and Editing Images Images are graphical pieces of content you add them by selecting Image from the drop down list When you add an image the name of the content changes to the file of the image So if you upload an image called photo gif it ll be accessible in Plone as photo gif When adding or uploading a new image you can select the image from your hard drive by clicking the Browse button and selecting the file see Figure 3 18 56 navigation Home 3 Members Choose file 5 andym s Home E2 Look in E Desktop Edit Image Using this form you can enti m Image D
291. fines in the ZMI by clicking portal_skins clicking plone_templates and then clicking global_defines You can find a full list of all the defines and an explanation of them in Appendix A 122 5 1 3 2 5 tal omit tag Removing Elements The tal omit tag is rather unusual It allows the removal of a tag Because the Zope Page Templates system requires the use of HTML tags complicated pages can often need lots of elements and can result in extra tags being added For this statement the tag is removed which just leaves the content of the tags For example lt p tal omit tag gt This is some text lt p gt The output is as follows This is some text In this example the text This is some text will be rendered however the tag won t be rendered Optionally the tal omit tag statement can take an expression as an argument If that expression evaluates to false then the tal omit tag doesn t happen For example this does nothing lt p tal omit tag nothing gt This is some text lt p gt One alternative to using tal omit tag is using the tal namespace as discussed in the Useful Tips section of Chapter 6 5 1 3 2 6 tal on error Performing Error Handling The tal on error statement provides a method to handle errors It acts rather like tal content because it causes the content of the tag to replaced but it s triggered only when an error occurs The following is an example lt p tal content request message tal on
292. first part of the catalog s job is to build indexes of the content An index primarily provides a method for quickly and efficiently searching the content For this reason the content of the index isn t designed to be clear or make sense it s designed rather for fast and efficient searching When you search in a Plone site you search the indexes and the catalog will return matching result sets for that query An index queries a Plone object for a particular value a method or an attribute and then it indexes whatever that object returns for that query How it actually indexes the content depends upon the type of the index Table 11 1 lists all the indexes that come with Plone Table 11 1 Available Index Types Name Description DateIndex This is designed to index dates and it lets you do searches based on dates and times DateIndexRange This is a more efficient implementation of DateIndex for cases where you have two dates such as start and end dates and doing lots of searches in those dates FieldIndex This treats every result automatically and allows you to search on what ever the index may contain It matches any search that matches the index KeywordIndex This takes a sequence of keywords and splits them into separate words This will return a result if any of the keywords in the index match the given query This is ideal for searching subjects or keywords on objects PathIndex This indexes the path of an object such as
293. for this standard field you ll have only a few attributes that should be added First you ll want this field to be searchable so you should set the searchable attribute Second you ll want this field to respond to FTP and WebDAV requests so you must set the primary attribute you can find more information on this in the sidebar The Primary Field Marshaling and Responding to FTP and WebDAV You ll want multiple content types to be uploaded so for this reason you set some allowable_content_types Then of course you need to know how to show the field so for that you set the default_output_type This then gives you the following field TextField body searchable 1 primary i default_output_types text html allowable_content_types text plain gt text structured gt text restructured text html widget RichWidget label Body 373 13 1 1 4 The Primary Field Marhsaling and Responding to FTP and WebDAV Plone is an object oriented system where an object has many attributes and can t simply be represented as a plain file Unfortunately most the existing protocols such as FTP and WebDAV treat content in exactly this manner So there needs to be some way to translate between the two and the primary field does this By setting the primary field on an object this field will become the one that s sent and received by these protocols rather than the entire object
294. form as shown in Figure 6 8 Edit Test Validation Actions Properties History Undo Ownership Se i Controller Page Template at Plone portal_skins custom test_controller Form and Script Actions This tool lets you set or override the default actions that are executed when a Controller Page T submitted or a Controller Python Script returns Learn more Edit Form Script Action Overrides Template Script Status Context Button Action Argul I test_controller success Any gt redirectto x Save Delete Add a New Form Action Override Template Script test_controller tatus Figure 6 8 Adding an action You have the following four choices for the actual resulting action 159 redirect_to This redirects to the URL specified in the argument a TALES expres sion The URL can be either absolute or relative redirect_to_action This redirect to the action specified in the argument a TALES expression for the current content object for example string view At this stage I haven t covered actions yet but each content object has actions such as view and edit Chapter 11 covers actions for an object traverse_to This traverses to the URL specified in the argument a TALES expres sion The URL can be either absolute or be relative traverse_to_action This traverses to the action specified in the argument a TALES expression for the current content object for example string view One example of th
295. formats Each of the fields has attributes you can assign to the field You ve already seen at least two the name and the widget attributes The name attribute is the only required parameter to a field and should be unique lowercase and without spaces or periods The name attribute is going to be used internally only so sticking to this naming rule is important All the other values are optional Table 13 2 describes the attributes Table 13 2 Field Attributes Name Description access he name of the method to get the value of the field so you could change how this field is retrieved Any method name for example specialGetMethod defaulfhe default value for the field default stethgdor obtaining a value for the field one is created for you by default if you don t define one edit_addessoame of a method to get the raw value of a field enforcHVenabiddryyou wont accept anything out side the vocabulary Possible Values See the Overriding Default Methods section later in this chapter Should be appropriate to the field Any string for example getSpecialDe scription See the Overriding Default Methods section later in this chapter Any method name for example rawGet Method See the Overriding Default Methods section later in this chapter True or False 368 index If you want this field to be placed in its own catalog index then specify the type of index here as a string If you app
296. ful A document in Plone has a description method for example that will give you the description that the user added When using the templating system you ll see in more detail that everything is an object You ll look first at some of the basic principles of object publishing 5 1 1 1 Introducing Object Publishing In Plone youre actually publishing objects that are located in Zope most of them are objects that are persisted in the object database The concept is more complicated than standard Common Gateway Interface CGI environments where a script is executed and passed a series of request variables Everything in Plone is an object everything in Zope is an object and everything in Python is an object Until now I ve tried to avoid using the word object instead I ve used words such as template script and item but all of these are really objects just ones that behave differently When you request a Uniform Resource Locator URL from Plone an object in the environment is called Plone does this by translating the URL into a path So if the URL is Plone login_form what Plone is going to do is break that URL down into a path and look up each of those objects in the database It s going find the Plone object and then a login_form object inside the Plone object Looking up this path is called traversal essentially Zope traverses across those objects and then calls the last one in the path When Zope calls the login form obje
297. g Some of the macros in main_template define slots in them as well and then fill them back in the main_template so that if you really wanted you could also fill in those slots That s an advanced technique however so you ll want to ensure you have the basics down before going down that road 6 1 1 2 Introducing Internationalization Plone is always striving to maintain a large number of high quality translations The fact that Plone provides an accessible user interface in more than 30 languages is a key selling point for Plone This also means that I18N is a key feature of the templates To facilitate this the 118N namespace is an extra namespace such as TAL or METAL that has specific statements 134 This section details what users need to know in regard to the templates In a template you can add an i18n tag to an element that will allow the translation of an attribute or its contents Six statements exist attributes data domain source target and translate The basic pattern is to wrap the piece of text you want to translate and add the appropriate i18n attributes For example if you want to translate the following lt i gt Some text lt i gt it would become like so lt i i18n translate some_text_label gt Some text lt i gt Each localization provides a translation of Some text and the translation tool looks up a trans lation for a user When performing the translation each string to be translated must have a unique me
298. g You can then export the file as a comma separated file and finally import it into Plone Because this requires lots of methods that are restricted you ll need to make this an external method An external method to import user import csv the full path to your csv file fileName var zope zeo Extensions test csv def importUsers self reader csv reader open fileName r 258 pr self portal_registration pg self portal_groups out if your csv file contains a header line that explains the contents of each column ignoreLine 1 This is just the setup code in other words it sets up all the variables you ll use in this script At the beginning you import the csv module which is a module that ships with Python 2 3 and provides fast parsing of csv files The csv file is in the variable fileName which is a full path to the file if you make it a relative path Plone may end up looking in the wrong place As you saw earlier self is passed to the method and from that you can get to the two tools needed portal_registration to provide access to the registration API and portal_groups to provide access to the groups API for row in reader if ignoreLine ignoreLine 0 continue check we have exactly 4 items assert len row id name email groups row groups groups split make a password password pr generatePassword Next you loop through each row and get the ID name e mail
299. g autogener ated IDs ImageWidget Shows and allows the editing of images IntegerWidget A simple HTML input box for a string KeywordWidget This displays a list of keywords from the catalog in a complicated widget such as the one in the Properties tab on a normal ob ject LabelWidgets Used to display labels on forms no values or form elements LinesWidget Displays a text area that users can enter values MultiSelectionWidgs tlection widget by default it s an HTML select widget PasswordWidget An HTML password element RichWidget Allows the input of a file in mul tiple formats that are then trans formed See Transforming Data later in this chapter for more in formation ReferenceWidget Shows an HTML select element of a list of possible references Other Attributes size You can provide format rows mode and cols for columns You can provide a display_threshold that allows you to set the size of an image if it s below this size the image will display in the Web page size rows and columns format which can be one of select or checkbox You can provide rows cols columns and format 371 Name Description Other Attributes SelectionWidget Shows a selection widget If format which can be one of flex select or it s flex the default then if the radio number of choices is more than four a select element is used otherwise a radio button is used StringWidget A simple HT
300. ge it looks through the layers to find logo jpg In a default site this is the item in plone_images called logo jpg Because this is an FSDV as I mentioned earlier you re unable to alter the image through the Web To guard your site against future changes you don t want to be able to change it on the file system either Instead take a closer look at what the Customize 169 button does If you look at that button again you can see that there is to the left of that button a drop down list of folders in the contents of the portal_skins tool NOTE The folders listed are ones that exist inside the Zope database FSDVs aren t included in the drop down list by default it shows only folders Clicking the Customize button makes a local copy of the item in the folder selected in the drop down box By default that folder is the custom folder so now you have a copy in the custom folder When Plone looks up the item logo jpg it will access the version in the custom folder Looking again at the layers for the Plone Default skin the custom folder is the topmost layer of the skin Hence when logo jpg is called it will find the image in the custom layer This is why the new logo jpg is rendered Placing customized items into the custom folder is the quickest way to start tweaking your Plone site The custom folder is a standard Plone folder so you can put as many items in there as you want in order to override earlier elements 7 1 2 2
301. ge variable set at the beginning of the script After this replacement the msg variable will contain the e mail you want to send To send the e mail simply call the send method of the MailHost and pass through the e mail string if user email msg message administratorEmailAddress user email object TitleOrIdQ object Description object absolute_url mhost send msg 229 This will result in the following e mail being sent From administrator agmweb ca To andy agmweb ca Subject New item submitted for approval Plone s great We all know Plone is a great product but with the newest release it s gotten even better URL http agmweb ca Members andym News_Item_123 Appendix B shows the full listing for this script 8 1 4 5 Using PloneCollectorNG PloneCollectorNG is a bug tracker that s available for Plone You ll find many other issue track ers out there but this is the one I use and recommend for Plone In fact writing an issue tracker seems to be a common thing for developers to do One of the really nice things about workflow is that it enables your users to significantly change the way an application works As a devel oper developing products hooking into DCWorkflow allows your application to remain flexible You can find PloneCollectorNG at http www zope org Members ajung PloneCollectorNG The product adds a series of content types during installation one of them is PlonelssueNG w
302. gg Od Figure 10 3 Correctly installed products Incidentally you have three things that could go wrong at this point First if nothing shows up in the management interface then you ve placed the directory in the wrong place To correct this double check the installation instructions and the location of your Products directory as explained earlier Second you could get a broken icon appearing in the product list this means the product was attempted to be registered in Zope but an error occurred Click the broken icon to get a traceback which will tell you the error and should give you a chance to fix it Finally if you ve been unable to access the management interface after restarting it could be that you have a more serious problem Zope wasn t able to start because Plone found a serious 280 error To find out what the problem is start Plone from the command line in debug mode and a traceback will print to the screen 10 1 2 4 Installing in Plone Now that you ve correctly installed into Zope the next step is easy To com pletely install CMFExternalFile you ll now need to install the CMFExternalFile product http prdownloads sourceforge net collective CMFExternalFile 0 5 zip download the same way you installed ExternalFile You ll also have to restart Plone You have to install CMFExternalFile into each Plone instance Not all Plone products require this but most do The only real way to tell is to
303. gners translators writers and testers You can find the current development status on the Plone Web site at http plone org development and the best way to get involved is to join the mailing lists or join the developers on an Internet Relay Chat IRC channel Plone is built on top of Zope and the Content Management Framework CMF To understand Plone you have to understand Zope and the CMF as the underlying architecture For this reason I ll explain these two items and how they integrate with Plone in this section Zope is a powerful and flexible open source Web application server developed by Zope Corporation http www zope org Originally Zope was developed as a stand alone CMS but over time it didn t satisfy the needs of its users Then Zope Corporation developed the CMF an open source project The CMF provides developers with the tools necessary to create complex CMSs it enables workflow provides site skinning and offers other functions The CMF is a framework for a system in other words it provides the tools for developers to build a product rather than just providing an out of the box system that users can use imme diately Plone takes this and many other features and improves upon them to provide the user with a high quality product Plone is a layer on top of the CME which is an application running on top of Zope Understanding the CMF is key to understanding Plone Most administration functions require the use of Zope
304. gure 7 12 Searching for text In Zope you can also perform this search by going to the portal_skins tool and clicking the Find tab Once there enter Notice that the top in the containing field Leave all the other settings the same and click the Find button Sure enough you ll find the login_success template You can also conduct this search on the file system depending upon your operating system and the tools available The quickest way to find this file in Linux is to go to your CMFPlone directory and do the following grep ri Notice that the top plone_forms login_success pt Notice that the top 192 On Windows open the CMFPlone folder in Windows Explorer and click the Search tab Then enter the contents of the file as Notice that the top and click Search This should give you a list of likely files Using this rather crude technique you ve been given a template login_success that renders the message back to the user This technique has the following issues e Beware of lowercasing the content in CSS always make your searches case insensitive the default in Windows It s annoying to search for home when it s Home in the template and it s lowercased in CSS e If you re trying to do this in a language other than English the content may have been localized causing the search to fail e Occasionally there may not be searchable text that will match up in this case looking up via URL is the recommended appr
305. han 2GB If an integer is reported then you ll need to upgrade your Python version or recompile with large file support enabled again enabled in new version by default If you try to compile Plone with a version of Zope that doesn t have large file support you ll get an error like so andy thorin tmp Zope 2 7 0 b3 configure Configuring Zope installation This Python interpreter does not have have large file support enabled If this is the case then you ll need to go and fix your Python installation You can find more de tails about this at http www python org doc current lib posix large files html If you re happy with just limiting to 2GB then you can pass the ignore largefile option to the configure script If you re limited to a 2GB database then you ll need to pack more regularly 14 1 1 2 2 Cleaning up the database is called packing Packing can be intensive and when its process is run it s in a separate thread so although it will affect a site s speed it will still be able to respond to requests To pack sites and keep Plone running at peak performance see the Using ZEO section later in this chapter To run a pack access the ZMI control panel select Database Management and click main 398 Database Activity Cache Parameters 6 Database Management at Control_Panel Database main The Database Manager allows you to view database status information It also allows you to pert tasks such as
306. hange into the examples folder In that folder you ll see the mkdemo script To run it just type mkdemo python ArchGenXML py outline zargo outline_argo You then need to copy the product folder created for example outline_argo into your Prod ucts directory and restart your Zope instance If you take a peek inside the outline_argo di rectory you ll see that everything has been created for you the entire directory and all the relevant product initialization Click plone setup select Add Remove Products and install the outline_argo product You can now add an outline object that has all the schema defined in the UML 390 That s about as rapid development as you can get and there are many many options inside ArchGenXML for defining abstract classes code fragments and so on Furthermore generating code this way easily allows you to make changes and have great documentation The only real drawback is a lack of round tripping http plone org documentation archetypes ArchetypesDeveloperGuide index_html archgenxml generating archetypes using uml 13 1 6 2 Storing Your Content in a SQL Database For almost all of this book the content you ve seen has been stored in the Zope object database I ve shown you how to store content on the file system but a commonly asked question is How do you store it in a relational database Placing it inside a relational database is often a good thing to do if the following are true e
307. hapter 10 covers this in more detail After selecting the options you want click Save to commit the changes All the changes on this form will occur immediately 4 1 2 2 Setting Up a Mail Server Plone will send e mail using the MailHost object which provides an interface to an SMTP server and allows the developer to write forms and tools that send e mails The send to a friend function and the mailing of a forgotten password use the settings configured here The default configuration is for a mail server on the localhost at port 25 If the SMTP server is located elsewhere in the network then you can access the form by clicking plone setup and then clicking Mail Settings Then change the mail server and the port to suit your configuration On my network the mail server is at monty clearwind ca on port 1025 so I set the server as shown in Figure 4 4 however in most cases you won t need to change this 78 home news you are here home a navigation Mail Setup Home Up to Plone Setup Chapters Mail setup for Plone Software MailHost Details SMTP server The address of your local SMTP outgoing e mail server Usually localhe use an external server to send e mail monty clearwind ca SMTP port The port of your local SMTP outgoing e mail server Usually 25 1025 s Save Figure 4 4 Setting up the mail server NOTE The MailHost object is a Zope object accessible in the ZMI This obj
308. he ZMI As shown in Figure 4 19 this will open a large list of portal actions present by default Some of these actions will seem familiar in that they represent parts of the Plone site 95 Actions Action Providers Overview Contents View Plone Actions Tool at Plone portal actions C Name Contents Id ffolderCo ntents Propertie Action string folder_url folder_contents Condition python member and folder is not object Permission List folder contents gt Category object Visible Vv D Name Contents Id ffolderCo ntents Action string folder_url folder_contents Condition python member Permission List folder contents x Category folder Visible M l Name Edit this file in an externi Id lextediit Action string object_url extemal_edit Candition Invthon hasatt nooral nortal ornnerties site oronerties ext editor and onoral onrtal Figure 4 19 The portal actions for your Plone site Scroll through the actions until you find the Home item and change the Name field to wel come Then scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save Returning to the Plone interface you ll now notice that it says welcome on the tab The order of the tabs from left to right on the page is set by the order from top to bottom in the list of actions So to move the tabs it s a matter of checking the tab and then scrolling to the bottom of the page to the Move Up and Move Down buttons I
309. he object s ID getRemoteUrl Only used for links this is the URL pointed to by the link id Same as getld location For events only where the event will take place meta_type The object s meta_type modified When the object was modified 317 Name Description portal type The object s portal_type review_state The state of the object in workflow start For events only when the event will start 11 1 2 3 How an Object Is Indexed Content types are indexed automatically because they inherit from a class called PortalContent which inherits from a class called CMFCatalogAware The CMFCatalogAware class handles all the code to ensure that when you add edit cut copy delete or rename an object the catalog and also workflow are kept up to date Essentially the object is passed to the catalog and the appropriate instruction for the catalog is called index remove from index and so on The catalog then runs through each index and for each index queries the object by looking for attributes or methods on the object For most indexes the attribute or method looked up is the same name as the index For the index name Title it would look for an attribute or method named Title and populate the index with the result It then repeats the process with each of the metadata columns Two exceptions to this process are the FieldIndex and TopicIndex types When you add a FieldIn dex you can specify that the index examines a different
310. he portal_skins tool click Properties and it will list the file system path of CMFPlone skins plone_images This path is the location of this directory on the file system relative to the instance home you specified in the installation process Because you can see files through the Web in the FSDV or on the file system you can access them for reading either way Because viewing files through a file system is generally more friendly and easy to do I ll refer to a file as a path in the file system which can be accessed using familiar tools 7 1 2 Customizing Skins You ve seen how skins and layers interact Now you ll see how you can customize a Plone site IIl start by returning to the example in Chapter 4 where you learned how to customize the logo Using your new knowledge of how skins work you ll be able to follow along and customize the skin Then I ll move onto showing the power of the Plone CSS and how you can customize it Finally Pll cover the main template you saw in earlier chapters and go through all the elements of it 7 1 2 1 Customizing the Logo Revisited In Chapter 4 you learned how to customize the logo in the top left corner of a Plone site but I skipped over what was actually happening The section revisits that example The logo jpg image is the image that appears in the top left corner of every page You ll now look at what happens when a browser tries to render this page Once Plone receives the request for that ima
311. he possibility of sending an e mail to all the people in a workgroup for an object You could add this to workflow but first you need a script to do that This example uses a couple of functions to get at the users The following is the getGroupUsers script which takes an object and returns a list of users parameters object None object is the object to find all the members of the same group for users 261 get the creator userName object Creator user context portal_membership getMemberById userName pg context portal_groups loop through the groups the user is in for group in user getGroups group pg getGroupByld group loop through the users in each of those groups for user in group getGroupUsers if user not in users and user userName users append user return users In this script you re given an object so you need to find the creator of that object by calling the method Creator Once you have that user you can call getGroups and a method of the user object lists all the names of all the groups a user is in After that you get each of those groups and from that list you get the usernames for a group So finally you have each username Now for each of those users you want only users who aren t duplicates or aren t the original person who made the change to the object The user list will contain all the other users in the same groups as the person who owned the object You co
312. he rewrite rule information inside a virtual host directive You could have multiple such virtual hosts in Apache so that PHP Perl and Java sites all sit side by side on one server 10 1 3 2 2 Squid For its powerful caching and configuration options Squid is a popular choice for users Squid is available for Unix and there are Windows builds using cygwin available Although I havent tested the Windows version specifically people who have report that it works well You can find the downloads at http www squid cache org These notes cover the latest stable version at the time of writing which is version 2 5 Installing Squid from the source distribution is quite simple After downloading the following commands install Squid tar xvf squid 2 5 STABLE3 tar gz cd squid 2 5 STABLE3 configure prefix usr local squid make all make install 288 Unfortunately Squid doesn t have a rewrite rule that allows you to alter incoming requests before proxying Squid Guard http www squidguard org can do this job though I tested the 1 2 0 version After downloading the following commands perform the install tar zxvf squidGuard 1 2 0 tar gz cd squidGuard 1 2 0 configure make make install Now both Squid and SquidGuard are ready to go however both configuration files still need setting up You can find the Squid configuration file at etc squid conf It s a long configuration file that fortunately e
313. he value you want The easiest way to do this is to make a string out of the fields you want for example the title the description and the raw code This can be protected by the View permission since anyone viewing the object can happily see the contents anyway The following is a SearchableText method that performs this task security declareProtected view_permission SearchableText def SearchableText self Used by the catalog for basic full text indexing return s s 48 self Title Q self Description self _raw 12 1 1 6 3 The Difference Between a Python Class and a Plone Class As you can see there s quite a difference between a normal Python product and one registered in Plone However most of those differences are about registering the product and assert ing the security The actual class remains similar Listing 12 5 highlights all the differences between the pure Python implementation and the Plone implementation Listing 12 5 The Plone Version of the Class from Globals import InitializeClass from AccessControl import ClassSecurityInfo from Products CMFDefault DublinCore import DefaultDublinCoreImpl from Products CMFCore PortalContent import PortalContent from config import plone_product_name product_name from config import add_permission edit_permission view_permission from source import generate_html list_generators factory_type_information id plone_product_name 341
314. hen it moves into document_view and you see the percentages for that part So in this case going from toLocalizedTime to getPreviousMonth takes 23 3 percent of the time taken to render document_view 14 1 2 5 2 Page Template Profiler Page Template Profiler works only with the Zope Page Templates system In a similar way to Call Profiler it reports how long was spent enacting each call inside a page template Since in the previous example you saw that most of the time is spent in one page template document_view you may find it instructive to see how the time is spent in that template You can find Page Template Profiler at http zope org Members guido_w PTProfiler Install the product and then restart Zope To deinstall Page Template Profiler you ll have to remove it from your Products directory when you ve finished profiling Once installed go to the Zope root in the ZMI and select PT Profile Viewer from the Add drop down box Complete the creation form giving a unique value for ID enter PTProfiler for example and then click Add Now repeat calling the page you want to measure by running the ab tool or accessing the page in a browser Access the Page Template Profiler object just added and you ll see a result for the request just run Click it to get more details as shown in Figure 14 5 407 Total Number Time a time of calls per call Expression Total rendering time 44 618 23 1 93991
315. her Publish line 40 in call_object a Module Products CMFCore FSPythonScript line 104 in __call__ a Module Shared DC Scripts Bindings line 252 in __call__ Figure 4 5 An example error On the error log form you ll see the following settings e Number of exceptions to keep These are the exceptions to keep in the active log on the screen The default is 20 e Copy exceptions to the event log This copies each exception to the file based log file Not doing this means that no permanent record will be kept for exceptions The default is that this is selected e Ignored exception types This is a list one per line of exception types to ignore The default is Unauthorized NotFound and Redirect 80 You can log each exception and view it on the screen This means if a user is visiting your site and an error occurs then you can go to the error log and see what occurred The three components of an error are the error type which is the type of the error the error value which is a string explaining when an error occurs and the traceback These first two items are shown to a user on a standard error page see Figure 4 6 81 Plone Book Error Message Microsoft Internet Explorer File Edit View Favorites Tools Help Bak gt a Qsearch Favorites media 4 B SH W Address http aloin 080 Plone prefs mailhost set home news Z admin you are here home o stic 7 3 a Site error
316. her terms can exist For example entering Rome or Tuesday will return a result of when either of those words are in the content Not You can use the word not to return results where the word isn t present a prefix of and is required For example entering welcome and not page would return matches for pages that contained welcome but not page Phrases Phrases are grouped with double quotes and signify several words one after the other For example entering welcome page matches This welcome page is used to introduce you to the Plone Content Management System but not Welcome to the front page of my Web site Not phrase You can specify a phrase with a minus prefix For example entering welcome welcome page matches all pages with welcome in them but not ones that match the phrase welcome page 69 NOTE All searches are case insensitive Large sites may have a lot of results so only 20 results display at a time To page through the results navigation bars will appear at the top and the bottom of the search result pages The values on an object used in a search are its title description and body text if the content type has any for example news items and documents 3 1 7 3 Performing an Advanced Search You can narrow down the search results by using an advanced search which is accessible via the search results of a standard search In old Plone sites a search tab brought users to this page you can
317. hich is an issue or bug report Rather than hard coding exactly how the issue moves through the database a separate workflow is assigned to the issue That workflow contains appropriate states transitions variables and worklists At any stage you can find out what state an object is in by calling the getInfoFor method of portal_workflow This useful method accepts an object and the variable to be looked up In PloneCollectorNG s workflow that variable is called state and in Plone workflow it s called review_state For example to find the state for an object you use this portal_workflow getInfoFor obj review_state You can find possible states for an object by examining the state s object directly from the workflow like so portal_workflow pcng_workflow states _mapping keys The result of this is that if your user wants to have a simple issue tracking system then modify ing this workflow through the Web is relatively trivial if when the application was developed the workflow tools have been considered Compare this to another popular bug tracking system Bugzilla where changing a state or a transition requires hours and hours of a Perl programmer s time to find all the hard coded references to a bug s state 8 1 4 6 Distributing and Writing Workflow If you ve got a great workflow for your application you have a couple of different ways to write and distribute workflow The following sections close the
318. his is because when you do this import you ll get a cascade of Zope related imports You can cope with some of this but not all of it One of the common problems is that you ll get the following error Traceback most recent call last File lt stdin gt line 1 in File PloneSilverCity __init__ py line 1 in import PloneSilverCity File PloneSilverCity PloneSilverCity py line 4 in from Globals import InitializeClass File opt Zope 2 7 lib python Globals py line 23 in import Acquisition ComputedAttribute App PersistentExtra os File opt Zope 2 7 lib python App PersistentExtra py line 15 in from Persistence import Persistent ImportError cannot import name Persistent You can solve this by making sure that before you import PloneSilverCity you import Zope and run the startup method To be able to import Zope you must have the directory containing Zope in your path on my computer this is opt Zope 2 7 lib python However you ll then run across errors trying to import CMFCore if you have an instance home configured which you probably will The easiest way to import PloneSilverCity is to run Zope from the command line in debug mode using zopectl This will open a Python prompt that will let you access the Zope database directly from Python Chapter 14 covers this in more detail but it can be done easily now assuming your Zope isn t currently running You can find the zopectl script in the bin directory of your Z
319. ical upshot of this is that now no matter when or how a person types in the word Perl 13 1 2 Putting Together the Rest of the Content Type I ve now covered all the main elements of the content type Listing 13 1 shows all the code together You ll note that the rest of the code is more compact than the Python product because Archetypes does so much work for you Listing 13 1 Article py from Products ArchExample config import ARTICLE_GROUPS from Products Archetypes public import BaseSchema Schema from Products Archetypes public import StringField TextField from Products Archetypes public import SelectionWidget TextAreaWidget from Products Archetypes public import RichWidget from Products Archetypes public import BaseContent registerType 378 from Products Archetypes Marshall import PrimaryFieldMarshaller from Products CMFCore import CMFCorePermissions from config import PROJECTNAME schema BaseSchema Schema StringField group vocabulary ARTICLE_GROUPS widget SelectionWidget J3 StringField blurb searchable 1 widget TextAreaWidget Jas TextField body searchable 1 required 1 primary 1 default_output_type text html allowable_content_types text plain gt text structured gt text restructured text html application msword widget RichWidget label Body Xs marshall PrimaryFieldMarshaller class Article BaseContent This
320. ically small organizations that don t employ a full time Webmaster can be one of the key beneficiaries of such a system By installing a CMS you can resolve all these issues and more The key factor of any CMS is that it provides a clear separation of the key elements in it security workflow templates and so on For example the templates presenting an item are separate from the content This allows you to easily modify the presentation 1 1 3 Introducing Plone s Features Plone is open source licensed under the General Public License GPL which is a common open source license that allows anyone to use the source for free For more information about the GPL go to the Free Software Foundation Web site at http ww gnu org You can examine any aspect of Plone s code and alter it to fit your application There are no licensing fees to pay there s no license that will expire and all the code is visible This open source philosophy means that Plone already has a large user base and legion of developers usability experts translators technical writers and graphic designers who are able to work on Plone By choos ing Plone you re not locked into one company rather nearly a dozen companies offer different Plone services 1 1 3 1 Packaging Plone maintains easy installers for Windows Linux and Mac Other third party products and add ons also come with the installers Maintaining quality releases of these products makes instal
321. ick portal_skins click custom click the Add button and then select Image as shown in Figure 4 24 Select type to add Filesystem Directory View Folder Folder Ordered Form Controller Tool Formulator Form Group User Folder Mail Host Page Template Plone Content Plone Site Figure 4 24 Adding the new image For the file I chose an image I found on the Web which is also available on the Plone book Web site but you could choose any image you have Make sure that the ID of the image is background gif as shown in Figure 4 25 102 Add Image Help Select a file to upload from your local computer by clicking the Browse button Id background gif Title File oackground gif Browse Add Figure 4 25 Checking the new image Second you need to change the CSS code to point to the new image You ve already cus tomized the CSS code so return to portal_skins custom ploneCustom css and change the text from this DELETE THIS LINE AND PUT YOUR CUSTOM STUFF HERE to the following body background image url background jpg background repeat no repeat background position center Click Save Changes to commit changes to this file Then return to the Plone interface If all went well you should see the new image see Figure 4 26 103 news software Z admin you are here home plone book navigation Home Chapters Plone Book 3 Software
322. iled to you 38 home news members you are here home ierigenen Lost Password Home Enter your username below click Mail me my password and your pass you if you gave a valid email address when you registered If this will no log in example if you forgot your member name or didn t enter your email add Name to EsPortal Administrator Password Member Details My user name is andym gt log in Pa send me my password gt Forgot your password gt New user Figure 3 5 Getting a forgotten password Unfortunately if you have no longer access to that e mail account or you can t even remember the username you ll have to contact a site administrator Using the techniques discussed in Chapter 9 the administrator can change your e mail and find your user account Once logged in to the Plone site you ll see a log out link in the upper right corner When your work is finished it s good practice to log out of Plone site especially if you re accessing it from a computer that s likely to be used by other people 3 1 3 Setting Up Your Folder and Preferences After you ve logged in the member bar in the top right corner will change to represent the options available to you as a member of the site see Figure 3 6 Bandym Smy folder my preferences undo Slog out 39 Figure 3 6 Your personal choices in the top right corner have changed One of these options is that each member has a folder crea
323. in this is the best place to add them For example if you wanted to add a page that outlined a privacy policy this could be a 245 good place To do this first add the page and all the information you want to contain in that policy It would make sense to make the ID of the page something useful such as privacy html and put it in the root of your Plone site In the ZMI go to portal_registration and add a new action with the following information Name Privacy Id privacy Action string portal_url privacy html Condition not member Permission Add portal member Category user Visible selected You ll now get the privacy link to your privacy page if aren t logged in By making the category user you ll ensure it appears in the personal bar End Sidebar 9 1 2 2 Portal Member Data The portal_memberdata tool holds the member data for each user A Plone user has a series of options such as skins the time last logged in What You See Is What You Get WYSIWYG editor and so on When a user joins a site a default record in portal_memberdata is created You set the actual properties created in that record in this tool click portal_memberdata and select Properties to see the default set of properties In Plone these are the following e mail This is the user s e mail address portal_skin This is deprecated ignore this property listed Show this user in the Members directory Boolean By default this is
324. in Plone is Although it has been a lot of pages most of it has been setting up the infrastructure and the skins One of the first things people do is compare this to other Web scripting languages such as PHP You have to remember that by having your code in Plone you ve achieved quite a few things without having to rewrite them Specifically you ve achieved the following e Full text searching of the content e Integration with the workflow e Integration with portal membership and authentication e Persistence through the Plone database without having to write SQL or do other work Further it really does let your complete product scale later For example if you need a bug tracking system drop in the Collector product and if you need a photo management product drop in CMFPhoto By utilizing the framework you can give your overall site a great deal of flexibility and scalability 350 Although this product is a little cheeky by using lots of existing code it demon strates quite a few key functions of writing a product in Plone 12 1 1 11 Debugging Development If you re developing your own product then two things will happen to you at some point unless you have so much Zen that you should be writing the Zope core code your product will break and you ll need to debug it During development you may want to try importing the product into the Python prompt to see how it works Unfortunately you ll probably get an error T
325. in the site and log in through the login process described in the Joining a Site section Users can of course view a Plone site without logging in but they won t be able to add or edit content In this chapter I ll go through the steps a user takes to create content on a Plone site First I ll cover how to join the site and log in Once you ve accomplished this I ll cover how to create and then edit a document Finally Pll show how you can search and publish this content In short this chapter covers how to use Plone 3 1 1 Joining a Site When you join a Plone site you create an account on the server That account gives you the right as a member to add content such as images documents and so forth To join a site click the join link in the top right corner of the Web site see Figure 3 1 you are not logged in gt loq in ty Figure 3 1 Clicking the join link in the top right corner of the page This will take you to a registration form that you ll have to complete see Figure 3 2 Because this is the first Plone form you ve encountered take note of the following e Some fields are required a little red box next to the text indicates the required fields 32 33 e For most fields some grayed out help text beneath the field name indicates what you should enter home news members you are here home navigation Home login Name E Password
326. ing Permissions I ve now covered users roles and groups with you but there s more the lowest level of settings for security is a permission As the name suggests giving a user a permission means giving them the ability to do something such as view an object add a document get a listing 250 of the contents of a folder and so on Each permission is identified uniquely by a meaningful name such as View Add portal content or List folder contents Permissions aren t applied to an individual user but to a role Each role gains particular per missions and then the user gains those particular roles You can find all the security settings for Zope in the ZMI on the Security tab This includes the Plone site the Zope root all the objects and content inside a Plone site and the skins When clicking the Security tab you ll see all the permissions and the roles that map to them in a grid as shown in Figure 9 10 Contents View Properties Security Undo Plone Site at Plone The listing below shows the current security settings for this item Permissions are rows and role indicate where roles are assigned permissions You can also assign local roles to users which gi object and its subobjects When a role is assigned to a permission users with the given role will be able to perform tasks as When the Acquire permission settings checkbox is selected then the containing objects s permiss permission settings may be augm
327. ing no change occurred When an object is edited a method is called to perform the change For example when a document is edited the method called is document_edit cpy You can find that script by clicking portal_skins clicking plone_form_scripts and clicking document_edit All that s needed is to add one line to that script before the last line context portal_workflow doActionFor new_context edit comment The doActionFor method of portal_workflow performs the transition given in this case edit for the object passed in in this case context Each time the object is edited that edit transition will fire That will cause a line to be added to the comments list showing who edited the object when it was added and any comments associated with it When an object is edited there are actually no comments so to be a little more advanced you d have to modify the document s edit template to include a comments field You could then access this comments list by going to the State tab where the list of changes displays at the bottom 226 8 1 4 3 Moving Objects One useful ability is moving an object during the workflow For example you could move all press releases into a folder called Press Release each time you publish one Content could be created and edited anywhere and then on publishing moved into that folder The example script in Listing 8 1 moves the object being workflowed into the Members folder To add th
328. ing of Short Names Determines if Short Names also known as IDs are visible and editable v contents If Short Names are not displayed they will be generated autom Yes C No Portrait To add or change the portrait click the Browse button select a picture Recommended image size is 75 pixels wide by 100 pixels tall Browse gt save gt cancel Full name This is the full name you gave when you registered with the site E mail This is the e mail address associated with your membership and is used a number of places in a Plone site Most important if you lose or forget your password this is the address to which the system will send it 41 Content editor When editing complex content you may want the help of an editor If your site administrator has made one available you can select it here It will then be used when you click the edit tab of an object If you re unsure leave this as the default Listed status This property specifies whether your profile will show up on the members tab and when someone searches the members listing Editing of Short Names Objects have an ID or Short Name property that s used for the internal representation of the content object This also shows up in the item s Web address and the item s Uniform Resource Locator URL By default these look something like News Item 2002 11 16 4102 but you could make it much simpler such as november_news by changing the Short Name va
329. ing those individual elements This means you can alter just the sections you d like to change rather than altering the whole template The main template uses Extensible Markup Language XML namespaces heavily to present the simplest possible metal code For example lt metal headslot define slot head_slot gt lt A slot where you can insert elements in the header from a template gt 181 Here the name of the tag isn t a standard Extensible HTML XHTML element instead it uses the metal prefix to define a namespace as metal headslot This has the following advantages e The element headslot is semantic in that it describes the element It s easy to spot that this is the slot for adding anything you may want to add to the head of your page e Attributes in that element use the namespace in the element if not otherwise declared so instead of metal fill slot you can just use fill slot e The actual tag isn t a valid XHTML tag so it won t display However if the rendering of the tag generates any valid XHTML that XHTML will display When a macro is used the content in the calling template is removed so it s possible to place comments in the calling template as text inside the macro For example lt div metal use macro here global_searchbox macros quick_search gt The quicksearch box normally placed at the top right lt div gt Because of the comment it s easy to determine that this macro refer
330. inside SQLStorage you could change these mappings to more appropriate ones if you so desired The uid column is the unique ID for your object inside Plone The parentuid is the uid of the parent object These are all the unique IDs for Archetypes that I ve already mentioned For example db SELECT FROM personsq1l uid parentuid age email PersonSQL 2003 07 23 4935 30 andy clearwind ca 393 That s it your data is being persisted inside your relational database No SQL needs to be writ ten and you can have all the advantages a relational database brings Joel Burton has written an excellent how to article on SQLStorage at http plone sourceforge net archetypes sqlstorage howto html With kind permission some parts of this section are based on Joel s document 14 Chapter 14 14 1 Administering and Scaling Plone This chapter covers the tasks you have to worry about once you ve built your site and are using it I start by covering the administration of a Plone site which is actually quite straightforward Next I cover what files to back up including when and how to back them up I also cover upgrades to Plone Then I cover performance and show techniques for finding the hotspots Once you ve found those spots I cover common problems Then I go into the main technique for making your Plone site really fast and scalable caching When it comes
331. installer this was already included for you If not then go to http pyxml sf net and download the package In my case the latest package was 0 8 3 so after downloading I ran the following tar xvf PyXML 0 8 3 tar gz cd PyXML 0 8 3 python setup py install NOTE Usually installing in this manner requires root privileges on Unix to install into the Python directories Now that you have everything set up and installed you ll see some of the examples 13 1 1 1 Diving Into Archetypes A whole bunch of great examples are available for Archetypes so rather than con structing one for the book I show ArchExample which comes with the Archetypes installation This adds a content type called article to give a rough example of the power of Archetypes Article py contains the main product code You ll see that the code looks quite different from previous examples It contains schemas StringField blurb searchable 1 widget TextAreaWidget 363 This piece of code denotes that you have an attribute on the content type called blurb that it s a string and that it s going to be shown as an HTML text area I discuss all the options for fields and widgets in a moment For now take a look at the content type in Plone In Figure 13 1 ve added the blurb content type contents Edit Article 4rticle Title Enter a value for Title Group Enter a value for Group Headline gt Blurb Enter a
332. into content types from the top 11 1 1 An Overview of Content Types To begin with I ve been using certain terms throughout this book The explanations I ve given have been a little superficial and it s time for me to expand on these to improve your under standing of them The following are important concepts Content type This is a type of content registered in a Plone site Usually but not always a content type is something that can be added and edited through the Plone interface by users of the given security In Plone it s recommended to separate content types such as documents files and images This separation of content into different types is a basic Plone concept Item and object These terms refer to the actual instance of something and they re overloaded terms so their definitions normally depend upon their context So far in this book I ve used these terms to refer to a particular instance of a content type such as one particular document or image From now on I ll use the specific term content type to refer to actual content types Tool A tool is a service that sits inside a Plone site There will be only one instance of each tool in a Plone site In itself the tool doesn t do anything and external users of the application will never know how many tools exist or what they do However content types or requests that the users make will interact with the tools You ve already seen some key tools port
333. ion So your Plone site contains content types but how does the Plone site know how they re configured The answer is that for each content type its attributes methods security and skins are all defined on the file system in Python and associated code This information is enough for Plone to understand how to use the product The only exception to this as you ve seen is workflow which is normally defined externally from the content type Some products have their own workflow that s added to the content type for its behavior Chapter 10 showed you how content types are installed in Plone through a two step process First the product is installed in Zope Second the content type is installed in each Plone instance The second step installs information about the content type which is taken from the file system and then installed into your Plone site Why is this a two stage process In the second stage a local copy of the product in your Plone site is made and now you can change how the content behaves for you Want a document 306 object to have different tabs at the top Want a document object to be manipulated differently look differently and even be called something completely different No problem you can now change your instance of Plone through the Web This approach is the same as it is for portal_skins where you can customize a skin in your local instance When changes occur in the product and you install a new ver
334. is is used if you go to folder contents and click add without selecting a content type to add a list of all the content types and their descriptions will appear Icon This is the ID of the icon that s used for this content type Product metatype This is the metatype for this content type This matches up the Plone content type with a Zope metatype Product name This is the product name where this metatype is defined Product factory method This is the method that s called by the product factory to create this piece of content Initial view name This isn t used in Plone Implicitly addable This indicates whether this content can be added to Plone If this is selected then it ll be addable unless explicitly specified oth erwise Filter content types If this content type is a folder then enable this to filter the content types that can be added by users to this object Allowed content types If this content type can contain other items and Filter content types is enabled only the types of content specified in this list will be allowed 307 e Allow discussion This sets the default status for discussions for all types of content If this is enabled then users will be able to discuss the content Which users will be able to do this is based on the permission Discuss content You ll now look at some of the aspects of this registration information in a bit more detail including some examples 11 1 1 3 1 How D
335. is script go into the workflow tool in the ZMI and select the Scripts tab Then select Script Python from the drop down box Give the new object the name moveObject and then enter Listing 8 1 into this script Listing 8 1 Moving an Object parameters state_change get the object and its ID obj state_change object id obj getId Q get the src folder and the destination folder dstFldr context portal_url Members srcFldr obj aq_parent perform the move objs srcFldr manage_cutObjects id dstFldr manage_pasteObjects objs get the new object new_obj dstFldr id pass new_obj to the error twice raise state_change O0bjectMoved new_obj new_obj You need to do a few more things first assign this script to a transition I d normally use such a script in the publish transition To do this go to that transition and assign the value of script after to moveObject Second one other small problem exists This script moves objects into the Members folder You ll probably have a better destination in mind of course To perform such a move a user has to have the appropriate rights to move objects between these folders Normally only a manager can move objects into the Members folder So you need to give the script the proxy role of manager You can do this by clicking Scripts clicking moveObject and selecting the Proxy tab Assign the role of manager to this script You can find more information about secur
336. is a sample article it has an overridden view for show but this is purely optional schema schema actions id view name View action string object_url article_view permissions CMFCorePermissions View registerType Article PROJECTNAME Apart from a bunch of imports at the top and the schema I ve covered all the contents of this code with one exception registerType This function registers your object with the product 379 Each product can have multiple content types so this function takes the object and the name of the project In this case the name of the project is imported from the configuration file as you saw earlier The configuration file config py contains similar variables for the product configuration as shown in Listing 13 2 Listing 13 2 The Configuration File for ArchExample from Products CMFCore CMFCorePermissions import AddPortalContent from Products Archetypes public import DisplayList ADD_CONTENT_PERMISSION AddPortalContent PROJECTNAME ArchExample SKINS_DIR skins GLOBALS globals ARTICLE_GROUPS DisplayList headline Headline bulletin Special Bulletin column Weekly Column editorial Editorial release Press Release The variable ARTICLE_GROUPS is a tuple of a tuple of strings for use in the group widget You could just use a simple tu
337. is image Click that button to find your new image and click Save to commit the changes In Figure 4 23 Pll add a Canadian Plone logo as an example 100 Edit View Properties Security Undo Ownership Image at portal_skins custom logo jpg Saved changes 2004 04 19 11 56 You can update the data for this image using the form below Select a data file from your local c clicking the browse button and click upload to update the contents of the image Title ae Content Type image jpeq Preview Last Modified 2004 04 19 11 55 File Size 2 473 bytes Save Changes File Data Browse Upload Figure 4 23 The Canadian Plone logo Now return to the Plone interface and you ll see that the image has changed To ensure you re seeing the new image clear your browser s cache on Internet Explorer pressing Ctrl F5 will do this 4 1 3 9 3 What If Your New Image Isn t in JPG Format Zope doesn t base the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions MIME type on the extension but rather on the content So you can upload a GIF image into logo jpg and it ll still work since the correct MIME type of image gif is applied However you may want to rename the image to logo gif or logo png to be less confusing 4 1 3 9 4 Changing the CSS Code CSS determines the majority of the look and feel of your site including the tabs the images the boxes and the overall layout The fact that Plone s CSS is totally customiza
338. is is if the completion of the form is a success you traverse to a Controller Python Script object that you ve written that processes the result of the form If the page is a failure you traverse back to the template and show them the error The difference between a redirect and a traversal is that the redirect is an HTTP redirect sent to the user s browser The browser processes it and then sends the user off to the next page Thus the redirect actions lose all the values passed in the original request If you need to examine the contents of the original form then this isn t the best approach Instead I recommend the traversal to options The result is the same it s just that the traverse option does this all on the server Doing this preserves the request variables and allows you to examine this in scripts 6 1 4 2 E Mail Example Sending E Mail to the Webmaster You ll now see a real example and spend the rest of this chapter building it A common re quirement is a custom form that sends e mail to the Webmaster You ll build this type of form in the following sections The complete scripts page template and assorted code are available in Appendix B If you really don t want to type all this in you can see this example online at the book s Web site it s also downloadable as a compressed file from the Plone book Web site http plone book agmweb ca and the Apress Web site http www apress com so you can just install it and
339. is is the transition being executed identical to state_change transition e status This is the original state identical to state_change old_state 224 e workflow This is the workflow for this object e scripts These are the scripts available in this workflow e user This is the user executing this transition 8 1 4 Common Tasks and Examples Pll now present some common tasks you can achieve easily using workflow When a user causes a workflow transition this transition runs using that specific user s account In many of these examples a normal user may not have the correct permissions to perform the task For example members don t normally have the right to access the list of members unless this permission has been explicitly given to them To solve this permission issue where noted some of the following Script Python objects have been given a slightly different role To set a proxy role on a script access the Proxy tab on an object and then select the user to run the script as shown in Figure 8 9 Edit Bindings Test Proxy History Undo Ownership Security 2 Script Python at portal_workflow plone_workflow scripts moveObject Help Proxy Roles Anonymous Authenticated Member Owner Reviewer Save Changes Figure 8 9 Setting proxy settings on a script You would of course make sure your scripts executed with the minimum roles needed de pending exactly upon what your script does 8 1 4 1 Int
340. is rather boring it prints the following text This is the Script Python test_py in http gloin 8080 Plone portal_skins custom A script also has the following options Title The edit form has a Title option which is for you to give the script a title This will show up in the ZMI so i ll be easier to remember what it does 145 Parameter List This is a list of parameters that the script takes such as variableA or variableB None In fact this is a standard list of parameters you d expect in a standard Python function Some parameters are already defined for you in this object however you can see them by clicking the Bindings tab In that tab you ll see a list of the variables already bound into the object which should have familiar names by now The following are the variables bound to the script that are accessible from a Script Python object e context This is the object on which the script is being called e container This is the containing object for this script e script This is the Script Python object itself the equivalent in Zope Page Templates is template e namespace This is for when this script is called from Document Template Markup Language DTML which is something that doesn t happen in Plone e traverse_subpath This is the Uniform Resource Locator URL path after the script s name which is an advanced feature Pll now show a simple example that ties these topics into the Zope Pag
341. is suitable for scripts that may check if something should happen prior to the transition running such as testing that another dependent object or page has been uploaded or there are no spelling errors The script assigned to after runs once the transition completes although if at any time an uncaught exception is raised on a script this will cause the transition to fail the object to remain in its original state and the exception to display to the user 8 1 3 2 9 Editing Workflow Expressions Throughout this chapter you ve seen values that can be expressed as workflow expressions For example the value assigned to a variable is the result of a workflow expression This expression is nothing special it s merely a Template Attribute Language TAL expression with a few different variables available You already learned about TAL expressions in Chapter 5 so you should be familiar with these expression and all their options such as Python string and path expressions Unlike the standard TAL expression a few extra parameters are passed through to the names pace relating to the particular workflow The namespace for a workflow expression contains the following e here This is the object being transitioned in the workflow e container This is the container of the object being transitioned in the work flow e state_change This is the state change object referenced in the Editing Work flow Scripts section e transition Th
342. it ll remain in that state for a long time usually forever Content may reach one or more different end states in the process of a workflow For that piece of content to move from one state to another a transition is needed A transition connects a starting state and an ending state A transition can have lots of different features associated with it as you ll see later but for the moment you just need to know that a tran sition moves content between two states Usually a transition is triggered by some external force such as a user clicking a button on a Web page or a script interacting with a page Visualizing a workflow especially when talking about something as nebulous as content can be a little confusing Thinking about an everyday occurrence will help In this case the following example shows the workflow of my credit card bill which I have the joy of getting every month 1 The credit card company prepares a bill and mails it to me 2 I get the bill and put it on my desk Sometimes the bill sits on my desk for quite a while as I wait for the end of month Occasionally I have to query people about certain expenditures such as What were those clothes you bought 3 Any serious queries or questions then go back to the credit card company perhaps causing a new bill to be created although this happens quite rarely 207 4 Usually at the end of the month when I do all the accounting I then pay the bill Fro
343. it in Plone so if you don t already know DTML I recommend you avoid learning it if possible The Zope Page Templates system will give you every thing you need Excellent online references do exist for DTML for Zope however refer to http zope org Documentation Books ZopeBook 2_6Edition DTML stx The DTML syntax for this style sheet is actually pretty simple each variable relates to a cor responding attribute in a property sheet To access this property sheet click portal_skins plone_styles and then base_properties In Figure 7 5 you can see how this file looks in the ZMI 173 Ea Customize E Filesystem Properties Object at Plone portal_skins plone_styles base properties Id base_properties Source file CMFPlone skins plone_styles base_properties props Customize Select a destination folder and press the button to make a copy of these properties custom Customize Name Value title Plone s color font logo and border defaults plone_skin Plone Default logoName logo jpg fontFamily Lucida Grande Yerdana Lucida Helvetica Arial sans serii fontBaseSize 169 fontColor Black fontSmallsize 85 backgroundColor white linkColor 436976 linkActiveColor Red link isitedColor Purple borderWidth 1px borderStyle solid Figure 7 5 The base properties for the style sheet For example dtml fontColor locates the variable fontColor and places it in the style sheet
344. ite e Policy ID Images e Predicate python content portal_type Image e Max age secs 3600 Leave all the other fields blank and select Add to add this policy The caching _policy_manager will now looks something like Figure 14 8 Policies Undo Ownership Security CMF Caching Policy Manager at Plone caching policy manager Edit Caching Policies Policy ID Images Predicate python content portal_type Image No cache f Mod Time contentfmodified No store M Max age 3600 Must secs revalidate Change Delete _Up Down Add Caching Policy i Figure 14 8 The caching_policy_manager with the Images policy added To test this correctly you ll need to add an image into your site through the Plone interface Images will get sent with the appropriate headers if you call the view 416 header py http localhost test gif view GET Cache Control max age 3600 Connection close Content Language Content Length 19810 Content Type text html charset utf 8 Date Fri 05 Sep 2003 18 42 44 GMT Etag Expires Fri 05 Sep 2003 19 42 44 GMT Last Modified Fri 05 Sep 2003 18 33 41 GMT Pragma no cache Server Zope unreleased version python 2 2 2 linux2 ZServer 1 1 As expected the Last Modified and Expires headers are now being sent By altering predicates and adding multiple policies you can build up a rather sophisticated caching system For complicated rules you can pass the handling
345. item e If the server has External Editor installed you can click the pencil to edit in External Editor this is covered in Chapter 10 e If the content is locked you ll see a lock icon appear next to the content Home page area that contains the items created and collected by and visit pen visit visit pub visit 65 3 1 6 1 2 Publishing a Folder Folders have a much simpler workflow than documents Earlier in this chapter you saw how to publish content to make it publicly visible because this allows users to create and edit content as much as possible before pushing it live However folders are a little different because they contain content but don t have any content of their own For this reason folders have no review state Anyone can directly publish or make private folders so there are three states private visible and published After adding a folder select Publish from the drop down list Then it ll show up in the naviga tion As per the earlier rules for workflow if you don t publish a folder it won t show up in the navigation 3 1 6 2 Using Topics A topic allows you to collect content from disparate places throughout a Plone site and provide it in one location Topics work by creating a criterion that s common to all the objects you d like to gather This criterion could be all images or all news items with Plone in the text Because topics are a rather complicated type of content only managers
346. ituation you need to be able to cache just part of the page and this is where RAM Cache Manager comes in handy RAM Cache Manager will cache the output of an object in RAM so that on the next occurrence of that script it ll be pulled from the cache Repeated invocations of that object will cause the output to be pulled from the cache until the cache expires The point of this manager is that you re really avoiding recomputing complicated or large calculations every time instead youre storing the result and reusing This Cache Manager won t cache images or files It wont stop users trying to configure the cache to do so but it has no effect on these objects By default Plone creates a RAM Manager called RAMCache in the root of your Plone site Accessing this object through the ZMI will open the management options for the cache The following are all reasonable defaults and nothing needs to be changed initially e Title This is the title of the cache manager and is optional e REQUEST variables These are the variables that form the condition for the cache This is a powerful option that allows the cache to be based upon the user variables For example if an item to be cached requires that it should be cached differently for each user or in different languages you can enter the REQUEST variables you d like to cache here e Threshold entries This is the maximum number of entries that can be stored in the cache If the cache is taking
347. ity and local roles in Chapter 9 Looking at the code first the script gets the object and the object s ID from the transition namespace Then it gets the source and destination folders Then it utilizes Zope s ObjectMan ager Application Programming Interface API to perform the copy and paste You could of course determine these folders programmatically perhaps based on the user performing the transaction or on the type of content being moved Finally you get the object and pass it to an exception ObjectMoved 227 The ObjectMoved exception is a special exception to DCWorkflow By passing the new object twice as parameters into the exception the new object will be passed up to the Plone front end This is critical so that when the user is sent to the object in response to the change it s to the new location of the object not the old one Of course you may want to write a function that moves the function back after rejecting the object perhaps to the member s home folder Another special case and a more unusual one is to delete an object in workflow Usually deleting an object is an action from the containing object so it s unusual to see in workflow For this task you can raise an ObjectDeleted exception Listing 8 2 shows the script to perform a delete Listing 8 2 Deleting an Object parameters state_change get the object obj state_change object id obj getId get the parent folder delete the object
348. ive Date and Expiration Date fields are left blank Format This is the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions MIME type of the item The term MIME type refers to a computer definition of the type of content 51 for example application msword or image jpeg This is set at a default value if youre unsure about this field just ignore it Language This is the language in which the document is written the default is English Copyright This is the copyright information for the content which is usually blank Contributors This includes the names of the people outside the Plone system who contributed to the object Each person s name should be on its own line After completing the values for this form click Save to commit the changes As stated usually you won t need to edit the values on this tab Editing the contents of this tab is usually based upon the requirements for your site and the type of site you re building 3 1 4 7 What Are Effective and Expiration Dates Any item in the Plone system can have effective and expiration dates if the person editing the content wants Both of these are optional and leaving the fields blank will ensure that these values aren t set One example of an item that may have an effective date is a press release In the ideal world the news item is crafted prepared and reviewed in Plone However suppose the news item has to go live on the Web site at midnight but that s exactly whe
349. ixpath py 260 walk 6561 666 0 370 0 000 1 620 0 002 transformer py 976 com binary 2944 2516 0 340 0 000 12 690 0 005 ProfilerPatch py 16 _ patched _call_ 272 0 340 0 001 0 800 0 003 pyassem py 434 flattenGraph 1064 0 320 0 000 0 450 0 000 DirectoryView py 54 walker 1088 0 300 0 000 4 340 0 004 Expressions py 295 restrictedTraverse 14145 474 0 290 0 000 1 830 0 004 transformer py 734 com_node 12598 0 280 0 000 0 280 0 000 posixpath py 44 join 6588 0 270 0 000 0 430 0 000 pyassem py 78 emit 10020 270 0 250 0 000 0 800 0 003 MutatingWalker py 51 dispatchObject 9040 8031 0 250 0 000 0 250 0 000 ast py 8 flatten 2428 4 0 230 0 000 14 300 3 575 TALInterpreter py 218 interpret 8031 0 220 0 000 0 470 0 000 ast py 19 flatten_nodes 5106 0 220 0 000 0 220 0 000 pyassem py 501 _lookupName x 2417 noan n onnn naan NO ONNAN Sinan Lda wert Z F nee ee 4 Figure 14 6 Python Profiler results As you can see in Figure 14 6 that the output shows the gory details of what takes time I ve rarely had to use this 14 1 2 6 Simple Optimization Tricks After looking at quite a lot of Plone the Plone development team has come up with the follow ing optimization tricks 14 1 2 6 1 Limit Name Lookup Overdoing name lookups is a common mistake the solution is to define a variable locally In the following example Plone has to perform lookup for portal_url on each repetition of the loop lt tal block tal repeat result here portal_catalog
350. kin when it s rendered The original document shows a property called cookedBody which is an attribute of a document I removed that part of the code and instead inserted the code As you ve seen by now the function getHTMLCode returns the HTML so all you have to do is the following lt div id bodyContent gt lt div tal replace structure here getHTMLCode gt lt div gt If you want to change anything else specific in this page template now is your opportunity It could be nice to show the language that it was written in to show an icon or to change history for example 345 12 1 1 7 2 Making the Edit Page Like the view page you can take the edit page copy it into the skin and rename it to sil vercity_edit form cpt The biggest problem is that the edit form is designed to be used with a What You See Is What You Get WYSIWYG editor such as Epoz Until a good WYSIWYG editor for source code is available for Web browsers you ll have to turn this off because you can t write SQL in an HTML editor This is quite a lengthy change of the page template remember you can get this off the Web site In this template remove all mentions of the editors and replace them with a simple text area Keep the name of the HTML field the same because there s no real need to change it Also leaving it the same means it plays nicely with the script for handling the form later A document has at the bottom a series of selections for th
351. l you can see how a Plone page is constructed in a page template and then see exactly how you can customize those individual page elements If you look at the main Plone page you ll see a number of elements in that page Figure 7 8 shows a Plone page with all the key user interface elements marked Table 7 2 describes each of the elements and their purpose For each element in Figure 7 8 you ll find a corresponding number in the table 179 navigation elas Welcome to Plone This welcome page is used to introduce y System Thanks for using our product 1 2 Flone and its visual design is Copyright z000 Figure 7 8 All the main elements in the Plone user interface Table 7 2 User Interface Elements 180 Name Description No 1 Site logo Shows the top logo 2 Search form Shows the search form 3 Portal tabs Shows the tabs across the top of the site 4 Personal bar Shows the personal information for that user such as login and my folder 5 Breadcrumbs Shows the location of the current content 6 Left slot Determines where portlets added to the left_slot property dis play 7 Content tabs Shows the actions with the category content_tabs for that piece of content 8 Content drop down lists Shows some drop down menus for this content workflow and new content types 9 Document actions Shows the actions for this particular piece of content printing or e mail 10 Byline Shows a description of the con
352. l authenticate against the following e Radius e SMB e LDAP e Relational databases To do this you ll need to install the specific database adapter for the relational database fortunately adapters for all the major databases are covered For more information you can find excellent information in the exUserFolder directories with ReadMe files on al most every subject The Zope book covers setting up access to a relational database at http zope org Documentation Books ZopeBook 2_6Edition RelationalDatabases stx 10 Chapter 10 10 1 Integrating with Other Systems Integration is a huge issue in any enterprise that has a large number of other systems already in place Because Plone is an open source project it has a lot of products add ons skins and tools that provide extra functionality for free That s right often these extra products are given away to anyone who wants them Additionally as an open source language Python has a whole host of free excellent products often called packages Most of these products don t directly affect Plone though In other words they don t give functionality to Plone out of the box that s what Plone products do However people often ask Can Plone do X The answer is often Yes if Python can do it The following are some of the most popular Python products Python Imaging Library PIL This allows you to manipulate convert and analyze images http www pythonware com
353. l block tal define dummy python request RESPONSE setHeader CCC gt Content Type text html charset 4s charset gt lt metal block tal define dummy python request RESPONSE setHeader CCC Content Language lang gt lt metal cacheheaders gt 415 Once you ve done this you can continue to cache selectively using the caching_policy_manager Access the tool via the ZMI and you ll see the following options e Policy ID This is a unique ID for a policy used internally only e Predicate This is a TALES expression for matching the content The variable content contains the object being rendered e Mod Time This is a TALES expression that evaluates and returns a value from the object to use for calculating the modification time The variable content contains the object being rendered Max age secs This is how long to set the cache header for e Vary This varies the header to send you ll learn more about this later in the Using Squid section Note Unfortunately Vary did not make into CMF 1 4 and hence Plone 2 0 x and is in CMF 1 5 If you d like to use this tag then install the Caching Policy Manager with Vary tag available at http plone book agmweb ca Software e No cache This sends the no cache HTTP header e No store This sends the no store HTTP header e Must revalidate This sends the must revalidate HTTP header The following is a sample policy that would cache all images on the s
354. lates in Plone you ll see a referral to here or context This is the context of the content being accessed In a template you can now say context something or other and this will be the something or other looked up relative to the piece of content not the template You ll now create your first template in Plone 5 1 2 3 Creating Your First Page Template The standard way to create a page template is through the Zope Management Interface ZMI Unfortunately because it means editing the template through a text area in a Web browser the ZMI is also the most painful to use as a developer The text area provides limited functionality compared with most editors it s lacking features such as line numbers syntax highlighting and so on In Chapter 9 I show you how to use External Editor to edit content this allows you to edit Web site content in local editors such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Emacs In Chapter 6 I show you how to make Plone read page templates off a hard drive as files and then you can use any tool youd like To create a template go to the ZMI click portal_skins click custom and then select Page Template from the drop down box see Figure 5 1 Click Add and you ll see the page shown in Figure 5 2 Contents View Properties Security Undo Ownership Find G Folder at ff Help Select type to add 7 Add LinkChecker a LocalContent LocalFolder Localizer Mail Host MessageCatalo Type Name l C ij Cont
355. lation and management easy Also each new release maintains migration paths and updates so that your Plone site will keep working and stay up to date 1 1 3 2 Internationalization The whole Plone user interface is translated into more than 20 languages including Korean Japanese French Spanish and German Inserting your own translation is easy see Chapter 4 1 1 3 3 Usability Plone offers an excellent user experience that provides high levels of usability and accessibility This isn t just a matter of presenting pretty HTML but instead goes to the core of Plone Plone provides an interface that s compatible with the industry and government standard WAI AAA and U S Section 508 This allows sites built with Plone to be used by people with vision disabilities In addition this provides the unexpected but related benefit that your page may index better in search engines such as Google 1 1 3 4 Skinnable Plone separates the content from the actual templates used to present the content often called skins The skins are written in the excellent HTML templating system Zope Page Templates and a large amount of Cascading Style Sheets CSS With little knowledge of Plone you can apply multiple skins achieve multiple looks and totally customize your Web site s appearance 1 1 3 5 Registration and Personalization Plone features a complete user registration system Users register with a Plone site using their own username password
356. ld Here you ve set two attributes for the byline element text align and font weight Note that you haven t changed any other attributes of the byline element the remaining attributes are inherited from the original style sheet With a few simple lines of CSS you ve changed the site and made sure that other changes to Plone won t affect your site Changing ploneCustom css is the best bet for small changes By using different style sheets you can use Plone to provide a different look to different clients Often Web sites have a Click for Printable Page button that shows a simpler page without much formatting Plone alleviates this problem by providing a separate style sheet when a browser prints the page that style sheet formats the page All the alternate style sheets are included at the top of a page you can find them by clicking portal_skins clicking plone_templates and then clicking header pt NOTE One style sheet that s a little unusual is the projection style sheet It s supported only by Opera and when the browser is used in full screen mode headings turn into separate pages and a presentation like interface displays 178 7 1 2 5 Customizing the Main Template As you saw in the previous chapter to get the Plone look and feel on a page you need to use the master macro from the main_template Every Plone page uses this macro and then fills in the appropriate slots By taking a look at the main template in detai
357. ld error class this class will show a nice orange box around the field Next if an error has occurred for this field as you ve already tested for the corresponding message will be displayed Finally you ll show the form element and if there s a value for email_address already in the request you ll populate the form element with that value The tabindex is a useful tool in Plone It contains a sequential number that s incremented for each element and each time it sets a new HTML tabindex value for each element in a form This is a nice user interface feature it means each form element can be safely moved around without having to worry about remembering the tabindex numbers because that ll happen automatically That s a lot of work for one element but it s mostly boilerplate code you can easily copy or change it You can find the remainder of the form in Appendix B 6 1 4 2 2 Creating a Validator In the example you have only one required element the e mail so it s a simple piece of Python called validEmail vpy that does the work The contents of this script are as follows email context REQUEST get email_address None if not email state setError email_address Email is required new_status failure if state getErrors state set portal_status_message Please correct the errors return state If no e mail address can be found this script adds an error to the dictionary of erro
358. ld use this method to restrict access to certain parts of your site but I recommend using security within Plone for this At this point Plone isn t actually managing content so it has no security workflow or metadata The content is entirely outside of Plone This may be a good solution though 10 1 4 2 Managing a File in Plone CMFExternalFile is a product that allows you to manage content from within Plone and still have the core content on the file system If you installed ExternalFile and CMFExternal earlier in the chapter then you re all set If not return to the earlier Installing Plone Products section After installing these return to your Plone interface You ll note that if you go to Plone you can now add a new content type called External File You add the External File type in the same way as a normal file as I described in Chapter 3 In fact if you dig into the program code you ll note that it uses the same templates However you ll notice one small difference here The file has actually been added to the file system It s placed in a new directory located in the var directory of your Plone installation If you aren t sure where this is go to the control panel and look for the directory listed by the instance home my var directory is located in var zope var Inside that directory is a directory called externalfiles In this directory all the files you upload into Plone will be created If you look in that direc
359. le on a site On the form at portal_metadata elements subject you ll also see a vocabulary form for a content type of lt default gt If you add items to the Vocabulary field of that page and click Update you ll add these to the list of available keywords for every content type 92 If you want keywords to appear for say only documents then use the add form at the bottom of the page Select a content type and add some vocabulary one value for each line These will then become keywords that users can select for that piece of content only If you re logged in as a user with the manager or reviewer role clicking the properties tab of an object in the Plone interface will display a New Keywords box for the addition of ad hoc keywords These keywords won t appear in the portal_metadata vocabulary but will appear on all types of content for other users to enter 4 1 3 6 Changing the Default Page As discussed in Chapter 3 when a user is viewing a folder the default page for that folder is shown if present In the old versions of Zope and Plone the name for that default page was index_html You ll see these a lot in Plone sites where Web site addresses often have index_html on the end If you made this filename an extension that s more commonly recognized as index html then it d be easier to edit using editing programs and Web site tools In Plone you can define a list of pages that will be looked up to be rendered as the default
360. less users know about it At any point in time each item of content in your Plone site is in a particular state This state describes its permissions and roles within the Plone site By having items in different states it s 52 possible to apply different security to each item of content For example sometimes an item may take a week or two to prepare and involve multiple revisions Eventually you ll want to publish the content so that it s visible for all users and shows up in the navigation and search You can publish the content using the State drop down menu located at the top right of the main navigation see Figure 3 15 ed to categorize an be Figure 3 15 State drop down menu To publish an object select Submit from the drop down menu By default you can t directly publish content but you can submit it for review When an item is submitted for review it moves into the review state This is an intermediary state between visible and published It allows for the review of content by users of your site with the reviewer role before it goes live for the entire world to see After you ve submitted the content you ll notice that the content is now in the review state by looking at the box in the top right corner You ll also notice that in Figure 3 16 there s no longer an edit tab contents i sharing Figure 3 16 The content has been submitted for review the state has changed to pending and the edit tab is
361. let_news macros portlet 4 1 3 1 7 Recent The recent portlet lists the recently published items on the site since the last time you logged in see Figure 4 15 If there are no such items it ll still display recent items Plone org 2004 01 03 Python org 2004 01 03 Figure 4 15 Recent portlet The expression to add is here portlet_recent macros portlet 4 1 3 1 8 Related The related portlet shows a list of items that are related to the item you re currently viewing as determined by the keywords on that item If a related item is a link to another Web site 88 then it ll show up in a separate list of external resources Even if you have this item in the list of portlets it won t display unless there are some related items see Figure 4 16 related Local resources Plone org D P yth on org B Archetypes Figure 4 16 Related portlet The expression to add is here portlet_related macros portlet 4 1 3 1 9 Review The review portlet displays a list of items that are in the review state and are waiting to be reviewed This is shown only if the user logged in has the reviewer role and there are items awaiting review see Figure 4 17 review list Archetypes 2004 01 03 Figure 4 17 Review portlet The expression to add is here portlet_review macros portlet 4 1 3 1 10 Book Web Site Altering Slots For the Plone book site most of the slots on the right side made no sense This book has no events so
362. lidate_title validators Cancel 346 Where did those validations come from Well I was cheeky and again looked at the validations for a document That calls three validations but you need only two of them By checking what that validation evaluated to you can see which ones are needed and which ones aren t You ll find all the validations in plone_skins plone_form_scripts and the object name starts with validation So now you need the action so take the edit script for a document document_edit cpy and copy it into SilverCity Mostly the script is just fine so you can keep it with one modification Change the messages to Source code instead of Document Listing 12 7 shows the edit script Listing 12 7 The Edit Script parameters text_format text file SafteyBelt CCC title description id title Edit a document filename getattr file filename if file and filename if there is no id use the filename as the id if not id id filename max filename rfind filename rfind filename rfind 1 file seek 0 if there is no id specified keep the current one if not id id context getId new_context context portal_factory doCreate context id new_context edit text_format text file safety_belt SafetyBelt from Products CMFPlone import transaction_note transaction_note Edited source code s at 4s CCC new_cont
363. logged in see Figure 4 12 86 log in Name Password gt log in gt Forgot your password gt New user Figure 4 12 Login portlet The expression to add is here portlet_login macros portlet 4 1 3 1 5 Navigation The navigation portlet shows a simple tree of the folders in the current position in the form of a tree It provides a powerful and simple navigation tool The navigation portlet is extremely customizable you can alter it by clicking portal_properties and then clicking navtree_properties inside the ZMI which is covered in the Altering the Navigation Portlet section see Figure 4 13 navigation 3 About Plone Development 3 Documentation 3 Downloads Events Public Relations Figure 4 13 Navigation portlet The expression to add is here portlet_navigation macros portlet 4 1 3 1 6 News The news portlet lists all the recent news items with links to them see Figure 4 14 Even if you have this item in the portlet list it won t show up unless there are some news items published The news items on a site are also available by clicking the news tab 87 news eduplone products publicly available December 27 E Happy Holidays from the Plone Team December 24 B Bug Day 2 amp 3 Progress report December 22 E GRUF 2 0Beta 2 is out December 22 B Linux co uk moves to Plone December 20 More Figure 4 14 News portlet The expression to add is here port
364. lone Skins 7 1 2 Customizing Skins 7 1 3 Making New Skins and Layers 7 1 4 Case Study Examining the NASA Skin 8 Chapter 8 8 1 Managing Workflow 8 1 1 What Is Workflow 8 1 2 Understanding Workflow in Plone 8 1 3 Adding and Editing Workflow 8 1 4 Common Tasks and Examples 9 Chapter 9 9 1 Setting Up Security and Users 9 1 1 Administering Users 9 1 2 User Registration Tools 9 1 3 Setting Permissions 9 1 4 Scripting Users 9 1 5 Integrating Plone with Other Services 10 Chapter 10 10 1 Integrating with Other Systems 10 1 1 Open Source Licensing 10 1 2 Installing Plone Products 10 1 3 Using a Different Web Server 10 1 4 Integrating Plone with the File System 11 Chapter 11 11 1 Manipulating and Categorizing Content Types 11 1 1 An Overview of Content Types 11 1 2 Searching and Categorizing Content 12 Chapter 12 12 1 Writing a Product in Python 12 1 1 Writing a Custom Content Type 12 1 2 Writing a Custom Tool 12 1 3 Adding Some User Interface Elements 13 Chapter 13 13 1 Developing with Archetypes 13 1 1 Introducing Archetypes 13 1 2 Putting Together the Rest of the Content Type 13 1 3 Archetypes based Development 13 1 4 Setting Up a Content Type 13 1 5 Setting Up a Transformation on Windows 13 1 6 Testing the Content Type 13 1 7 Making a Content Type Persist in a Relational Database 14 Chapter 14 14 1 Administering and Scaling Plone 14 1 1 Administering a Plone Site 14 1 2 Improving Plone Performance 1
365. look at the Portal Transforms source code to see if you can find a transformation that will do the job for you 13 1 4 Setting Up a Content Type You ll now create a simple content type for handling Microsoft Word documents probably the most common type of content you ll have to handle For this example I did the transformation on Windows However if you can set up an alternative system most of the following worked on Linux In this case the easiest thing to do is to use Windows to install your Plone instance This creates an install with all the Win32 API modules installed and working I had Microsoft Office installed on the server Then you need to make a content type to handle the example called WordExample Essentially one field in the schema handles the content so that the schema looks like the following schema BaseSchema Schema TextField body searchable 1 required 1 primary 1 default_output_type text html allowable_content_types application msword widget RichWidget label Body 386 marshall PrimaryFieldMarshaller The only difference is that you ve added a Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions MIME type for the Word document application msword For each of content types to be transformed add the MIME type into allowable_content_types For example if you wanted to handle Word and PDF documents you d have the following line allowable_content_types applicati
366. lso be passed through other request variables such as the query string It s available only through the ZMI You can also set skins programatically This allows developers to show different skins to dif ferent users depending upon certain business or site logic For example if a user is writing content for a site they may see the standard Plone skin If theyre an anonymous user then they can see a totally different skin Rather than letting the user choose the site is making that decision If you really want you could base the skin on the folder they re accessing however that approach can lead to confusion so I don t recommend it To change the skin add a Script Python object called setSkin in the root of your Plone site Then add the following code title Skin changing script parameters req context REQUEST if req SERVER_URL find internal somesite org gt 1 context changeSkin Plone Default context changeSkin Custom Chrome The actual logic for determining the skin will depend upon the site s business rules In this case anyone accessing http internal somesite org will get the Plone Default skin and anyone ac cessing http external somesite org will get the Custom Chrome skin Unfortunately one catch is that you can t determine the skin on the security level of the user for example authenti cated users see one skin and managers see another This rather obvious need isn t possible
367. lue NOTE When you change an object s name value anything that references the older name will no longer be valid and will result in the page not being found It s best not to change the name value after you submit an object for review or link to it from elsewhere For this reason I recommend setting this option to No Portrait In larger organizations and in community Web sites it s useful to see pictures of other members The Portrait field allows you to upload a picture of yourself The picture should be 75 by 100 pixels Once you ve made the desired changes click the Save button to commit the changes Now that you ve logged in it s time to start adding and editing content 3 1 4 Adding and Editing Documents As mentioned now that you re a site member a folder has been created for you where you can store content Of course you can add content to any folder that the site administrator has given you the right to do so but by default every user can add content to their member folder Each type of content you can add is distinct and you can edit and view it in different ways For this reason Plone references each type of content differently for example you can add images links documents and so on Out of the box Plone provides the following content types e Document This is an item that presents some static information to the user This is the most common type of content added and most closely represents a typical
368. lues from the current con text Previously you called the Script Python object using a path expression you could do that here as context updateScript However you can t pass parameters through to the script being called in that syntax so you make a Python expression instead which is python con text updateScriptQ The contentValues function returns a list of all content objects in a folder Next look at the code for each iteration lt a href tal attributes href updated object absolute_ur1 tal content updated object title_or_id gt The title of the item lt a gt lt em tal content updated diff gt days ago lt li gt lt ul gt As shown you can loop through this list of values and you can then use path expressions to access first the repeated value updated then the object object and then a method of that object title_or_id This is an example of taking complicated logic processing and passing it off to a Script Python object 6 1 2 1 2 Restricted Python I ve mentioned several times that Script Python objects and Python TAL expressions all run in restricted Python mode Restricted Python is an environment that has some functions removed These functions may potentially be dangerous in a Web environment such as Plone The origi nal reasoning is that you may have untrusted but authenticated users writing Python on your site If you open an account at one of the many free Web hosts for Zope you ll find you
369. lverCity 12 1 1 7 Adding Skins So now that you ve got the main code you have two things left to do build the skins and create an installation method The skins are actually one of the easier parts because so much of the work has been done already in the Plone framework I covered skins in detail in earlier chapters where I discussed how to make a skin for the Plone site on the file system Each product that needs to provide custom User Interface UI does so by making its own File System Directory View FSDV so you ll do the same again here The skins are placed in the skins directory of the product This directory name is defined in the init__ py file where you register the directory using the registerDirectory function If you wanted to change the name make sure to register it you can register as many directories as you like but it s recursive and will register everything in and below that registered directory 344 The easiest of all your jobs for this product is to add an icon for the object that will appear in Plone The name of this icon is already defined in the factory type information with the line content icon silvercity gif so all you have to do is add an icon to the skins directory called silvercity gif This icon will display whenever you see the object in the Plone user interface When SilverCity lexes a file it outputs HTML using CSS tags so you have ensure that the particular CSS file is available Fo
370. m It s available as a zip file of the skin after you ve downloaded and unzipped it you ll find there s a file structure similar to the one mentioned earlier 199 You have an _ init__ py file and skins directory In the skins directory you ll find a series of page templates Controller Validator objects and all the matching metadata files If you want to install this then copy the PloneBookExamples folder into the Products directory of your instance home Restart Plone and then click plone setup Select Add Remove Products and you ll see an entry for PloneBookExamples check it and then click install You ve now installed the templates and can go to feedbackForm and get the page template you saw in the previous chapter What the install procedure did was automate the process of adding an FSDV and then added a layer to each skin If you click portal_skins and then select the Properties tab you ll see that the new layer plone_book_examples has been added end sidebar 7 1 4 Case Study Examining the NASA Skin In January 2004 two NASA probes landed on Mars Spirit and Opportunity These remote controlled robots scoured the surface of Mars returning pictures and analysis of the surface The probes were a great success returning stunning pictures of the surface of Mars that thrilled the world One small part of this cog was a Web site at http mars telascience org This site published a program called Maestro To quote
371. m e max Anything smaller than the largest item e minmax Anything smaller than the largest and bigger than the smallest For example to find all events that have a start time bigger than now in other words anything in the future use the following from DateTime import DateTime now DateTime results context portal_catalog searchResults Type Event end query now range min To search on a range such as all news items in December you d need to calculate the start and end dates for the month From those dates you can then construct the following query from DateTime import DateTime start DateTime 2004 12 01 320 end DateTime 2004 12 31 results context portal_catalog searchResults Type News Item created query start end range minmax Date indexes work in the same manner as field indexes and often you ll see dates placed inside field indexes which works just fine 11 1 2 4 2 Searching a KeywordIndex By default a KeywordIndex returns all the values that match in the keyword index Subject is the only KeywordIndex this is the keyword that a user has assigned to an object through the Properties tab of the Plone interface To search for all items with the keyword Africa use this results context portal_catalog searchResults Subject Africa Similar to a FieldIndex a KeywordIndex can be passed a more complicated query with several obj
372. m au see Help About PythonVvin for further copyright information gt gt gt Ready Figure 1 2 The Python prompt on Windows On Linux and Mac OS X usually typing python will start the Python interpreter python Pyython 2 3 2 1 Oct 6 2003 10 07 16 GCC 3 2 2 20030222 Red Hat Linux 3 2 2 5 on linux2 Type help copyright credits or license for more information gt gt gt Since Python is an interpreted language instead of the whole Python script being compiled and run you can just send lines of code to the interpreter as you write them This makes the interpreter an amazingly useful place for testing and debugging code In the interpreter each line waiting for input is prefixed with gt gt gt For example the simplest Hello World program is as follows gt gt gt print Hello world Hello world gt gt gt To exit the interpreter press Ctrl D press the D key while holding down Ctrl on Linux or press Ctrl Z on Windows You ll also use this later for more advanced Zope and Plone interaction You can execute normal Python scripts by passing them to the interpreter for example given the following script called hello py 00003 joos 4 13 print Hello world you can run this using the following command python hello py Hello world The Python Web site at http www python org has excellent documentation especially the tutorial Also the following books pro
373. m this then you can come up with some states Looking at the previous steps you ll see you really have no need to create different states for receiving the bill which includes opening it and putting it on my desk Similarly you don t need to bother with every review that happens Although these are all valid steps that take place trying to make a workflow for every state would be too cumbersome Instead you can summarize the workflow with the following states e Draft The credit card bill has been prepared and sent to me e Review The credit card bill has been received and is on my desk being re viewed e Paid The credit card bill has been paid put in my filing cabinet and forgotten about forever Now that you ve come up with the states you can think of the changes that need to occur For each of these states you ll have at least one transition that occurs to move the bill from one state to another e Post The bank sends the credit card bill e Pay I pay the credit card bill e Reject Something is wrong on the bill and it isn t approved Figure 8 1 shows this set of transitions and states In the figure boxes represent states with the state written in them Arrows represent the transitions from one state to the next with the name of the transition in italics Que ry Draft gt Review gt Open Pay Figure 8 1 A simple state machine for paying credit card bills You ve now extracted this business pro
374. m wishes you a happy holiday gt login Read More Posted by 2 lirs gt Forgot your password Bug Day 2 amp 3 Progress report _ gt New user Lots of brilliant people sacrificed a lot of time to get Plone 2 0 ready fo are some of the happenings for day 2 and day 3 of the Bug Weekend development Read More You can submit bug reports and feature Posted by lin requests to the Plone Collector GRUF 2 0Beta2 is out Sita aeeanth hart Figure 3 24 A list of news items If I wanted to write a Web page that was going to be relevant for a long period of time such as directions to my company s office Pd use a document If I wanted a page that detailed my exciting new product and drew attention to it Pd use a news item That news item would be visible under the news tab and as new things happened itd slowly move down the page 63 3 1 6 Organizing Content So far you ve seen how to add and edit content in a Plone site but without clear organization this can become a mess quite quickly You have two main ways of organizing content folders and topics A folder is the simplest and most powerful mechanism for organizing content and works just like a folder or a directory on a computer s hard drive A folder can contain any item of content content can be copied and pasted between folders and of course folders can contain other folders To organize content that s spread all over a site a
375. mes straight out of the box with Plone I also provide a series of examples to help you perform tasks such as creating notifications moving content and so on Finally I show some of the more advanced features of workflow development and some of the useful tools that are available 8 1 1 What Is Workflow Workflow is a chain of actions or events that occurs on something to achieve an objective Workflow often expresses business rules that may exist Every business has different rules and policies about tasks that must happen within that company Examples of this include the following e Before an employee s time sheet is approved it must be viewed and acknowl edged by a supervisor e In a widget factory for each widget assembled users must be notified of the order and any change in the state of the widget as it passes through the factory e Before a Web page is published on a Web site it must be approved by market ing approved by the Webmaster and translated by a linguist Workflow separates the logic of these business rules and standardizes the concept of thinking about these changes By having separate logic it s now easy for businesses to change the application to fit their business and their business rules Often applications try to enforce a workflow on a business because the workflow is hard coded into the application 205 206 8 1 2 Understanding Workflow in Plone Plone s workflow tool provides certain featur
376. meters return 1 2 146 6 1 2 1 1 Scripting Plone Scripting Plone is a rather complicated subject because as soon as you re able to script Plone you have to take into account the Application Programming Interface API of all the objects and tools you may want to use Explaining APIs is beyond the scope of this book instead I ll demonstrate how to do some simple tasks using Script Python objects Once you re comfort able with them IIl describe more API specific functions Page templates can loop through Python dictionaries and lists quite nicely But often you don t have data in one of these convenient formats so you need to jump into a Script Python object format the data nicely and then pass it back to the page template The most convenient data format is a list of dictionaries which lets you combine the power of a tal repeat and a path expression in one function As an example you ll see a function that takes a list of objects Each of these objects is actually an object in a folder For each of those objects you ll see the object if it has been updated in the last five days Listing 6 2 shows a useful little portlet I put together for a site that wanted to locate this type of information and then highlight exactly those items Listing 6 2 Returning Objects Up to Five Days Old title recentlyChanged parameters objects from DateTime import DateTime now DateTime difference 5 as in 5 days result
377. might find the Collective worth ultiple words may be found by upcoming events fa Python Conference checking out Itu i CastleSprint 2004 contains many third Washington DC USA party add on products Control Panel March 24 Convention Help regarding Plone Database iz Debian Redhat Packages x fi European Python development and g and Zope Conference deployment is Aa 2004 available in the news Description Sweden G teborg ieee and mailing Return items matching this description Multiple ds may be found by combining them with June 07 pias AND and OR r m om G Pan European zopelabs Portals Conference Change the skin based New items since aa getty zl Figure 3 29 Advanced search Although the search text field searches both the title and description you may want to search the description or title only For that reason these fields are presented on the advanced search form You can t search the title and description using the wildcards globbing or any of the advanced search options Any search result will match the input if given of all the fields the results will be an intersection of all the terms 70 3 1 8 Example Creating the Plone Book Web Site To give an example Plone site and provide a series of examples I set up a Web site for this book This is a Plone site with a few minor modifications As I go through the book TIl make references to the site and add new features as they re covered i
378. move the database from your old installation to the new ZEO directory In my case that means moving the Data fs file from var zope var to var zeo var Next you ll need to alter the configuration of your Zope instance To do this open the zope conf in etc and enter the following information ZEO client storage lt zodb_db main gt mount point lt zeoclient gt server localhost 9999 storage 1 name zeostorage var INSTANCE var lt zeoclient gt lt zodb_db gt 422 In the previous code you re setting the port and the server where the ZEO Server can be found You ll also need to comment out the existing map to the local database This is should look like the following lt zodb_db main gt Main FileStorage database lt filestorage gt path INSTANCE var Data fs lt filestorage gt mount point lt zodb_db gt H HHHH To test that this works first start the ZEO server This may require more permissions than the user you installed it as cd var zeo bin zeoctl start daemon process started pid 29316 The ZEO daemon has successfully started Now fire up a Zope client and try to connect to it like so cd var zope bin zopectl start daemon process started pid 29338 This means things are good to go and you can now access your Plone as usual 14 1 3 2 Using ZEO Clients In this configuration the ZODB is accessed via the ZEO server and each Zope instance is a ZEO client Multiple
379. mple Error on Startup bin runzope 2003 12 19T17 44 05 INFO O ZServer HTTP server started at Fri Dec 19 17 44 05 2003 Hostname laptop Port 8080 2003 12 19T17 44 05 INFO O ZServer FTP server started at Fri Dec 19 17 44 05 2003 Hostname basil agmweb ca Port 8021 2003 12 19T17 44 16 ERROR 200 Zope Could not import Products PloneSilverCity Traceback most recent call last File opt Zope 2 7 lib python OFS Application py line 533 in import_product product __import__ pname global_dict global_dict silly File var zope zeo Products PloneSilverCity __init__ py line 1 in import PloneSilverCity File var zope zeo Products PloneSilverCity PloneSilverCity py line 1 import ThisModuleDoesNotExist a ImportError No module named ThismoduleDoesNotExist At this point Zope stops you ll have to fix this import before starting again This is probably the easiest error to fix but will likely occur only when you install that a whiz bang new product off the Internet only to find it has a dozen dependencies The next kind of error that can occur is a programming or logic error which occurs inside the code Suppose your product adds two numbers together but one of them is a string this is an error in Python An error will be raised which Plone will report back to the user interface with an error value and error type At this point you should click plone setup and click Error Log to see the traceback find the bug and fix
380. mputer the script zpasswd py is located in opt Zope 2 7 bin zpasswd py So to create a password you d do the following cd var zope python opt Zope 2 7 bin zpasswd py access Username emergency Password 268 Verify password Please choose a format from SHA SHA 1 hashed password CRYPT UNIX style crypt password CLEARTEXT no protection Encoding SHA Domain restrictions This will create a file access in your Zope instance Now restart Zope and log into the ZMI using that username and password entered in that script This user has a special meaning in Plone and is called the emergency user Once you ve logged in as an emergency user you can t create objects but you can now create a new user for yourself and log in as that user For security reasons you should then delete the access file 9 1 5 1 3 Getting Emergency Access on Windows The Windows installation of Plone features a Graphical User Interface GUI application for easily getting emergency access Select Start Program Files Plone Plone and click the Emergency User option This allows you to create a new user alter the current emergency user s password or remove any emergency user as shown in Figure 9 16 l Plone Controller Emergency User Plone Ports 2 Status amp Emergency User User name About Password m Create Emergency User Confirm Password IF you have not got access to your Zope instance
381. n registerDirectory skins globals def initialize context product utils ContentInit product_name content_types contentClasses permission add_permission extra_constructors contentConstructors fti contentFTI product initialize context What s happening in this code Well actually not that much it s just a little verbose First you make references to the classes and constructors that are going to be used in contentClasses and contentConstructors These map to the factory function for creating the objects and the actual class These are then passed into the ContentInit function inside initialize which is a special function that s called during the product initialization ContentInit does all the work to set up the product within Plone The parameters to this function are as follows e product_name This is the name of the product as defined in the config file in this case PloneSilverCity content_types This is the tuple of classes that this product defines usually this is just one class but it may be more e permission This is the permission that s needed to create an instance of this object in this case it s the add_permission variable I ve defined in config py fti This stands for factory type information and is the dictionary of factory type information you defined in the PloneSilverCity py module for the content 338 12 1 1 6 Altering the Product Modules Now you can
382. n t enough if a user could still say edit a document With knowledge of Plone they could go and run the page from a script or other malicious mechanism Often in Plone you ll find that if you try hard enough you can get to the edit page of a document you re viewing by hacking the uniform resource locator URL However you won t actually be able to edit the page you ll just be able to call up the edit form If your server is running in the wild without restricted access then ensure that you re running another Web server in front of Zope s ZServer As I discuss in Chapter 10 the ZServer that comes in the package is a simple implementation without all the checks and security a real Web server needs Consider proxies if possible for other Zope services such as FTP and WebDAV if youre going to let untrusted users at these services this isn t normally the case 9 1 5 Integrating Plone with Other Services The following sections cover security outside of a Plone instance for example all the security settings you need to actually run Plone on a server Then I cover using Plone with LDAP so that you can have users from an external server be used in Plone 9 1 5 1 Security on Your Server I ve covered the security of users within the Plone system but there s one other important issue the security and setup of your Plone server within your operating system As with any Web application getting the security right for your server
383. n wenden for German users What gets translated is determined by the i18n tags that have been inserted into the page templates as you saw earlier If you want to change that translation or add your own variation then merely change the po file If no msgstr is found then the default English translation is found Once you ve made that change restart Plone When this happens Plone will recompile that file into the mo version and your translation will be updated For Plone the default translation is always to use the English translation file if no language is given or no translation is available In fact the plone en po file is blank so no translation will be available Therefore Plone does the final fallback does no translation and shows the text in the page template The text in all page templates is in English since most developers speak English The long and short of this is that there s no English translation Therefore you can make a new translation by copying the plone pot file into a new file of the name plone xx po The value of xx should match the country code of your translation You can find a list of language codes at http www unicode org onlinedat languages html Once you ve started the translation set the values at the top including the language code and start translating away If you ve done a new language file then the Plone I18N team will happily accept it and help you complete it The Plone team mailing list is at
384. n Unfortunately IIS can t perform proxying in the same way as Squid and Apache you need a separate plug in Just before this book was published a free proxy was written called IIS2Zope that provides this functionality How ever I haven t had chance to try it in a high performance site For more information see http zope org Members freshlogic index_html Instead I ll cover a solution that s simple to set up and free Earlier Zope users recommended PCGI but over the years this has been slow and complicated to install By using Microsoft s ASP language and some IIS properties you have a quicker solution It s called ASP 404 and does the redirect through Microsoft s ASP programming language From http www zope org Members hiperlogica ASP404 download the latest version I tested ASP404_1 0 b2 zip Unzip the downloaded file and you ll find a file default asp inside it Take that file and put it in the root of the site you want to proxy on my server that s c inetpubwwwroot Next you need to configure that script with the appropriate information for the location of your Plone site You have to open the script in a simple text editor and change two lines that contain the variables for the site configuration Specifically change line 18 from this zopeAddress http 127 0 0 1 8080 to the address of the destination server In this example it s as follows zopeAddress http 192 168 2 1 8080 Then change line 27 fr
385. n Externalkditor install unix The following is an example with version 0 7 tar zxf zopeedit 0 7 1 src tgz cd zopeedit 0 7 1 sre python setup py install After you ve installed the client you ll need to configure each browser you want to use In structions for Konqueror Galeon and other browsers are available online at Zope org The following are the step by step configuration instructions for Mozilla Zope Editor application x zope edit External Editor opens an editor based on the contents of a configuration file To have an editor of your choice invoked alter that file You can find it under different names in the following places depending on your setup e On Windows if you installed Plone using an installer you can find this file at c Program FilesPloneZopepwizopeedit ini e On Windows if you used the stand alone External Editor installer you can find this file in the directory you installed External Editor to by default this is c Program FilesZopeExternalEditorzopeedit ini e On Unix this file will be called zope external edit and located in the home directory of the user running the program for example home andy zope external edit It s in the home directory of the user because each user may have different settings This file contains a mapping of extensions and the editor invoked to change the editor for page templates for example find the following lines that have meta type Page Template meta typ
386. n be accessed only with the permission given declareObjectPublic This sets the entire object as publicly accessible declareObjectPrivate This sets the entire object to private and inaccessible to restricted code With these methods it s possible to set almost any security you d like However I ve almost always found that explicitly setting the protection of each method with a permission has been sufficient 340 12 1 1 6 2 Integrating with Search In the previous chapter I showed you how the search works and the indexes that exist Since the indexes work against Dublin Core objects and you ve used Dublin Core as a base class your object s title description creator modification date and so on will all be indexed for you no extra work is needed Further by inheriting from the PortalContent class every time the object is altered the catalog will be updated for you again you don t need to worry about anything However one index does need a little help and that s SearchableText As I demonstrated previously the SearchableText index provides the full text index that Plone uses when a search is run Itd be nice if the search would also index the source code so if somebody uploaded a piece of code with import in it the search would pick it up Because the catalog looks at the object and tries to find an attribute or method matching the index name all you need to do is provide a method with that name that returns t
387. n dates language and keywords Item Properties Allow Discussion on this item Default will use the site wide setting for discussions C Default Enabled C Disabled Keywords Keywords relate different types of content to each other Don t select too many categories Figure 3 26 Enabling discussions Once discussions are enabled click the Add Comment button to discuss the content which opens a form for adding the comment see Figure 3 27 67 Add Comment You can add a comment by filling out the form below Plain text formatting Comment Details Subject Isn t Plone great Body text Im just really starting to understand this now gt add comment Figure 3 27 Adding a comment to a piece of content Enter the subject of the comment and the text of the comment The text is entered as plain text so just type away as usual Comments don t go through any workflow so comments show up as soon as they ve been added Once a comment has been entered it can be replied to forming a threaded list of comments on an item Further comments will be entered in the catalog so they can be searched NOTE Administrators logged in as managers can remove any replies or entire threads Dis abling replies doesn t remove the comments it just stops them being shown so reenabling comments will show the existing comments again 3 1 7 2 Searching for Content Plone contains a powerful search engine system based on Zope
388. n mean sd median max Connect 0 0 0 0 0 0 401 Processing 770 770 0 0 770 770 Waiting 766 766 0 0 766 766 Total 770 770 0 0 770 770 This last piece of information is useful and includes the time taken to get a connection Since my server is on the same computer as the client this is quite short This test demonstrates that it took 1 30 seconds to complete a request Of course that hasn t really tested the server much at all When testing you ll probably want to hit the server with a few concurrent requests to simulate the real world a little more You can do this by specifying the number of requests and the concurrency by using the c concurrent threads and n number of requests options For example ab n 20 c 4 http localhost This sends a total of 20 requests over four concurrent threads The end result is a slightly different request per second of 1 78 seconds For more information on all the options available please see the Apache Bench manual at http httpd apache org docs programs ab html One advantage of using ab is that you aren t actually assembling the pages on the client they re just being downloaded and then thrown away If you have a page that has lots of scripts or features big images the time it takes for a client to assemble that page into something the user can understand won t be included A classic example of this is that in the old Netscape browser a large number of tables can slow down
389. n of setting the state This will set a message that provides some feedback to the user screenMsg Comments sent thank you state setKwargs portal_status_message screenMsg return state 6 1 4 2 4 Binding the Three Parts Together At the moment however three separate entities exist a form a validator and an action script These need to be tied together to form the chain so you ll return to the Controller Template object Click the Validator tab and enter a new validator that points to the validEmail script You ll also add a success action if the processing is correct to traverse to the sendEmail script Expression string sendEmail n the sendEmail script you can now add another traversal back to feedbackForm Expression string feedBackForm so that after sendEmail happens correctly the user will be sent back to the original page NOTE A much more complete e mail validation script appears in Plone called vali date_emailaddr which checks that the e mail is in the right format If you want to use this script instead you can point the validator to this script 163 That s it you re done You should now be able to test the form on the book s Web site To make it even easier I made a Feedback tab which points to the feedbackForm template and from there you can now give feedback to me about this book 7 Chapter 7 7 1 Customizing the Look and Feel of Plone Over the previous two chapters I ve c
390. n the book including new templates skins and so on The Web site for this book is at http plone book agmweb ca initially I set this site up on Windows server as described in Chapter 2 However I later transferred it to Linux The site serves the following purposes It gives people a place to get information about the book and buy it It allows easy access to the software used in the book It gives code examples and allows users to interact with samples in the book It contains any errata or issues found after publication Once I set up a Plone site I created the following basic folder and page structure Home _ Software _ Chapters _ Chapter 1 _ Chapter 2 To do this I logged in as the user who was created with the installer in my case the admin user After logging in I went to the home page clicked the edit tab and wrote some text for the home page I created links to the Chapters and Software folders Then I clicked the contents tab and added two folders as shown in Figure 3 30 contents navigation i p eee Plone Book ae Software The Plone Book site Select gt add new item title size modified state order D Software 2004 03 21 12 34 24 visible DD Chapters 2004 03 21 12 34 36 visible B Plone Book Z 1K 2004 03 21 12 34 50 visible F oO P o gt rename gt cut gt copy gt delete Figure 3 30 The folder contents with my home page and the new folders Next I went to the Chapt
391. n the parent objects in the hierarchy to determine this object s permissions Go now to the root Zope folder and click the Security tab This opens the list of permissions for the root folder and sure enough there are some settings for the Access contents information permission in this folder namely the anonymous and manager roles have this permission Since permissions are acquired all subfolders will also acquire these permission settings This means the Plone site and every object in the Plone site will have these permissions Therefore if you want to set a security permission for the whole site all you have to do is configure the permission in the root Plone and most of objects will acquire those permissions NOTE The exception is workflowed objects which specifically turn off acquisition This is covered in the Security and Workflow section later in this chapter You can set permissions on any object in Zope through the ZMI This may be the Zope root a Plone site a folder such as the Members folder or even a piece of content Each object has it own set of permissions but not all objects have the same choice of permissions For example the Add permission is provided on all folders But since these permissions don t make sense to a nonfolderish object by definition an object must be a folder to have items added to it they aren t present Any product or piece of Python code in your Zope site can define its own security pe
392. n you plan to be sleeping Not a problem give the press release an effective date and a time of midnight Up until the effective date it won t be visible in the calendar in navigation in searches or in pages that use a search as the listing under the news tab However anybody who knows about the press release will be able to access the page directly Once the effective date has passed the item will appear in all the aforementioned places and be live to the world The effect is similar with expiration dates If you have a special offer that stops being effective on a particular day then you could set an expiration date of that day After that date it wouldn t appear in calendar navigation searches and so on The effective and expiration dates don t actually change the state of the item in workflow see Chapter 7 for more information on workflow rather they just change where it displays You can also set effective and expiration dates on the state tab which you ll learn about in the next section 3 1 4 8 Publishing Your Document When a document is created it s given an initial state called visible By default content isn t automatically published and available to the world instead others can view your content but it doesn t show up in searches or the navigation tree This is a useful state because you can point other users to this content but because it won t show up in navigation or searches it s not visible un
393. naming scheme The two 366 schemas are simply added together to create one bigger schema In ArchExample you do this by adding the schema for the content type to the already existing BaseSchema For example schema BaseSchema Schema StringField group vocabulary ARTICLE_GROUPS widget SelectionWidget It s worth noting that the items are returned from queries of the schema in the order they re added to the schema This means you can rearrange the order that elements appear in the user interface by moving the fields around in the schema That s also why the BaseSchema is added at the beginning so that the ID and title fields will appear at the top of the view and edit page rather than at the bottom 13 1 1 2 2 Fields So far you ve seen the StringField field which is a common field that represents a string on your content type A number of fields are available in Archetypes as described in Table 13 1 Over time more fields are being added and if you need to it s possible to create your own Each field has a default widget that will be used unless you specify one In the blurb example earlier I specified a TextAreaWidget Widgets are covered in the next section All these fields are imported from the Archetypes public module for example from Products Archetypes public import BooleanField All fields are instantiated the same way by creating a field and passing in the one required parameter for
394. nctionality such as formatting strings and numbers or performing simple conditions Further almost all the other TALES expressions mentioned can be wrapped in Python and called The following are the expressions 109 e path string Evaluates a path expression string string Evaluates a string expression exists string Evaluates a string expression e nocall string Evaluates a nocall expression For example the following code python path context Members is equivalent to the following context Members A few convenience functions have also been added to assist developers The test function takes three parameters a statement to evaluate and the true and false conditions The statement is evaluated and the appropriate value is returned For example python test 1 1 0 1 The same_type function takes two variables and compares if they re the same For example python same_type something Some developers discourage using Python inside the Zope Page Templates system because it means adding logic in the presentation templates Often as a developer for each piece of Python added it can be useful to ask yourself if that piece of code would be better factored out and placed in a separate Script Python object This doesn t mean you should move every piece of Python out just think about it before adding anything 5 1 1 2 6 Book Web Site Revisiting Actions In Chapter 4 you added an action for pointi
395. nctions are currently available if you can t complete your task there then you ll have to go to the ZMI 72 73 To access the control panel log into Plone as a user with the manager role If you don t have a user with that role and are an administrator of the site see Chapter 9 for more information on how to do this If you aren t the administrator of a site and want this level of access ask your site administrator To access the control panel click plone setup at the top of the page see Figure 4 1 Badmin my preferences undo plone setup log out Figure 4 1 Accessing the control panel This opens the control panel see Figure 4 2 home news you are here home navigation Plone Setu p D Home Chapters Configuration area for Plone and add on Products Software Plone Configuration amp Add Remove Products Error Log Ed Mail Settings Portal Settings Skins amp Users and Groups Administration 2 Zope Management Interface Add on Product Configuration No Preference Panels available Figure 4 2 Plone control panel The following functions are available in the control panel admin 74 Add Remove Products Clicking this link allows you to automate the instal lation products covered in detail in Chapter 10 Error Log Clicking this link accesses the log of errors that have occurred in the Plone site Mail Settings Clicking this link allows you to alter the Simple Mail Tran
396. nd for the body is set to the color 343434 202 body background 343434 Second the actual content of a Plone page the part that you can edit is contained in one class called documentContent Because the background color of the documentContent element is set to white in the main plone css file the background of the text is white and produces the white area in the middle of the screen Next the image of the satellite and robot at the top of the Web site is one large image You place it at the top using CSS The code for this is as follows portal top background url http mars telascience org header jpg transparent no repeat padding 162px 0 0 0 position relative This CSS code sets the parameters for the element that has the ID of portal top If you look at the HTML code for a Plone site you ll see the portal top element at the top of the page just below the body element By setting the background for that image to the URL of the image in question you can have the image appear The image is 162 pixels high which is why the padding for the top of the portal top element is set to 162px If you don t do this then all the items below will be pushed up overriding the image The header image is 677 pixels wide and you ll note that the text in the page fits cleanly underneath the image rather than spilling out to the left or right You can do this by setting the value for the element to 680px The visual po
397. nd is written in C it can respond far more quickly In Chapter 10 I covered installing Squid and using it as a proxy If you re going to use Squid to accelerate Plone then please see that chapter for information on setting up Squid as a proxy As you ve seen earlier in this chapter you can put almost any information you want in HTTP headers using the Caching Policy Manager and the Accelerated HTTP Cache Manager Now Squid will act in a similar manner to a browser cache When a request comes for a page if those cache headers are present Squid will cache the page Repeated hits will cause Squid to return the page not Plone It s relatively simple to tell if a page has been cached Squid will add an X Cache header to the response Using the header py script you can see if the page has been successfully cached A HIT means that a cached copy was found in Squid and returned if no copy was found in the cache and Plone was queried a MISS is reported For example X Cache HIT from www agmweb ca Squid shows impressive numbers in testing in the development environment accelerating the view of a Plone page that s cached from about 2 requests per second to more than 25 requests per second On fast servers users have reported speeds of more than 200 requests per second with relative ease 419 14 1 2 12 2 1 Cleaning Squid Caches When a user edits an object it changes in Plone however because this object is cached in an earlier st
398. ndows and Mac OS X for example create a second configuration file called plone conf that contains Plone specific configuration options If your installation contains a plone conf file then use that configuration file to make changes they ll be included in the main configuration file The configuration file is extremely verbose and contains a great deal of useful comments and examples If you re familiar with Unix configuration files such as Apache then you ll find the Zope configuration file familiar To alter Zope configuration open the configuration in a text editor and change the lines as needed after altering the configuration you ll need to restart Zope It s possible to run Plone 2 0 with a version of Zope prior to 2 7 however Zope 2 7 offers increased stability and new features including easier configuration If you re using a version of Zope prior to 2 7 you ll need to read the documentation on how to change the configuration 2 1 4 1 Adjusting the Ports To change a port add the address lines for that port For example to run Plone on port 80 instead of the default change the following bold line in zope conf lt http server gt valid keys are address and force connection close address 8080 force connection close on lt http server gt to the following lt http server gt valid keys are address and force connection close address 80 force connection close on lt http server gt If you
399. ndy Desktop ExternalFile Fie Edit View Favorites Tools Help Bak 7 gt gt amp Gsearch 4 Folders S amp amp Ea Address so J C Documents and Settings andy Desktop ExternalFile Go L CVS File Folder 1 6 2004 4 48 PM ExternalFile Select an item to view its description See also My Documents My Network Places My Computer C extras help Ea tests www e init__ py CHANGES txt a CreationDialog py DEPENDENCIES txt a ExternalFile py a FileUtils py IExternalFile py INSTALL txt LICENSE txt README txt refresh txt 2 TODO txt version txt a ExternalFileBatch 2 ProductProperties File Folder File Folder File Folder File Folder File Folder pythonwin Text Document pythonwin Text Document pythonwin pythonwin pythonwin pythonwin Text Document Text Document pythonwin Text Document Text Document Text Document Text Document 1 6 2004 4 48 PM 1 6 2004 4 48 PM 1 6 2004 4 48 PM 1 6 2004 4 48 PM 1 6 2004 4 48 PM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 4 12 2003 12 17 PM 1 11 2002 12 11 PM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 4 21 2003 12 02 AM 10 17 2001 10 41 Al 4 17 2003 11 37 PM 4 12 2003 12 17 PM rr a Figure 10 2 The ExternalFile directory contents Next move the ExternalFile folder not its conten
400. ne forms that perform a simple task such as request a password login and so on The framework also works for all content types for tasks such as editing a content type which I ll cover later in this book in Chapters 11 13 All basic forms have at least two components that you ve already seen so far a Page Template object to show the form to the user and a Script Python object to parse the results and perform some action on the results The form controller framework in Plone introduces a few new object types that are equivalent to the types you ve seen in this chapter These are the Controller Page Template object the Controller Script Python object and the Controller Validator object These new objects have their equivalent objects as shown in Table 6 1 These new objects have more properties and act in slightly different ways than the equivalent objects Table 6 1 New Object Types That the Controller Provides Object Type Equivalent Zope Object Controller Filesystem Page Template Page Template 155 Object Type Equivalent Zope Object Controller Python Script Python Script Controller Validator Python Script To add one of these objects using the ZMI go to the drop down box and select the name The form controller framework creates a sequence of events for a form that a user can then define The following is the sequence of events when executing a form When this sequence of events occurs a state object is passed
401. ner lt Application instance at 0266E1D0 gt e template lt ZopePageTemplate at test_context gt e default modules lt Products PageTemplates ZRPythonExpr SecureModulelmporter instance at 0x0169676 e here lt PloneFolder instance at O2BCC530 gt e traverse_subpath e user admin e context lt PloneFolder instance at O2BCC530 gt e nothing root lt Apphcation instance at 0266E1D0 gt e options args O e loop lt SafeMapping instance at 02629B90 gt REQUEST form cookies tree s eJyLjIZ3hANXWACY WAAtdOTL _Zopeld 94991059A 11Oy7ipDs lazy items Figure 5 6 An example of all the default variables in a script 5 1 3 2 Introducing TAL Statement Syntax The Template Attribute Language TAL provides all the basic building blocks for dynamic presentation TAL defines eight statements attributes condition content define omit tag on error repeat and replace Since page templates are valid XML all TAL attributes must be lowercase Further each ele ment can have each statement only once In the following examples I ve inserted new lines in 119 the elements to increase legibility this is perfectly valid code and quite common in the Plone source However this is optional and isn t required 5 1 3 2 1 tal attributes Changing an Element s Attributes The tal attributes allows you to replace one or more attribute of an element A statement contains the attribute to be changed separated by a sp
402. nfiguration area for Plone and add on Products 3 Software Plone Configuration B Add Remove Products Error Log Ed Mail Settings Portal Settings i Skins amp Users and Groups Administration zope Management Interface Add on Product Configuration No Preference Panels available TIP When dealing with the ZMI I find having two different browsers open helpful For exam ple I use Mozilla and Firefox Besides as a site administrator it s always a good idea to have two different browsers to test that your changes work in more than one browser 76 4 1 2 1 Changing the Title Description and E Mail Addresses The title description and e mail addresses are stored in a Plone site as properties on an object inside Plone You can access these fields by clicking the Portal Settings link in the Plone control panel see Figure 4 3 navigation Portal Setup Home a Up to Plone Setup Chapters Portal wide settings Software Plone Details Portal title The title of your Plone portal Plone Book Portal description The portal description is available in syndicated content and elsewhere k The Plone Book site Portal From name Plone generates e mail using this name as the e mail sender Portal Administrator Portal From address Plone generates e mail using this address as the e mail return address postmaster localhost Default Language Specify
403. ng to the software part of the site so it appeared as a portal tab In that action you added in the string expression string portal_url Software This may make a bit more sense now that I ve explained the variable portal_url This is the URL to your portal which may vary depending upon if you re using virtual hosting It does this by using acquisition to acquire the portal_url object and insert the resulting value into the string The result is that you ll always get an absolute link to the Software folder 5 1 1 2 7 Gotcha Mixing Python and Strings I ve seen newcomers mixing up Python and strings a few times All the expressions are dif ferent In other words you can t place path like expressions inside a Python expression For example the expression python here Members absolute_url danae doesn t make sense The entire expression is interpreted as Python so Plone will try to divide one thing by another and you ll get errors This is an ideal situation to use a string expression which lets you do variable substitution so the variable contain a path expression So you could use string here Members absolute_url danae 110 5 1 2 Using the Zope Page Templates System Now that you understand object publishing and expressions you can get into the real meat of the system Zope Page Templates This is the templating system that Plone uses for generating HTML Many HTML generation systems are available and some o
404. nge of values To register a new validator that checks that a user is between say 0 and 150 years old seems reasonable you d add the following to your content type in the Python module before creating the field from validation validators validator import RangeValidator from validation import validation the RangeValidator takes a name for the validator and a start and end value validAge RangeValidator validAge 0 150 validation register validAge Then you can change your validator to the following validators isInt validAge First the code will check that you have a valid integer second it ll check that the integer is within the range of sensible ages If you wanted to add a totally new validator that did some thing other than a regular expression or range validation you d need to add a new validation system For this example make a validation that a date is between two values In the following example this is called DateRangeValidator and will return a boolean value if the given date fits between the two given dates This could be useful to assert that a vacation is within the school holidays So now define a new validator called DateRangeValidator in the validators module This will allow you to register date ranges to assert that the given date falls in the middle To do this you ll use the Zope DateTime object which is covered in more detail in Appendix A A validator is simple it s a class that ha
405. ning GRUF v 2 0 Z Revised 2004 05 04 21 48 46 Information latest version documentation see The GRUF Webpage Users folders management Use this form to check manage the underlying user folders Undo BE CAREFUL THAT MISUSE OF THIS FORM CAN LEAD YOU TO UNRECOVERABLE LOSS OF US For this reason all destructive actions ie replacing or deleting with existing UserFolders r confirmed by clicking the rightmost checkbox Actions T ee Move Replace C Groups source 5 User Folder Ez Select your source type forbidden I Users source 1 amp User Folder LDAPUserF older gt Ok Delete Tc Add Select your source type Add Figure 9 17 Adding an LDAPUserFolder In the LDAPUserFolder settings add the settings that match your existing LDAP settings You should now be able to click the Users tab and search for users that already exist in your LDAP directory 271 9 1 5 2 2 Relational Databases and Others An excellent user folder replacement is called exUserFolder which stands for extensible user folder This one is easy to install just download it from http prdownloads sourceforge net exuserfolder exUserFolder O_20_0 tgz do the usual unzip dance and copy it into your Products folder Again after restarting Plone you should be able to click acl_users select Sources and then scroll down to the Users source 1 option Then select exUserFolder and check I m sure Actually exUserFolder wil
406. ning down through the rest of main template you ll reach the left and right columns the footers and the colophon Note that the left column may appear before the main content of a page if your language reads from left to right anyway but the style sheet moves it there This ensures that if you visit the site in a text only browser the main content appears first not after all the navigation options 182 Table 7 3 describes the macros and slots in the main template Table 7 3 Main Template Macros and Slots 183 Name Cache headers Head slot CSS slot JavaScript head slot Site actions Quick search Portal tabs Personal bar Path bar Content views Content actions Portal message Header Main Sub status Description Sets the Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP cache headers for the con tent Allows content to add to the head ele ment of a page Allows content to add custom CSS for the page Allows content to JavaScript to the page add custom The site actions allow you to have a series of actions above the search By default these allow you to change the font size The quick search box show in the top right corner The normally blue portal tabs that are normally at the top left The ac tual tabs shown are determined by ac tions This determines how the tabs are rendered in HTML The personal bar in the top right lo gin logout and so on The path breadcrumbs that start
407. nis aptent et hendrerit ullamcorper iaceo gravis commodo et facilis pertineo Ideo rusticus facilisis minim nunc ad usitas capto transverbe consequat dolor ex vel hendrerit Dignissim immitto olim secundum ve adipiscing exerci te ea nulla probo Feugait ulciscor jus quidne epulae Suscipit veniam quae adsum ideo et adsum Et elit paratus camur aut accumsan ulciscor nisl Vel patria os persto elit validus quis quae au foras melior os Luctus ex facilisi conventio duis neo In illum rusticus nulla ibidem cui autem melior sino lenis ingenium Nostrud vulpes erat quod exputo Consequat adipiscing comis nulla abdo pecus ingenium accumsan Ir demoveo similis tum comis quis iustum nostrud iaceo aliquam loquor tego importunus virtus suscipit Acsi feugait reprobo in eu comis vel lu damnum antehabeo Suscipere gemino brevitas facilisi exerci quis nt dolor eros nisl rusticus adsum ymo acsi About ACME Widget Company Our company is the prime maker of widgets in the world Founded in Figure 11 1 An example Python script uploaded into Plone 312 In this case I ve added a Press Release object and the footer about ACME Company is in the template so users don t need to remember to type this in every time 11 1 1 6 Creating a Scripting Object Once an object is registered in the portal_types tool you can then create the object in your Plone site You can also script the creation of the object programmatically This is useful for
408. no longer an option NOTE If you re logged in as a manager then you ll note there will be one extra option in the drop down publishing list called Publish This lets you put content straight into the published state with no intermediate step In the workflow drop down list in the top right corner there s also an option for Advanced which opens the state form for changing the status of an object This form is the same as clicking the state tab It has the following fields Effective Date This is the same as the Effective Date field in the properties see the Setting Document Metadata action Expiration Date This is the same as the Expiration Date field in the properties see the Setting Document Metadata section Comments This includes any comments you want to make for this change in state that will be recorded in history For example you could enter First draft Bob please see second paragraph 53 Change State These mirror the choices available in the drop down menu For ex ample the options are Publish Submit and so on One further option No Change is available if no change is necessary Select the change of state you d like to occur and click Save to commit the changes 3 1 4 8 1 What Are the Workflow States At this point you may be asking yourself what this workflow thing is and what the states mean Workflow as discussed in Chapter 7 is the ability to apply different states to the content
409. ns To access the controller select Start Programs Plone Plone this will start the controller As discussed earlier the first page you ll see is the Status page which allows you to stop or start Plone On the left of the controller are a few other screens that I ll now discuss 2 1 1 2 1 Changing the Ports The Ports choice as shown in Figure 2 7 allows you to specify the ports that Plone listens to for incoming connections such as HTTP File Transfer Protocol FTP and Web based Distributed Authoring and Versioning WebDAV 21 Plone Controller Plone Ports Iof x Plone 2 lu Plone HTTP 60 amp Emergency User About Zope Management HTTP 8080 FTP Access 21 WebDAV Source 8280 Note just because a port value is given it does not mean it is enabled By default FTP and WebDAY are disabled To enable them you may need to manually uncomment them in the Dataletc zope conf file Figure 2 7 The Ports page displays the ports on which Plone is running As mentioned when installing Plone you ll want to ensure that no other server is listening to the same port as Plone servers such as II S Apache and Personal Web Server PWS could be listening to port 80 At the time of writing only the Plone HTTP and Zope Management HTTP ports are enabled to enable them you have to go into a text file to configure them The following are the four fields on the Ports page Plone HT
410. nt Management Conference OSCOM in 2002 for the Mindjack site http www mindjack com events oscom html I won t do the complete rundown of all the competing open source content management frameworks Ill cut to the chase The winner is Plone This productized take on the six year old web application framework Zope was the package with the most tools the most profes sionalism the most traction and above all the most buzz You can find the Plone Web site at http www plone org as shown in Figure 1 1 To try Plone easily a demonstration site is available at http demo plone org There you can quickly and easily add and edit content through the Web Specifically you can add events upload pictures add documents and process them all through the framework that Plone provides welcome news download documentation development you are here home welcome to plone org navigation About Plone Development C Documentation C3 Downloads C Events 3 Public Relations login Name Password E log in i Forgot your password gt New user development You can submit bug reports and feature requests to the Plone Collector Figure 1 1 The Plone Web site Welcome to plone org This is the development and community site for Plone a user friendly Management System About Plone On this site you will find information rega
411. ntent types that you can tailor to a particular site s needs 3 1 4 1 Understanding the Document Content Types Rather than detailing how to add and edit all the different types of content available I ll cover adding one type of content a document in detail After adding and editing a few of these documents the approach to adding content should be second nature and editing other content will be easy A document is a page of content usually a self contained piece of text Although all items added to Plone are accessible as Web pages if there s one content type you could think of as a Web page this is it The default home page for a Plone site that you ve seen already the now famous Welcome to Plone page is one example of a document see Figure 3 8 43 home members Bandy you are here home welcome to plone navigation Home contents Welcome to Plone This welcome page is used to introduce you to the Plone Content M You can customize this frontpage by clicking the edit tab on this docum correct permissions Create folders and put content in those folders Fi the navigation box if they are published It s a very simple and powerfi For more information Plone website Zope community CMF website There are mailing lists and recipe websites available to provide a your new found Content Management System Online chat is also a advice and help
412. ntiated the same way by creating a widget and passing in keyword pa rameters as needed For example from Products Archetypes public import IntegerField from Products Archetypes public import IntegerWidget a simple field for age age IntegerField age widget IntegerWidget label Your age Widgets can also have extra attributes depending upon the type of widget In most cases these extra attributes correspond directly to HTML attributes for example on a StringWidget you can set a size attribute This will produce the appropriate HTML widget with the HTML size attribute set So to have input that s 20 characters wide you d create the following widget bankAccountNumber StringField bank widget StringWidget label Bank account number size 20 Table 13 3 describes all the widgets available to you in Archetypes Table 13 3 The Available Widgets Name Description Other Attributes BooleanWidget Shows two checkboxes for the possible values 370 Name Description CalendarWidget Returns a set of input boxes with a link to a helper pop up box so that a user can select a date ComputedWidgetReturns the computed value as HTML DecimalWidget A simple HTML input box for a string EpozWidget An HTML Epoz widget that shows the Epoz rich text editor for the content FileWidget Displays an HTML file element for users to upload files IdWidget A simple HTML input box that s used for renderin
413. o You Change the Icon for a Content Type As an example if you don t like the icon that appears for a content type then it s a pretty simple matter of uploading a new image and then making sure that the value for the icon is set in the form described previously Icons work best if they have a transparent background and are 16 pixels wide and 16 pixels high Click portal_skins click custom and add a new image Then in the portal_types tool set the value for the icon to be the same as the ID of the object uploaded To test that the icon has changed go to the Plone interface and look for where the object may appear for example do a search or look in the content add form 11 1 1 3 2 Actions When you re looking at the content type configuration in portal_types you ll see an Actions tab These are the actions that can be performed on the content type You briefly looked at actions in Chapter 4 which contains a detailed list of what the Actions tab contains action As you ve seen actions are stored on tool objects Many of the tools contain actions but you really don t have a great way to search for the location of an action If you want to change a particular action on your Plone site you have to find the tool that stores it Once you ve found that action you can then customize as much as you d like For instance if you want to add a new action as a green tab for a document you have to go and find the correct place Luckil
414. o is fully functional in the following browsers but may look different from the original Plone Netscape 4 x Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 0 Microsoft Internet Explorer 4 0 Konqueror 2 x Lynx text based e w3m text based e AWeb Links text based with optional graphics e Any browser that handles a basic set of Hypertext Markup Language HTML and form input cookies including most mobile Personal Digital Assistant PDA browsers 2 1 1 Installing Plone on Windows By far the easiest way to install Plone is to use the Plone Windows installer which automates the installation of Plone on Windows The installation includes extra packages and options a Hypertext Transfer Protocol HTTP loaded database the setup of services and Python for Windows packages You can download this installer from http www plone org download 2 1 1 1 Using the Installer The installer has been tested on Windows 9 x ME NT 3 51 2000 and XP but it should also work on other Windows versions It s recommended you have administrator access on the computer you want to install on since the installer will try to set up as a service and install settings into the Windows Registry If you already have Zope or Python installed you may want to install the source separately to save hard drive space Before installing Plone you should make note of any current Web servers you have running For example later versions of Windows automatically install
415. o on are macros that are explicitly called In fact if in the Zope Management Interface ZMI you look at the file by clicking portal_skins clicking plone_templates and then clicking main_template you ll see that the entire page con sists of macros and slots At this stage it s probably a little confusing but when called it runs through a series of macros and pulls everything together This allows a user to easily change any part of a Plone site by overriding that macro as you ll see in the next chapter For example lt div metal use macro here global_siteactions macros site_actions gt Site wide actions Contact Sitemap Help Style Switcher etc lt div gt lt div metal use macro here global_searchbox macros quick_search gt The quicksearch box normally placed at the top right lt div gt Continuing to scroll down through main_template you ll encounter some define slots Briefly I ll recap how a page in Plone is rendered When an object is shown a template for that view of that content is shown When you view an image the template image_view is shown and that template controls how the image is shown To do this task the image template fills the main slot If you look in the image view template you ll see the following code defined in that template 133 lt div metal fill slot main gt lt div gt If you jump back to the main_template you ll see that it contains a define slot definition for the slot main
416. oach 7 1 3 Making New Skins and Layers So far I ve talked about customizing the existing skin The process for making a whole new skin or a new layer isn t actually that different ll cover one key point putting your templates and scripts on the file system Making templates and scripts on the file system and creating new skins and layers are def initely the best way to go for long term maintainability and flexibility Not only is creating skin elements much easier in familiar tools on the file system but it also allows you to easily redistribute your code Writing on the file system is the style of choice for almost all Plone developers with minor modifications in the custom directory if needed 7 1 3 1 Making a New Skin As you ve seen a skin is actually nothing more than a collection of layers For my new skin I wanted to place all my custom code in one place so I went to the portal_skins tool added a new folder and gave it the ID of custom_chrome Then to add a new skin you have to click portal_skins select the Properties tab and add a new skin under the text Add a new skin You ll need to enter a series of layers that you want to set up for this skin In this example I added a new skin called Custom Chrome and a series of layers as shown in Figure 7 13 193 Contents Properties View Security Undo Owner Plone Skins Tool at Plone portal skins Skin selections Name Layers in order of precedence
417. off to a Script Python object if you so desire For example if the predicate is as follows python content myCachingRules content then add a Script Python called myCachingRules to calculate those rules For example parameters content cache all files images and anything thats published if content portal_type in File Image return 1 if content portal_workflow getInfoFor content review_state in published return 1 In this script you re caching all files and images and anything that s in the published state by setting the HTTP headers through the Caching Policy Manager 14 1 2 11 Example Caching on ZopeZen org When developing the site http www zopezen org there was one major problem The main page of ZopeZen which lists the posts and the number of replies is expensive to generate In Plone there s no easy way to efficiently calculate from the catalog the number of discussion replies to an item This is an ideal situation for the RAM Cache Manager Since the traffic that adds news items or posts is quite small perhaps one or two or day it seems reasonable that within any 30 minute period the front page won t change greatly The function that gets the news and the replies is called getNewsAndReplies and it performs the task of getting all the data needed for the index_html template The index_html template has elements that are specific to the user for example the login
418. om this zopePath to the ID of the Plone object like so zopePath Plone Save the file and close the editor Finally you need to tell IIS to speak to Plone this is where you have to use a bit of trickery Open the Internet Services Manager usually found somewhere in the Windows Control Panel Find the site you want to proxy and access the sites properties as shown in Figure 10 7 290 Internet Information Services Action View e gt Glm xX eB e 8 gt m Tree Internet Information Services G scripts c inetpub scripts 3 picard Hep c winnt help jishelp Bas TSAdmin C AWINNT System32 inetsrv iisadmin a Scripts Open 1sSamples c inetpub iissamples TISHelp Browse c program files common files system msadc TIsAdmit rinters C WINNT web printers WsSamp Start vS E MSADC Stop elp gif w Printers Pause isstart asp H cvs New R localstart asp alltasks gt fm pagerror gif View gt print gif arning gif lete aaah eb Export st in2000 gif es erver asp X gt Opens property sheet for the current selection R Figure 10 7 Accessing a site s properties In the properties select the Custom Errors tab and scroll down until you find the error for 404 Double click the 404 error and alter it as follows e Message Type URL e URL default asp Figure 10 8 shows the settings Error Code 40
419. omain for the translation To prevent conflict each site can have multiple domains or groups for translations for example there may be one domain for Plone and one for your custom application Plone uses the domain plone which is usually the default domain in Plone lt body i18n domain plone gt You shouldn t have to use this tag much however if you re writing a custom application you may find it useful to have a domain that doesn t conflict with other domains 6 1 1 2 3 li8n source This sets the source language for the text about to be translated It isn t used in Plone lt p i18n source en i18n translate gt Some text lt p gt 6 1 1 2 4 il18n name This provides a way of preserving elements in a larger block of text so that the block of text can be reordered In many languages not only are the words changed but also the order If you have to translate a whole paragraph or sentence that contains smaller chunks that shouldn t be translated then they can be passed through lt p i18n translate book_message gt The lt span tal omit tag tal content book color i18n name age gt Blue lt span gt Book lt p gt This will produce the following message string The color Book If the target language required these to be in a different order these could then be moved around and still have the dynamic content inserted into the correct place In French this would need to be translated as so Le Livr
420. on lt Files content title or id optional template title This is Page Template template id Desktop 2068 0 192 168 60 103 8080 test html lt body gt lt h2 gt lt span gt Disconnected 5798203 y IKF 1sec Book O REILLY HTML Reference x AP element defines a paragrapt HTML 4 0 the P element is form that content for a P element bec the P element starts on its own be nested inside a P element If at the next block level element The nature of the P element has Hl implementations of HTML the e Filey Edity View Sitey c ty eljon Test 7 flocar view 7 Figure 10 14 Editing page templates in Dreamweaver 10 1 4 5 6 HTML Kit HTML Kit is a free and powerful HTML editor and is the favorite of many Plone developers To use HTML Kit with External Editor alter your configuration file to point to HTML Kit For example in my installation this is as follows meta type Page Template extension pt editor C Program Files Chami HTML Kit Bin HTMLKit exe Clicking the pencil icon to edit in External Editor now opens it directly in HTML Kit You can also edit a setting to open each file in a separate process select Edit Preferences Startup and check Limit to a single HTML Kit instance Each file will now open a new process 11 Chapter 11 11 1 Manipulating and Categorizing Content Types Throughout the book I ve shown you how to add content to your
421. on Then change the template to the following lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtm1 xml lang en lang en 118n domain plone gt lt body gt lt div id portal searchbox metal define macro quick_search tal condition nothing gt Nothing to see here lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt This is the technique I showed earlier for removing elements just set tal condition on the macro element to ensure that the condition is false 7 1 4 2 Customizing the Colors You set the base colors for the site in the base_properties object This object has been cus tomized and the colors changed to the following colors unless mentioned all the other items are the same linkColor 776a44 globalBorderColor 776a44 globalBackgroundColor e0d3ad globalFontColor 776a44 The color change I most noticed is globalBackgroundColor which affects the colors of the personal bar and has changed from blue to brownish These minor colors changes will alter the base style sheet so that it matches the images and overall look and feel nicely 7 1 4 3 Creating the Style Sheet The big part of this site is the style sheet which is reproduced in full in Appendix B Here I ll highlight some of the main parts of the style sheet This style sheet is based on ploneCustom css which was customized in the custom folder Then some of the elements of the Web page were overridden in the new ploneCustom css file First the entire backgrou
422. on With kind permission Pll reproduce some of those diagrams here The UML modeling tool must support a standard Extensible Markup Language XML gen eration system called XML Metadata Interchange XMI This tool has been tested with the following programs e ObjectDomain commercial with a free demo for 30 classes from http www objectdomain com 389 e ArgoUML free from http argouml tigris org e Poseidon commercial based on ArgoUML from http www gentleware com e Sybase Powerdesigner commercial demo download from http www sybase com There are slightly different export properties for each of these but if you take a look in the ArchGenXML samples you ll see example outputs from the UML tools Figure 13 6 shows a class project that shows a few objects room person project resource and task There are relationships between all these objects and there s even Python code specified on some of the objects Project description text countT asks fromstart toend view_projectO ok ieeaares Task start datetime end datetime description text Person name picture image 0 resource al l Resource Room description text number description text Figure 13 6 A complex ArchGenXML example The quickest way to test this is to go into the ArchGenXML folder on your file system that you kept around from the original install and then c
423. on objects you choose to monitor as shown in Figure 14 3 For a standard Plone installation 405 you ll need to monitor Filesystem Script Python and Filesystem Page Template Call Profiler doesn t remember these settings between Zope restarts which means a simple restart will turn off the hooks and leave you ready to deploy Configure Results Results by URL Aggregates Undo Ownership re Call Profiler at Control_Panel CallProfiler Filesystem DTML Methad Filesystem Page Template Filesystem Script Python enabled 2003 09 16 20 26 Clear results Publisher Hook is installed F DTML Method M Filesystem DTML Method M Filesystem Page Template M Filesystem Script Python I Script Python N I Z SQL Method Monitor selected calls Monitorall Monitor none 4 Figure 14 3 Call Profiler with the file system hooks selected Once the objects to monitor have been selected access the URL you want to monitor The easiest way to access the URL to be tested is to run the ab tool mentioned earlier however using a Web browser will work just fine In this case if you re profiling the home page on localhost then run the following ab n 20 c 4 http localhost This will cause 20 requests to be made to Plone Once complete you can access the timing of those requests Returning to the Call Profiler interface you ll three tabs across the top of the Call Profiler tool Results Results by URL and Aggregates Sin
424. on in the etc directory at etc apache httpd conf or etc apache2 httpd conf To alter these files you ll usually need you to gain root or privileged user access 287 NOTE This example uses Apache 2 but all these commands are backward compatible with earlier versions such as Apache 1 3 2 However some earlier versions of Apache before 1 3 2 are known to have issues with cookies The easiest way to rewrite a URL in Apache is to use the built in rewrite and proxy modules This means enabling Apache s mod_rewrite and mod_proxy modules In Apache each site is usually contained within a virtual host directory that starts with the following lt VirtualHost 80 gt ServerName yoursite com other configuration options All you need to do is enable rewrites and add the rewrite rule like so RewriteEngine On RewriteRule http 192 168 2 1 8080 CCC VirtualHostBase http www mysite com 80 Plone CCC VirtualHostRoot 1 L P CCC lt VirtualHost gt The key rewrite rule here takes any request string passed to it and appends it to the end of your hard coded rewrite rule The L P tells Apache that this is the last rewrite rule and it should proxy to the server given After doing this you ll need to restart Apache to update the configuration You can find more information about rewriting in the mod_rewrite documenta tion at http httpd apache org docs 2 0 misc rewriteguide html Note that in this case you ve placed t
425. on msword application pdf This content type is about as simple as you can get at this point But you could plug more stuff into this into the content type such as a description or more properties If you re doing a lot of work then it d conceivably be possible even to pull the metadata information from the Word document and place it as metadata inside Plone 13 1 5 Setting Up a Transformation on Windows The transformation should be set up for you automatically inside the por tal_transforms tool There isn t really a lot to look at in the tool it merely provides a list of the transforms that are available A transformation has a list of incoming MIME types that it ll transform such as application msword and the output that will be produced such as text html Each transformation is a module on the file system in this case you can find it in PortalTransforms transforms word_to_html For that transformation to work though you must run a utility to generate the COM bindings for Python To do this select Start Plone Pythonwin and then select Tools COM Makepy Utility This lists all the COM interfaces available if you have Office installed you ll see an en try for Word somewhere in the list On my particular Windows server this is called Microsoft Word 9 0 Object Library 8 1 Select that option and click OK Pythonwin will now gener ate the appropriate information Once you ve done this you ll get a message
426. on to make sure you can edit objects with this tool For every computer accessing the Plone site you ll need to install this product on the client computer Just like you d install Flash or QuickTime in your browser you install the client side External Editor code This is manageable in intranets or on your computer but can be a little harder for a public site For Windows 2000 and XP download the executable Windows installer named zopeedit win32 0 7 1 exe Double click the installer and the graphical install will proceed You just need to select all the defaults This will set up the options for Internet Explorer To verify that this has worked do the following L 1x Folder Options General View File Types Registered file types Extensions Fie Types Od XM Winamp media file XML Document Winamp media file XSL Stylesheet Software Installation Settings Zope External Editor a vr New Delete m Details for ZOPE extension Opens with Ee pythonw Change Files with extension ZOPE are of type Zope External Editor To change settings that affect all Zope External Editor files click Advanced Advanced Cancel Apply Figure 10 13 File type configuration on Windows For Unix download the tarball named zopeedit 0 7 src targz Youll need to then unpack and run the setup as detailed in the Unix installation instructions at 300 http zope org Members Casema
427. ontext newld create a new Document type newFolder invokeFactory id index html type_name Document get the new page newPage getattr newFolder index html newPage edit html lt p gt This is the default page lt p gt return something back to the calling script return Done 313 If you add this as a Script Python object and test it by using the Test tab you ll get a folder made for you One interesting thing to note is that this creates the folder and document in the current context wherever the context object may be 11 1 1 7 Content Type Registry I ve shown you a variety of ways to access Plone including File Transfer Protocol FTP and WebDAV When Plone receives a piece of content from one of these sources it has to deal with the content in an appropriate manner This negotiation is performed by the content type registry which is visible in the ZMI as the content_type_registry tool If you visit the content_type_registry tool in Zope you ll probably be dazzled by yet another badly designed form in the ZMI but don t let that put you off When a piece of content is added to Plone via FTP or WebDAV the rules in the registry are executed from the top to the bottom until a match is made The match is based on the criteria in that rule and when met the appropriate content type for that rule is created The following are the four different types of criteria major_minor Thi
428. ope instance for example on my computer this is var zope bin Listing 12 11 shows an example running zopectl with PloneSilverCity NOTE At the time of writing zopectl doesn t work on Windows However on Linux it s a convenient way to test your code Unfortunately using zopectl requires locking the Zope Object Database ZODB and unless you re running ZEO something PI discuss in Chapter 14 can t be done while Zope is running Listing 12 11 Debugging the Product Using Zope cd var zope bin zopectl debug 351 Starting debugger the name app is bound to the top level Zope object gt gt gt from PloneSilverCity PloneSilverCity import PloneSilverCity gt gt gt p PloneSilverCity test gt gt gt p edit python import test gt gt gt p getRawCode import test gt gt gt p lt PloneSilverCity at test gt When your product breaks you ll get a traceback to one of two places either the error log page or one of the event logs If you ve really broken it then Plone won t start this normally happens when an import fails If that s the case then Plone will just not start at all I recommend starting Plone from the command line be it Windows or Linux Having the console output of that error will give you an immediate output of the error For example Listing 12 12 shows what happens when you try to run Plone SilverCity with a deliberate error in the import Listing 12 12 An Exa
429. or example lt a href tal attributes href python request get message default gt Link lt a gt In this example I m using the get function on the request object If the incoming request to the page has the message variable then the first value will be used which is message If the message variable isn t present then the second value default will be used Hence only by passing the message parameter will a change take place 120 5 1 3 2 2 tal condition Evaluating Conditions The tal condition statement allows a condition to be tested before rendering the element For example lt p tal condition request message gt There s a message lt p gt lt p tal condition not request message gt No message lt p gt Here the paragraph with the text for a message will be rendered only if the request variable has an attribute and it resolves to true ie the length of message is greater than zero Being able to test for a condition is pointless if the opposite condition can t be tested for this is what the not expression allows The not prefix inverts the statement so not request message resolves to true if the request variable message resolves to false ie the length of message is zero In this case the request variable message will still need to exist In TAL the following evaluates to false The number zero Any float or complex that evaluates to zero for example 0 0 Strings of zero
430. or even crash Netscape This wouldn t be evident using ab which gives you a more independent number with which to work 14 1 2 2 Lies Damned Lies and Benchmark Numbers At this point you may be concerned about these numbers They seem to indicate a very slow site In these examples my machine is a Toshiba laptop with 1 8 gigahertz GHz Celeron processor 256 megabytes MB of Random Access Memory RAM Red Hat Linux 9 0 and a beta version of Plone 2 Furthermore Plone is running in debug mode at the same time as KDE OpenOffice org Instant Messenger and several other development tools including the actual benchmarking tool This means Plone is nowhere near optimized or running in an ideal environment A similar test on a faster server yielded results around 20 requests per second The key point is that creating an objective number for site performance allows you to measure the success of your optimizations Developers can perform tweaks and then test again to compare the before and after numbers If it s possible you should run performance tests against a machine as similar to the production server as possible to get sensible numbers For this chapter it isn t important that a site can produce X requests per second instead it s important that a change be able to produce a significant increase in performance Also remember that numbers about how fast a certain part of your site is are pretty meaning less in isolation
431. or example if you installed using the Windows installer download the new installer and run the install again If you installed from source or a Debian package repeat those steps The upgrade steps are as follows 1 Download the relevant upgrade 399 2 Stop Plone 3 Back up as described previously 4 Install the upgrade 5 Start Plone At this point I recommend actually starting Plone in debug mode On Windows you can do this by selecting Start Plone Plone Debug On Linux you can do this using the runzope script inside the bin directory of your instance home like so bin runzope X debug mode on By running this in debug mode you ll directly see any errors that may have occurred during the upgrade to the new version If you re happy with this you can now proceed onto the next step migration For each Plone site you have access the ZMI and access the portal_migration tool in your Plone site It will have a bright red exclamation mark next to it indicating that the site isn t The migration will attempt to make those changes for you Until you run this migration it s possible that your Plone site may be broken Depending upon what needs to be done in the migration this may take some time To perform a migration follow these steps 1 From portal_migration click the Migrate tab 2 Click the upgrade button This may take some time especially on large sites or if a large upgrade is necessary 3 The
432. orkflow is logic defined by the organization s business rules and it describes a system for managing the content Historically there has been a difference between document management systems and CMSs but mostly these two systems have converged The essential difference is the items being managed it s often considered that content is any unit of information and a document refers to something that s created and edited by humans using software such as Microsoft Office Take for example a book A book contains many units of data and may require management slightly different from that required by content However in most cases this is a small difference and products such as Plone are able to manage the small units of a larger piece of content and reassemble them With the ubiquitousness of the Web many CMSs are now classified as Web CMSs either be cause they have a Web based interface or because they focus on a Web based delivery system over the Internet or an intranet Plone provides a Web management interface and Web based delivery system The following is one definition of a CMS http www contentmanager eu com history htm A CMS is a tool that enables a variety of centralized technical and decentralized nontechnical staff to create edit manage and finally publish a variety of content such as text graphics video and so on whilst being constrained by a centralized set of rules process and workflows that ensure a coherent
433. ormer contains It s pretty simple to get an object now by going through this catalog All you have to do is search the catalog for your object For example the following Script Python object can pull any registered object provided you know its UID paramaters objectId results context uid_catalog UID objectId return results 0 getObject But where this really is useful is in references between existing objects Say you want to reference one or more separate images with your article These images could be images up loaded by other users at another date perhaps part of an image database If those images are Archetypes objects then you could add a field to your article schema that reads as follows ReferenceField images allowed_types Archetype Images multivalued 1 The user will now get a drop down box of all the Archetype Image objects and be able to choose them Behind the scenes it s making a reference of that object s UID through the catalog You ll find an excellent example on references in a product called ACME in the Archetypes CVS repository at http sfnet projects archetypes 13 1 3 2 Altering Widgets A commonly asked question is why does this widget do this Another is why does this widget look like this Often the answer is something like Because it does now go and write your own Since widgets are what the client sees these requirements are often client driven All the widgets are represented
434. orming to standard Python variable rules for ex ample description user_name or cof fee_bag 6 For read only r for write only w for read and write rw True or False Any method name for example spe cialSetMethod See Overriding Default Methods later in this chapter True or False True or False True or False Any validator see the Validations of In put section later List of strings for example Green Red Blue Any valid storage object such as At tributeStorage or SQLStorage You can find these in the Archetypes Application Programming Interface API For more information see the Storing Your Con tent in a SQL Database section later in this database 369 widgetfhe widget that will be used to display this Any widget object field Now that I ve covered the default fields and attributes it s time to move onto the actual widgets that are available 13 1 1 2 3 Widgets A widget contains the information about how the object will be represented visu ally The view of an attribute displayed is often closely related to the type of the attribute however you have options for the display a string could be selected in many ways Given the set of widgets the widget object can be almost anything You can import any of the widgets from the Archetypes public module For example from Products Archetypes public import BooleanWidget All widgets are insta
435. ote a few moments ago That s one simple line because the module is in the same package The line to import the functions is as follows from source import generate_html list_generators Second you ll need a PloneSilverCity class that allows you to encapsulate the functionality you need You need to worry about the following four attributes on this class e id This stores the unique ID of this instance of the PloneSilverCity class e raw This stores the raw source code in the class e _raw_as html This stores the source code after it has been lexed into HTML e raw_language This stores the language of this source code For each of these attributes you ll write an accessor which is a function that returns the value of that attribute so that rather than calling the attribute you call the accessor function An example accessor function is getLanguage which returns the value of the language Writing an accessor is usually a good idea especially because you ll apply security to these accessor methods later In Zope any method or attribute that begins within an underscore isn t available to Web based methods such as page templates or Script Python objects A good practice is to start all your attributes with an underscore and then put security on the accessing method Listing 12 1 shows the basic class Listing 12 1 The Basic Python Class class PloneSilverCity def __init__ self id self id id self _raw self _raw_as_h
436. ou give different local roles on an object in Plone to users or groups If you ve got a piece of content you ve added to a Plone site and you want another person to be able to edit it then you need to give them more permissions for that one object This is called a local role and it allows you to give a user expanded rights on an item If I write a document in Plone I become the owner of that document and gain certain rights If I wanted to collaborate on this document with my colleague Ralph prior to publishing then I need to give Ralph more permissions so he can edit that document To do this I go to the Sharing tab and give Ralph more permissions NOTE You can assign local roles on a folder or document basis If you give users a local role on a folder then they get that local role for every object in that folder The Sharing tab appears only in places where you have the rights to alter sharing your folder being one such place Click my folder and then click sharing Figure 9 1 shows the form for the Sharing tab It has three main components you can assign a user to have a local role on this object you can assign a group to have a local role on this object and you can see who has certain roles already 235 contents inc properties Assign local roles to folder Chapters 4 local role is a way of allowing other users into some or all of your folders These users can edit item et cetera depending on what permissions you giv
437. overed some of the core components of Plone s user interface including Script Python objects and page templates It s now time to cover exactly how you construct the look and feel of a Plone site This chapter includes the objects from previous chapters and introduces some new ones To start Ill cover all the key definitions and Plone elements that comprise a site Pll define terms you may have already heard of such as skins and layers Then IIl cover customizing the Plone user interface concentrating on the power that Cascading Style Sheets CSS bring to the site developer Pll run through the key variables and show how you can change them I ll then revisit the customization of logos and skin elements pulling together all the topics I ve briefly covered over the past three chapters Then I ll show how to make a new skin and explain the techniques for developing all this on the file system Finally Pll finish this chapter with an example site Specifically Pl show the Maestro site which was used by NASA to distribute data about the Mars rovers This is a high traffic Web site built in Plone and the skin provides an excellent case study for customizing a site This real life example of how you can customize and modify a Plone site will enable you to do the same on your own 7 1 1 Introducing Plone Skins When a document displays in Plone the content of that document displays in the now familiar Plone green and blue interface
438. ovides an examples links and errata f Body text Normal 7 l 2lsl 242 F eS EEE All the software mentioned in the book is linked to in the software sec For a chapter by chapter listing of code and errata s check out the ch r Upload contents optional Uploaded files will replace the body text entered above m Figure 10 12 Editing a document in Epoz 10 1 4 5 2 External Editor External Editor is a tool you can use on all sorts of Plone content templates and code It allows you to edit Plone objects stored on a Plone site locally in programs of your choice For example you can edit a Microsoft Word document stored on your Plone site locally in Microsoft Word When you save the document its automatically sent to Plone External Editor comes with the Plone installer packages and sets up automatically on the server The application is unusual in that it has two components one for the server and one for each client that wants to use the product 299 Installing the server product isn t necessary if you used an installer to install your Plone site If this isn t the case the server side product is available at http zope org Members Caseman ExternalEditor Install the product in the standard way I discussed at the beginning of this chapter and then restart your Zope Then in Plone log in as the administrator click plone setup and then select Portal Configu ration Select the Enable External Editor opti
439. p Permissions A fundamental concept when dealing with Web sites is that everything and everybody is un trusted Before any property is accessed or any method is called you must first check if the party wanting to perform an action is allowed to do so In most systems three permissions exist the permission to add an item the permission to delete an item and the permission to edit an item One other permission applies to Plone the right to view an item through the Web or other protocol The containing folder handles deleting which is a permission handed out in Plone to the containing folder If you can delete anything in the folder you can then also delete the content type you re adding here This leaves you with three permissions to worry about It s normal to use the ones that come with the CMFCore package Add portal content Modify portal content and View Returning to the config file you can add the permissions you need like so from Products CMFCore import CMFCorePermissions add_permission CMFCorePermissions AddPortalContent edit_permission CMFCorePermissions ModifyPortalContent view_permission CMFCorePermissions View This means the add_permission variable references the permission imported from CMFCorePer missions There s nothing magical about the permissions each permission is just a string Us ing the built in permission is convenient and understandable for your users Plone is already configured to allow the
440. page see Figure 4 18 The default pages are index_html index html index htm and FrontPage You set the list of pages in portal_properties site_properties default_page property one name per line When the default page is looked for Plone will look for each page in that list starting with the first until it finds one that matches Further if you d like to change the value for a folder only you can access the folder through the ZMI click the properties tab and then add a new list property called default_page 93 M invalid_ids M default_page index asp index_html index html index htm FrontPage search_results_description_length jg int M ellipsis string Save Changes Delete To add a new property enter a name type and value for the new property and click the Add b Name Type string gt Yalue Add Figure 4 18 Making index asp the first default page 4 1 3 7 How Can You Make the News Items List the Default Page Exactly how this works involves knowing the underlying machinery a little too much For now go to your portal root and click Properties Then you need to go to the bottom of the page complete the add new property form with the following information and then click the Add button For the Name field default_page For the Value field news For the Type field lines Now return to your Plone site Instead of the standard home page you ll see the news page The news tab will still show
441. page you ll see a new review list when you first log in This is a list of the items that have been submitted for review and need reviewing by you or another reviewer see Figure 3 17 review list Plone 2 released 2004 04 06 Plone at OSCON 2004 04 08 54 Figure 3 17 The review list The review list will appear on the right when you log in as a user with the review role and there are items to review In my case I logged in as admin which was the user created during my install process You can tell you re logged in because your name will appear in the member bar The review list gives a list of items to review in this case you need to review the test document Click the document to open the item At this point you essentially have the following choices for this item Reject it Reject it by selecting Reject from the drop down choices This will move the content back into the visible state and assumes that as a reviewer you re un happy with it Usually you may want to click the Advanced option to open the comments form and add some comments stating why you re rejecting it Approve it Approve it by selecting Publish this will change the content into the published state This will make the content publicly available Do nothing Leave it by doing nothing This leaves the content in limbo but some times happens when you need to check information or talk to others Eventually you should return to do something with this conten
442. pe cmf zope cmfcalendar zope cmfcore zope cmfdefault zope cmfplone zope cmftopic zope cmfworkflow zope formulator zopectl O upgraded 11 newly installed O to remove and 49 not upgraded Need to get 4743kB of archives After unpacking 24 9MB of additional disk space will be used Do you want to continue Y n Press Y to continue and install all the required packages To start and stop Zope an install script has been created in the init d directory called zope To start Plone run the following etc init d zope start The Debian installer starts Zope on the nonstandard port 9673 Since the Debian installer is quite unusual it s recommended that you read the documentation for the packages at ust share doc zope and usr share doc zope cmfplone 2 1 3 Installing from Source As an alternative to using an installer or package you can install from the source tarball If you re familiar with installing from source it s actually rather simple but does require famil iarity with basic tools such as tar The following sections demonstrate how to install it on Linux This installation assumes you re familiar with basic operations such as untarring files and moving files This requires a working Zope installation NOTE To install Zope see the Zope installation instructions in the doc INSTALL txt file of your Zope download For more information see http zope org Documentation Books ZopeBook 2_6Edition InstallingZope stx Follow
443. pe org Products You can find more information on how to check out code at http dev zope org CVS ReadOnlyAccess 10 1 2 2 What Is CVS CVS is a system for maintaining control over source code Most development happens in a source code control system such as CVS or one of its many similar competing products such as Subversion Perforce BitKeeper and so on Checking files out of CVS is simple and most Unix and Linux users will be familiar with using CVS from the command line To check out all the products in the collective to your computer this may take a while do the following cvs d pserver anonymous cvs sourceforge net cvsroot collective login Supply a blank password and continue with the following command cvs z3 d pserver anonymous cvs sourceforge net cvsroot collective co Most of the Plone development team using Windows uses TortoiseCVS which hooks directly into the Windows Explorer shell m Explorer you can right click to check in and check out code For more information on TortoiseCVS visit http www tortoisecvs org 275 10 1 2 3 Installing in Zope Once you ve found and downloaded a suitable product you need to install it You ll first need to install it into Zope so that Zope can recognize the new product To do this you need to find the area that contains all the existing products To find the directories go to the control panel in the Zope Management Interface ZMI There you ll see a list of the
444. pen in Word As for the rest well Archetypes has a built in transformation package called Portal Trans forms that handles the transformation of content types This can take a file in a certain format and transform it into HTML which will then be cataloged and the HTML will display to the user in the user interface It does this by using an external transformation process to transform the data and read the results For example if you re using Windows on the server then Por tal Transforms will take the uploaded Word document and start a Component Object Model COM object that transforms it This all happens behind the scenes for you all you have to worry about is ensuring that any requirements for your transforms are installed and operational You can do lots of different types of transforms and there s more than one way to transform the data The OpenOffice org suite provides excellent transformation of Microsoft content so if you re running on a non Microsoft platform this is an excellent way to transform that content I ve also used wvWare http wvware sourceforge net quite successfully as another way of trans forming content All these options are available to you however they aren t trivial to set up Once they re set up of course people usually report getting higher quality transformations than when using a Microsoft server I recommend thinking first about exactly what you want to transform and then taking a
445. perties Variable Name Description logoName The filename of the portal logo fontFamily The font family used for all text that isn t a header fontBaseSize The base font size from which everything is calculated fontColor The main font color backgroundColor The background color linkColor The color used on normal links linkActiveColor The color used on active links linkVisitedColor The color used on visited links borderWidth The width of most borders in Plone borderStyle The style of the border lines usually solid borderStyleAnnotations The style of border lines on comments and so on globalBorderColor The border color used on the main tabs the portlets and so on globalBackgroundColor The background color for the selected tabs portlet headings and so on globalFontColor The color of the font in the tabs and in portlet headings headingFontFamily The font family for h1 h2 h3 h4 h5 and h6 headlines headingFontBaseSize The base size used when calculating the different headline sizes contentViewBorderColor The tabs border color on the Contents tab contentViewBackgroundddlercontent view tabs background color on the Contents tab contentViewFontColor The font color used in the tabs on the Contents tab textTransform Whether to lowercase text in portlets tabs and so on evenRowBackgroundColdrhe background color of even rows in listings oddRowBackgroundColoffhe background color of even rows in listings notifyBorderColor The bord
446. pes when the product is installed into your Plone instance This information will mirror what you saw in earlier where you altered factory type information through the Web Before building the factory information I usually create a configuration file that contains all the repeated variables for the product This file is called config py and in there you put the names of the product the name of its layer in the skins and the name as it will appear to the user like so 335 product_name Source Code plone_product_name PloneSilverCity layer_name silvercity layer_location PloneSilverCity skins Then you can set up the factory type information and use these strings For example the ID will be Source Code since this is shown in Plone to the users The actions section of the type information is a tuple of dictionaries of all the actions that can occur with this object When this factory is loaded into Plone the Actions tab inside the portal_types tool will be populated with this content Each of those actions has a corresponding method template or script that will be called most of these directly correspond to page templates which I discuss later in this section As you know by now an action is something that users can do to an item in the Plone database Thinking of this example application users can do two obvious things to the source code They can view it and see the nicely highlighted code and they can edit the item
447. ple of strings but in this case the example is using the DisplayList class which is a chance to show a different value to the user from what will be put in the form In this case the HTML for ArticleGroups is displayed in an HTML select element like so lt option value headline gt Headline lt option gt lt option value bulletin gt Special Bulletin lt option gt One other unusual insight is the use of globals function this is a Python built in function that contains all the global symbols This calculates the path to the skins directory on the file system so that you can make a file system directory view of the skin for the skins tool The product initialization function init__ py is also much simpler With one new inclusion the process and list type functions look like this from Products Archetypes public import process_types listTypes content_types constructors ftis process_types listTypes PROJECTNAME PROJECTNAME The listTypes function is an Archetypes utility that will return all the types you ve previously registered This is then passed into the process_types function which in turn returns you all 380 the content types constructors and factory type information objects These are all the same items you registered in the Python product it s just that this utility function makes it all a little easier Finally you have the installation function in the Extensions install py This script is now embar
448. ppet of Python that you can write and then call from other templates or through the Web directly Plone actually has a large number of these scripts for performing various key functions A Script Python is halfway between an expression and an external method in terms of power To add a Script Python object go to the ZMI select Script Python from the drop down menu and click Add as shown in Figure 6 2 142 Select type to add Plone Content Plone Site Plone Tool PortalTransforms Tool RAM Cache Manager ReStructuredText Document Script Python Session Data Mana Set Access Rule Site Error Log SiteRoot Figure 6 2 Adding in a Script Python object Give the script an ID such as test_py and then click Add and Edit This will open the edit page for the Script Python object which looks like Figure 6 3 143 Edit Bindings Test Proxy History Script Python at test py Title Parameter List Bound Names context container script traverse_subpath Last Modified 2004 01 03 23 57 Example code Import a standard function and get the HTML request and response objects from Products PythonScripts standard import html quote request container REQUEST RESPONSE request RESPONSE Return a string identifying this script print This is the script meta_type s script getId if script title print s html quote script title print in container absolute
449. prefix and is required For example welcome and not page would return matches for pages that contained welcome but not page e Phrases You can group phrases with double quotes and sig nify several words one after the other For example welcome page matches This welcome page is used to introduce you to the Plone Con tent Management System but not Welcome to the front page of e Not phrase You can specify a phrase with a minus prefix For example welcome welcome page matches all pages with welcome in them but not ones that match the phrase welcome page TIP If you perform a search with no text then no results are returned 322 11 1 2 4 5 Using the Results So you ve got some results now what do you do with them The first thing a lot of people do is look at the results and assume that it s a list of the objects that were cataloged Well it isn t rather it s a series of catalog brains These brains are actually lazy objects that contain the metadata columns defined earlier You can access any of these columns as if it were an attribute For example to print all the IDs of result objects use the following results context portal_catalog searchResults for result in results print result getId return printed In this example getId is the name of a metadata column so it ll display the value for getId that the catalog had for that object If you try to just access a value that do
450. products pi ReportLab This allows you to create Portable Document Format PDF files dynamically with images graphs and other goodies http www reportlab org Windows extensions This gives an interface to all the Win dows Application Programming Interfaces APIs for example it offers the ability to use Component Object Model COM objects http sourceforge net projects pywin32 Pygame This is a framework that allows users to write games in Python People have used it in Plone to get access to the media layer interfaces it provides for creating images or sounds http www pygame org OpenOffice org bindings This provides bindings so that you can do almost anything to OpenOffice org documents even parsing Mi crosoft Office documents for example as you ll see in Chapter 13 http udk openoffice org python python bridge html e mxTidy This package locates and corrects problems in Hyper text Markup Language HTML files including page templates http www egenix com files python mxTidy html These excellent add ons usually have graphical installers for Windows that allow you to step through the installation If you aren t using Windows then the distutils module for Python 272 273 offers a simple command line interface for installing any of these products As ever the real key to installing anything is to read the instructions contained in the download This chapter focuses on installing produ
451. properties form has the following fields which are common to all content types Allow Discussion This lets this document be discussed by users who have the right to do so If the value is left as default it ll use the sitewide policy for that content type Keywords Each item can have keywords assigned to it to enable grouping and sorting of the items For example an article about recent events in politics may have the keywords politics and prime minister Keywords are flexible and you can use any keyword from the given list By default there are no keywords in the Plone system site administrators may add new keywords so that other users can select them Effective Date The effective date is the first day a piece of content should be available You can specify this date by entering the values in the form or clicking the little calendar icon which opens a calendar and picking a date see Figure 3 14 Effective Date The date when the item will become visible Expiration Toda The date wt pi wk Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat Sun 2003 49 1 2 3 4 5 6 Fi 50 3 9 10 11 12 13 14 Format 5i 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 52 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 this 53 29 30 31 Select date ally make the item invisible for others at the given date The MIME t does just leave it Figure 3 14 Entering an effective date Expiration Date The expiration date is the last day a piece of content should be available Usually the Effect
452. quickinstaller tool contained inside Zope For a look at what this product actually does skip to the Integrating Plone with the File System section 282 10 1 3 Using a Different Web Server If you re in an organization that already serves Web sites then you ll likely have a Web server platform that you use Virtual hosting is the ability to server multiple Web sites on one server differentiating sites based upon their Internet Protocol IP address or name It allows one initial server such as Apache to pass requests to one or more Plone instances Virtual hosting is usually achieved by proxying although using a proxy server is a desirable approach with Plone no matter how many sites are hosted A proxy server sits between a client and a server and forwards requests from the client and the server A proxy server should be transparent to the user In Chapter 14 Pll show you how you can use proxy servers to dramatically increase Plone s performance Although Plone uses Zope s underlying Web server ZServer works just fine it s not a complete industry strength Web server that should be exposed to the world The server has several issues regarding possible Denial of Service DOS attacks however these are obscure and hard to find items within ZServer No known attacks have been performed against ZServer that exploit these issues but perhaps this is because of its relative obscurity in the real world ZServer isn t specificall
453. r stand some basic techniques for finding the elements you want to alter Bear in mind at which level you want to customize the element As noted earlier you have three levels for rendering an object If you want to change the visual representation or its placement then the chances are that you can change the CSS and do no further work If CSS isn t sufficient then your next best bet is to search through the templates For example suppose you want to change the text that appears on the page when a user logs in or you want Z admin 188 to change the entire page In this example you ll alter the page shown in Figure 7 10 to make it a script that does something unusual Plone Book Login successful Microsoft Internet Explorer File Edit Yiew Favorites Tools Help Back gt tat Search Favorites Media By amp x Address http igloin 8080 Plone login_success portal_status_message Welcome 21 Yout are now logged in home software chapters feedback _Badmin you are here home navigation Home 3 Chapters 3 Software You are now logged in Notice that the top right bar has changed It now contains several persi settings and your personal area They will remain as long as you are loc You might want to head over to and add some content or set up your F Plone and its visual design is Copyright 2000 2004 by Alexander Limi Alan secrionlg sos Done Figure 7 10 The
454. r Plone directly from the file system by going to Windows Explorer as shown in Figure 10 11 1 x Software File Edit View Favorites Tools Help a Back QSsearch Pyrolders 6 US E X A Ee Address E x Software Go Folders x Name 2 Size type Mie lag 314 Floppy 4 File Folder 1 4 200 H E DISKIPARTOL C 1KB File 1 3 200 H E DISKIPARTO2 D 1KB File 1 3 200 E Compact Disc E 1KB File 1 4 200 E amp Compact Disc F H gt docs on monty H Plone Book on Webdrive andy x i a acl_users a Chapters H Plone H portal_actions H portal_catalog H portal_controlpanel 2 portal_properties aa portal_quickinstaller i portal_skins 4 portal_types i E portal_workflow Software iG Software Control Panel 4 object s Disk Free space 18 6 GB 738 bytes SE Local intranet a Figure 10 11 Accessing your Plone contents using WebDrive For Unix you can get Cadaver http www webdav org cadaver which is a full featured command line client After installing Cadaver you can connect to a Plone site from the com mand line For example cadaver http 192 168 2 1 8080 Members Plone 10 1 4 5 Editing Content with Rich Editors Editing content in a text area is a really bad way to force users to write and edit content something I ve commented on several times Some editors provide a solution for this 297
455. r this product you simply copy the CSS out of the SilverCity product and place it in the skins directory with the name silvercity css These two items are now done Next you actually have to write the view and edit pages Pre viously I discussed how this is similar to a document so when you re looking for view and edit pages the best place to look is the pages for a document Those pages are document_view pt and document_edit_form cpt and are located in the CMFPlone skins plone_content directory 12 1 1 7 1 Making the View Page To alter the view page you take the view page for a document copy it into your product s skins directory and rename it to silvercity_view pt There s no point in re creating the entire page when the view page is so similar all you need to do is to make two minor changes As mentioned SilverCity spits out HTML where all the code has been highlighted using CSS and you have a custom style sheet You need to make sure that the view page inserts that CSS and the main template has a slot for CSS called css_ slot To put the custom CSS file into that slot you just have to provide a value for it For example lt metal cssslot fill slot css_slot gt lt link rel stylesheet href tal attributes href string portal_url silvercity css gt lt metal cssslot gt Here you re referencing a CSS file called silvercity css That file is located in the skins directory and you ll be accessing it from the s
456. r when they click the tool in the ZMI such as giving an example of how to use the product For this you ll alter the ZMI so that you can display something Specifically you write a page template that does what you want it to do In this example this is a simple page template that hooks into the ZMI The ZMI is an unsophisticated user interface that just spits back Web pages to the user so no fancy macros or slots render the page All you need to do is write a HTML and add the following lt span tal replace structure here manage_tabs gt This one tal replace function gets the management tabs and makes them appear at the top of the page My ZMI page loops through the two methods of the plone_stats tool and spits out the results for the user as shown in Listing 12 14 Listing 12 14 A Page to Show in the Management Interface lt html gt lt body gt lt span tal replace structure here manage_tabs gt lt p gt Statistics for this Plone site lt p gt lt h3 gt Content Types lt h3 gt lt span tal define numbers here getContentTypes gt lt p gt Total count lt i tal replace numbers total gt lt br gt 358 Content types by type lt p gt lt span tal repeat type python numbers bytype keys gt lt ul gt lt li gt lt span tal replace type gt lt i tal replace python numbers bytype type gt lt li gt lt ul gt lt span gt lt p gt Content types by state lt
457. raries and built those In my case the tested version was 2 0 0pre05 1 i386 rpm Make sure you use the same Python interpreter you re using to run Plone After you ve gone through those particular hoops you need to make sure the Idap so module is importable by Python The easiest way to test this is to run the following python c import _ldap 270 If you get no error messages then it imported correctly If you do get er rors then you ll have to retrace your steps Then go and get LDAPUserFolder from http www dataflake org software Idapuserfolder The tested version was 2 1 beta 2 Down load the file untar it and move it into the Products directory of your Zope installation For example tar zxf LDAPUserFolder 2_1beta2 tgz mv LDAPUserFolder var zope Products Now restart Plone go to the control panel and ensure that it shows up correctly in the Products page of the control panel I provide more details on this in Chapter 10 Next in Plone you should be able to click acl_users click Sources and then scroll down to the Users source 1 option Then select LDAPUserFolder and check I m sure as shown in Figure 9 17 This will create a new user folder and replace the existing one so make sure you aremt about to lose anything critical In fact now is a good time to do a backup Then click OK Overview Sources Groups Users Audit Contents Security Group User Folder at Plone acl users You are currently run
458. rating system and the tools available The quickest way to find this file in Linux is to go to your CMFPlone directory and do the following cd skins find name login_success print plone_forms login_success pt On Windows open the CMFPlone folder in Windows Explorer and click the Search tab Then enter the name of the file as login_success and click Search This should give you a list of likely files This search should provide the result CMFPlone plone_forms login_success pt If you per form the same search in the ZMI you click portal_skins click plone_forms and then click login_success 7 1 2 13 Searching for a Piece of Text A rather crude approach that s somewhat successful is to do a full text search on the code to find the element that renders the page For example looking at the page in Figure 7 12 you can see that it contains the text Notice that the top The simplest way to find the bit that renders that text is to search for it 191 Contents Properties View Security Undo Owner Plone Skins Tool at Plone portal skins Displaying items 1 1 of 1 items matching your query You can revise your search terms below plone_forms login_success Login successful Find objects of type Archetypes Tool Archetypes Content BTreeFolder2 xl with ids DOO O containing Notice thatthe top modified before Search only in this folder Search all subfolders Find Advanced Fi
459. rding Plone documentation news discussions and mailing lists and you will also be able to download the latest release of Plone to try it out yourself Want to experience Plone before downloading Create an account on demo plone org and see the software from a user s perspective Plone is built on top of the open source application server Zope and tt Content Management Framework which have thousands of developer supporting it Plone is ideal as an intranet and extranet server as a document publish server and as a groupware tool for collaboration between separately loc versatile software nrodurt like Blane can he used in a myriad of waws Ir 1 1 1 What Is a Content Management System One simple definition for a Content Management System CMS is that it s a system for man aging content This is a rather unhelpful definition so Pll break it down into smaller parts for a fuller explanation ll start with a broad definition of content Content is a unit of data with some extra information attached to it That piece of data could be a Web page information about an upcoming event a Microsoft Word document an image a movie clip or any piece of data that has meaning to the organization deploying the system All these items are called content and they all share similar attributes such as the need to be added or edited by certain users and be published in various ways A system called workflow controls these attributes W
460. re calculated This gives a total set of roles that a user may have 243 9 1 2 User Registration Tools Before users are members of your site they must register with your site Users can register themselves quite easily by clicking the join link in the top right corner of a Plone site I covered this in detail at the beginning of Chapter 3 where I showed you how users can join and register for a site The registration process for users is actually pretty straightforward but quite a few options are available This process is controlled by three key tools portal_registration portal_memberdata and portal_membership The following sections present these three tools now 9 1 2 1 Portal Registration The portal_registration tool is an action provider and provides one key action in Plone joining Clicking this link will open the join form By default any user anonymous included that hasn t already logged in can click this link to join When users register using the join form they ll get two simple options for a Plone site to either validate e mail or not validate it The only true way to validate an e mail is to send an e mail to the address and see if an appropriate response is returned By default e mail validation is turned off that is when a user registers by default they provide their name e mail and password in Plone They can then log in and use the site as usual This is the form you ve seen in Chapter 3 If e mail valid
461. re it finds the right_slots value and uses that Since the value of right_slot in the Members folder is empty whenever you re viewing content located in Members the right slot will be empty By adding and removing properties from folders through the ZMI site administrators can cus tomize exactly what portlets appear on their sites The properties tab is fortunately reasonably straightforward You just select the item in the ZMI and then click Properties To add a left or right slots property use the add form at the bottom of the form and ensure that the property type is list 4 1 3 2 Altering the Navigation Portlet Of all the portlets covered probably the most useful and the most asked about is the navigation portlet Specifically how can you alter the navigation portlet and the way that it s displayed The navigation portlet is list of current folders and documents in the navigation slot You can alter the navigation slot by changing the code however you can make many changes through the ZMI The biggest thing to remember is that only published objects will be shown in the navigation tree to members and anonymous users To alter the navigation tree properties click portal_properties and then click navtree_properties in the ZMI The following is an abridged list of the options available e showMyUserFolderOnly This displays only the user folder of the user logged in So when the Members folder is being shown in the navigation it won
462. re utils import UniqueObject getToolByName The Simpleltem class is the default base class for a simple not a folder object in Zope Actually all content types inherit from a class that somewhere in its class hierarchy inherits from SimpleItem it s just that you don t need all the extra attributes those other classes provide UniqueObject ensures that there will be one and only one instance of this object inside your Plone site and that it can t be renamed or moved around This means your object will always be available Next you import the variables from the config file as usual By assigning the ID of your object you ensure that the tool will have the ID of whatever unique_id is in the config file in this 357 case plone_stats The two base classes for the tool are the UniqueObject and SimplelItem classes which are the minimum it needs For example from config import view_permission product_name unique_id class Stats UniqueObject SimpleItem Prints out statistics for a Plone site meta_type product_name id unique_id Next you need to set up the security and again you ll use the ClassSecurityInfo class to set explicit permissions on the methods For example security ClassSecurityInfo security declareProtected view_permission getContentTypes def getContentTypes self 12 1 3 Adding Some User Interface Elements The main code is complete so itd be nice to show some response to the use
463. read the installation instructions If you see anything about install in the standard CMF way or in your Plone instance make an external method then you need to complete this step Fortunately you can actually disregard the instructions to make an external method because Plone has a much simpler way to do this In Plone click plone setup and then click Add Remove Products You ll see a list of products that are installed on your server and that need configuring in Plone Simply click the check box next to the product in this case CMFExternalFile and click install as shown in Figure 10 4 281 home software chapters feedback Z admin you are here home navigation Add Remove Products Home a Up to Plone Setup C3 Chapters Ca Software This is the Add on Products install section you can add and remove p Products available for install O amp Archetypes 1 2 2 final Product Description O amp PortalTransforms 1 0 1 O amp ExcelExample gt install Installed products D amp PloneBookExamples B Install log uninstall Figure 10 4 A list of products available to the user Just like that the product will be installed Well it may be if there s an error then it wont show up in the installed products list You may be able to solve the problem by reading the log so click the link next to the name of the product to get a log This installation is a service provided by the portal_
464. ready registered It could be that someone has registered another product of the same name For this you ll call the manage_addTypeInformation method as shown in Listing 12 9 Listing 12 9 Remainder of the Installation Function out typesTool getToolByName self portal_types skinsTool getToolByName self portal_skins if id not in typesTool objectIds typesTool manage_addTypeInformation add_meta_type factory_type_information meta_type id factory_type_information id out append Registered with the types tool else out append Object 4s already existed in the types tool id Next you need to add an FSDV to the skins directory Again the first thing you check is that you don t already have one then you add the directory view with the following if skinname not in skinsTool objectIds createDirectoryView skinsTool skinlocation skinname out append Added 4s directory view to portal_skins skinname Finally you loop through all the skins and add your new FSDV to each of the skins This is a generic function each skin is listed as string with each layer separated by commas All you have to do is split the string up and insert your new skin after the layer named custom as shown in Listing 12 10 Listing 12 10 Setting the Skin in the Installation Method 349 skins skinsTool getSkinSelections for skin in skins path skinsTool getSkinPath skin pa
465. reenable this tab if you want as covered in Chapter 4 The advanced search form enables a user to query content using a number of attributes including title keywords description review state creation date content type and even author as well as the search text as used in the quick search available from the top right corner as shown in Figure 3 29 3 News Items a Downloads Advanced search for content _ 3 Documentation 3 Development B Plone Keyword This search form enables you to find content on the site by specifying one or more search sabe dh Manager 0 2 released Events rma r March 14 Ga Members Remember that you can use the quick search anytime it s normally good enough this search Member form is just if you want to be more specific Plone 2 0 tarball Workspaces available Plone Search Terms March 12 3 Groups Search Text B Objectis free SEERNE For a simple text search enter your search term e found by hosting available in ee combining them with AND and OR The text in ved with items contents Chinese You can submit bug title and description marca reports and feature Plon past basal to the Plone B mxmDynamicPage 2 0 Plone content Title type for dynamic lists We currently hast Return items matching this title released development of Plone March 11 at SourceForge Keywords More There is also a Development Team area available for the Plone Developers Site admins
466. retty straightforward thanks to excellent work by many developers In the process of setting this up I found that the hardest part was building the software and setting up the integration between systems CAUTION In the next section you ll be playing around with the acl_users folders inside a Plone site Never delete or alter the acl_users folder in the root of your Zope instance If you do that and your user folder breaks for some reason the server goes down for example your entire site will be blocked and you ll no longer be able to get any access even as an administrator Make sure you change only the user folder in the Plone site 9 1 5 2 1 Using LDAP First you need to set up an LDAP server or something that communicates with LDAP such as Active Directory although apparently Active Directory has a few of quirks In this example I installed openLDAP on my Red Hat server and on my Windows server For Windows you ll find a precompiled version at http www zope org Members volkerw LdapWin32 I tested it for Python 2 3 Download and unzip the file and then place the contents inside c Program FilesPlonePythonlibsite packages Then install LDAPUserFolder On Linux you can find the openLDAP downloads at http www openldap org The tested version includes the RPMs 2 0 27 2 8 0 and 2 0 27 2 8 0 After building this by following the instructions I went to http python ldap sourceforge net downloaded the appropriate Python LDAP lib
467. return to the PloneSilverCity py module and complete the task of turning this into a Plone product At the start of the module you ll create the import statements These import statements pull various Plone initialization requirements from various locations as follows from Globals import InitializeClass from AccessControl import ClassSecurityInfo from Products CMFDefault DublinCore import DefaultDublinCoreImpl from Products CMFCore PortalContent import PortalContent These imports provide the base functionality for the product and are common across most content types The definitions of imports are as follows InitializeClass This function initializes the class and applies all the security decla rations that it ll have You specify those security declarations by using the ClassSe curityInfo class ClassSecurityInfo This class provides a series of security methods that will allow you to restrict access to methods of the content type DefaultDublinCoreImpl This class provides an implementation of Dublin Core metadata Chapter 11 covered Dublin Core this gives an object all the Dublin Core attributes and methods to access them such as Title Description Creator and so on PortalContent This provides the base class for all content in a Plone site and some of the key attributes it needs Using this base class gives the object a whole host of functionality such as making the object persist inside the database cataloging the object for
468. rkflow is applied As an example the default for the Portal Site type is blank You really don t want to try transitioning the Plone site itself just the objects in it If the value is Default the default workflow at the bottom of the page is applied to that content type In Figure 8 4 for topic and folders the folder_workflow workflow is used and for all other content types plone_workflow 214 is applied The names of the workflow refer to the name of workflow objects imported or created inside the workflow tool For more information on the workflows available select the Contents tab This opens a list of workflows that have been loaded into the system as shown in Figure 8 5 Workflows Overview Contents View Properties Plone Workflow Tool at Plone portal_ workflow Type Name Size E iy folder_workflow Folder Workflow Plone m amp plone_workflow Default Workflow Plone Rename cut Copy Delete Import Export Select All Figure 8 5 Workflows available You can add workflows by clicking the Add Workflow button This opens a list of the workflows available to create a workflow select a workflow type and enter a workflow name To create workflow that s empty but that s configurable through the Web select dc_workflow and enter an appropriate name for example enter my_workflow 8 1 3 2 Editing a Workflow From the Contents tab you can click a workflow to access the management screens for that
469. rmission so it can be a little difficult to define exactly what a permission lets you do Table 9 1 describes some of the key permissions and what they do Table 9 1 Common Plone Permissions Permission Description Access contents information This permission allows access to an object without neces sarily viewing the object For example a user may want to see the object s title in a list of results even though the user can t view the contents of that file Add There are numerous add permissions each relating to the type of object a user may like to add For a normal Plone site all the permissions are grouped together as Add portal content Add portal member This gives the ability to join a Plone site and get a user ac count Copy or Move This gives the right to copy or move an object Although users may have this right they still need to have the permis sion to paste the object into a destination Delete objects This gives the right to delete an object In standard Zope this permission is checked on the folder on Plone this check is made on each object List folder contents This gets a list of the contents of a folder this doesn t check if you have right to view the actual object listed 254 Permission Description List portal members This gives the right to see a list of members in the site and search through the members Modify portal content This is a catch all permission for any changes to an object
470. roducing Workflow Expressions The following are some useful examples of workflow expressions that can be used in various places 225 To get the comments or an empty string with this transition use the following python state_change kwargs get comment To obtain the title of the folder that the object is in use this container Title To test if the old state is review state use this python state_change old_state review To get the user executing this transition use this user getId So if you wanted to track who the last user to transition an object was you could add a last user variable into the workflow You do this by going to the workflow and clicking the Variables tab Then add the variable last_user If you set the Default expr variable to user getId each time the object changed that value would be stored for you 8 1 4 2 Using Workflow to Track Changes For one particular application a client of mine wanted to keep track of every time an item was edited and any reasons for that edit so that when auditing the item later there would be a comment for each change Thanks to workflow this was quite easy to achieve In this case the workflow had only one state but actually this will work for almost any work flow To this one workflow a transition was added called edit That transition didn t actually change the object s state the destination state for that transition was Remain in state mean
471. rol_Panel Control Pa C Plone Portal rC aclusers User Folder Plone Content m e gt browser_id_manager BrowPlone Site Manager Plone Tool C error_log PlonePopoll Tool 1 20 C index_html 1 Kb 2003 09 09 11 20 gt session_data_manager Session Data 2003 09 09 11 20 Manager C standard_error_message 1Kb 2003 09 09 11 20 xl Figure 5 1 Selecting the Page Template option 113 Add Page Template Page Templates allow you to use simple HTML or XML attributes to create dynamic templates You may choose to upload the template text from a local file by typing the file name or using the browse button Id hes Fite Browse Add and Edit Figure 5 2 Adding a page template Enter test for the page template s ID Then click the Add and Edit button which takes you to management screen see Figure 5 3 You can then edit this template through the Web by using the text area and clicking Save Changes to commit your changes 1 Page Template at test Help ji Content feam rte O ae texdyhtml Last Browse HTML source Modified 2003 09 16 10 07 AM I Expand macros when editing lt html gt lt head gt lt title tal content template title gt The title lt title gt lt head gt lt body gt I lt h2 gt lt span tal replace here title or_id gt content title or idm lt span tal condition template title tal replace template title gt optional template tit d 4 rf Save Changes Taller
472. roups Some of the key concepts in Plone are users roles and groups Before I show you how to edit these I ll cover in more detail exactly what these are 232 233 9 1 1 1 1 Users Each person visiting a Plone site is referred to as a user The user may or may not be authen ticated by Plone and users who are not authenticated are called anonymous users Users who are authenticated are logged into an existing user account If they don t have an account then usually they can create their own account Anonymous users are the lowest level of users in that they usually have the most restrictions Once users log in they gain the roles their accounts give them A user is identified by a short identifier for example andym By default no users are created for you in Plone except for the one added to Zope by the installer to give you administrator access The name of that user is whatever you set up in the installer usually admin 9 1 1 1 2 Roles A Plone site has a series of roles a role is a logical categorization of users Instead of setting every user s permissions individually each role is assigned permissions individually Every user can be assigned zero to many roles for example a user can be a member and a manager Each role is identified by a simple name for example Member A Plone site has five predefined roles split into two groups assignable roles and not assignable roles Assignable roles are roles you can giv
473. rs with the key of email_address and a message This key is used in the page template to see if an error occurred on that particular field 6 1 4 2 3 Processing the Script This example has a simple e mail script that gets the values which are already validated and forms an e mail out of them This is a Controller Python Script object it s just like a standard Script Python object except that it has a state variable and like the Controller Page Template you can give it actions for when it succeeds mhost context MailHost emailAddress context REQUEST get email_address administratorEmailAddress context email_from_address 162 comments context REQUEST get comments the message format s will be filled in from data message From s To 4s Subject Website Feedback us URL Js wou format the message message message emailAddress administratorEmailAddress comments context absolute_url mhost send message You ve now seen a simple script for sending e mail This is a common script that you ll see again and again Basically the MailHost object in Plone will take an e mail as a string as long as it conforms to the Request for Comment RFC specification for e mail that has From and To addresses In this e mail you take the administrator address you specified in the portal setup and send the e mail to that person The only extra part in this script is the additio
474. rtal wrapper HTML element is actually just below the body and it sets the width for the entire page body The code for this is as follows visual portal wrapper width 680px margin 1em auto 0 auto This sets the width for all the pages to be a fixed width which is fine as long as you make sure the width is smaller than the industry standard 800 pixel width No matter how big the user makes the browser window the main part of the page will never grow beyond those 680 pixels ensuring it matches nicely with the image Probably the other obvious changes are the tabs at the top of the page which are now images instead of just the standard Plone boxes Three images make up the tabs at the top of the page a spacer between tab the left part of the tab and the right part of the tab By putting these three images together you get the effect of the tab Figure 7 15 shows these three images 203 Figure 7 15 The three images that combine to make the tab For editing the CSS remember that each of the tabs is really a list item containing a link inside an element with the ID portal globalnav To set up the background spacer between each tab the skin first sets the background for the entire element Again note that by setting the height of the image to 21 pixels the same size as the image you ve ensured that there s the appropriate space for the image The code is as follows portal globalnav background url http m
475. rver and then I went to content type registry and made a new rule based on extension that maps image jpeg to the photo content type I then moved the rule up above the existing rule for images Then all I had to do was drag and drop the photographs into my FTP client and they were automatically loaded into Plone thumbnailed and displayed 314 11 1 2 Searching and Categorizing Content You ve seen how you can search for content in Plone but Pll now go into detail and show how the underlying categorization and searching of content occurs The main tool that stores all this information is a tool called the portal_catalog which is a slightly different and extended version of the underlying ZCatalog tool You ll find an excellent online reference to the ZCatalog at http zope org Documentation Books ZopeBook 2_6Edition SearchingZCatalog stx The catalog provides three key elements to a Plone site It creates indexes of content it holds metadata about the content in the index and it provides a search interface to quickly examine the content of your Plone site Of all the different objects present in your Zope site only the actual instances of your content types are cataloged Zope objects tools and other objects aren t placed in the catalog For this reason the catalog tool is closely tied to the content types and their usage You can access the catalog by accessing the portal_catalog tool in the ZMI 11 1 2 1 Indexing Content The
476. s I ll step through exactly how this was done Well actually it s quite simple because most of the look and feel was put together using CSS There were little to no changes other than changes to the custom style sheet and some new images You ll first look at the non CSS changes to the site which are changes to some of the templates and properties 7 1 4 1 Removing the Portlets and Some of the Main Elements The site has no portlets These have been removed because in this site there aren t any that are relevant Instead news appears on the home page To remove these portlets from your site go to the root of the Plone site and click Properties In the form fields next to left_slots and right_slots delete all the values In the Maestro site a few elements have been removed Sometimes I ve found that this the best thing to do for features that just aren t needed in a site It can be a little hard to squeeze every user interface element into a Plone site but really you don t always have to do that 201 instead just remove the elements you don t need A few elements here have been removed the site actions the search box the footer and the colophon To accomplish this those templates that produced the code were customized and then altered so they rendered nothing For example to remove the search box in the ZMI click portal_skins click plone_templates and then click global_searchbox Next click the Customize butt
477. s Apache or a proxy that the ISP controls As Pll discuss this makes a powerful tool when combined with Apache or Squid This caching can also include the browser if it s set to use caching the default for Internet Explorer However if a browser does a refresh on a page the browser sends the Pragma no cache header which forces proxies to also reload their copy Caching in this manner applies to the entire response so it can be risky if you try applying this to a whole page This is most commonly used with images style sheets JavaScript or pages that don t change a great deal Images used repeatedly in your pages for making nice elements such as rounded corners or background images are ideal for this By default Plone creates an Accelerated HTTP Cache Manager called HTTPCache in the root of your Plone site Accessing this object through the ZMI will bring up the management options for the cache The following are all reasonable defaults and nothing needs to be changed initially e Title e Interval e Cache anonymous connections only e Notify URLs via PURGE To see how the Accelerated HTTP Cache Manager works the following is an example based on a test object an image called test gif To see what headers are returned you need to test the headers being returned For this you can use a simple Python script called header py You can find this script in Appendix B On Linux the wget command also does the same thing if you pass
478. s a name and will respond to the _ call__ method by checking the date The following is the DateRangeValidator class which was added to the validators module 375 from DateTime import DateTime class DateRangeValidator __implements__ ivalidator def __init__ self name self name name def __call__ self value args kwargs min max args 2 if not isinstance value DateTime value DateTime value return min lt value and value lt max After restarting Zope you can now register a new validation like so from validation validators validator import DateRangeValidator from validation import validation from DateTime import DateTime christmas DateRangeValidator ChristmasHolidays DateTime 12 18 2004 DateTime 01 09 2005 validation register christmas Then you can create a validator in your schema in the following manner validators christmas 13 1 1 6 Overriding Views and Actions in the Base Class Archetypes creates default views and actions for you based on a standard set of requirements that will suit many needs The actions are view edit and properties of course references is another action you ll look at it a moment You won t find any view or edit page templates for the object those are generated automatically for you by Archetypes However you can override them I expect that in most cases you ll want to override the view method and provide one of your own
479. s case you ll find the matching page template on the file system in the skins archexample directory of ArchExample You can also find a copy of this page template in Appendix B This can be as simple or as complicated a page template as you d like You have to restart Plone for the changes to take effect In this case you re changing an action that s installed into the portal_types tool whenever the product is installed For this reason if you do change this action you ll need to reinstall the product To do this in the Plone interface click plone setup All the elements in the factory type information can be overridden by creating an attribute of that name on the object To override the content_icon setting you d make an attribute called content_item For example class SomeProduct BaseContent moe Some product mae content_icon some_icon gif 13 1 1 7 Overriding the Default Methods In Table 13 2 I mentioned the option of overriding some of the default methods that occur on content types such as accessor and mutator This is an advanced option that allows you to manipulate the way fields are edited Just as with the source code project in the last chapter you access these attributes or fields using accessors and mutator methods Some default methods are available for you If your field name is blurb then these methods will be getBlurb and setBlurb The term get However you may want to do something different in the acce
480. s chapter I explained that a state represents an object at a particular point in time Each state has an ID that s unique this is usually a simple verb such as pending or published To add a state enter an ID and click Add at the bottom of the page You ll also see the following options Title The title of the state is displayed in your Plone site and is a user friendly version of the state Description The description of the state is a long description of the state This isn t currently shown to users but may be in the future Possible transitions This lists all the possible transitions that can occur from the state This list will show only if you actually have a transition in the system Simply select the transitions that need to occur on this state By selecting a transition for this state you re selecting the start point for this transition to be this state To alter a state enter the changes and then click Save to commit the changes The Permissions tab will open with the permissions that will be applied to an object while it s in this state This may mean changing the permissions on an object when it transitions into that state The form is rather self explanatory to enable an anonymous user to view the object check the boxes that correspond to View and Anonymous and click Save as shown in Figure 8 7 217 Properties Permissions Variab e Workflow State at portal_workflow plone_workflow states pending Wh
481. s clothes for sale including information such as shipping costs dimensions and warranty e Users can upload a Microsoft Word document and then manipulate it so that certain parts of it are blanked out Users with a low security setting can see only those documents with blanked out parts All these options and more are available to you in Plone You really have few limits This is why Plone is probably one of the most extensible and flexible frameworks available The only real limit is your ability to program Python or being able to afford someone to do it for you In this chapter I thus cover content types in detail including how to register and manipulate them through the Web Although the following parts don t specifically require knowledge of 303 304 Python I recommend you at least become acquainted with it I also include in this chapter information about the forms and how to validate them This chapter is required reading for anyone who wants to develop their own content types no matter if they do it through the Web or in Python because the chapter covers the areas needed to understand content type registration The next chapter will continue this journey I ll take you into the really gory details of using Python to write content types After that you ll use Archetypes to do the same thing with a tenth of the effort and then do some really cool and advanced stuff with Archetypes But right now you ll get straight
482. s much more useful if people can find and then discuss the content The primary ways users find content is through searching and navigation Fortunately Plone automatically sets up searching and navigation for the users so it s easy to find the content you ve added 66 3 1 7 1 Adding Comments to Content Feedback from users is a vital part of any Web site By allowing users to add comments you ensure that users can give feedback correct typographical errors or otherwise discuss the content You can discuss almost any piece of content in Plone folders and topics are the only exceptions You can enable discussions in one of two ways First the owner of the content otherwise known as the person who created it turns on the discussion feature by clicking the properties tab of the object and selecting Enabled under the Allow Discussion on This Item header as shown in Figure 3 26 Second the default option applies the policy for that type of content as defined by the site administrator setting this option is described for the administrator in Chapter 10 home news members Badmin my folder my preferences undo plone setup you are here home members admin s home test edit properties navigation contents ers Edit Properties admin s Home This information also referred to as metadata is the collection o Ga Personal Items information that is used to categorize an object assign effective and expiratio
483. s or tools is the best way to provide ultimate flexibility If you have a burning need for Plone to do something specific and it isn t covered elsewhere then this is your opportunity to add this feature by writing a product This could be storing some type of content specific to your company or some manipulation unique to you In the previous chapter I showed how you can customize a content type This customization can take you only so far though you can t actually add new attributes to your content type for example Instead you ll probably want to write your own content type In this chapter I run through two examples a content type and a tool Both of these examples will be relatively straightforward but will get you ready for the next chapter where I ll show you how to use Archetypes a framework for Plone that allows you to generate content types quickly and simply with a minimal amount of code Specifically I create a custom content type in Plone and step through all the code used to create this content type It s a quite interesting content type it uses several building blocks it pulls from a third party C module and incorporates them into your Plone site I show how to create the content type initially and then add permissions search integration new user interface elements and installation scripts Finally I cover how to create a Plone tool which is a way to add new tools to a site Both of the examples in this chapter are
484. s port will change depending upon your installation You ll need a manager s username and password for access to the ZMI this password is created during the Zope installation NOTE If you ve forgotten the password for Plone that was created in the installa tion don t panic You can create a new one see Chapter 9 for more information You add all objects via the drop down list in the top right corner as shown in Figure 2 12 Scroll down the list until you find Plone Site and click Add After selecting the option Plone Site a form will display that prompts for some more informa tion see Figure 2 13 e Id This is the unique ID of the Plone site for example enter Plone or Site e Title This is the title of the Plone site for example enter My Por tal e Membership source For the moment leave this as the default op tion Create a New User Folder in the Portal This allows you to have user authentication somewhere other than the portal see Chapter 9 for more information e Description This is a description of the portal that members will see in e mails for example enter A site all about the exciting new widget technology Don t worry too much about this you can always change this later in the portal s properties 29 Add Plone Site Enter an ID and click the button below to create a new Plone site Id Plone il Title Plone demo site Membership source Create a new user folder in the por
485. s takes the two parts either side of the forward slash of the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions MIME type of the incoming file and matches against them If you leave either part blank then it will match everything For example a major_minor of image that s one empty space on the end matches image jpeg image gif image png and so on extension This matches the filename extension each extension is separated by a space So for example doc pdf matches invoices doc and report pdf mimetype_regex This performs a regular expression match on the MIME type For example j matches image jpeg image jpg application java and so on name_regex This performs a regular expression match on the filename For ex ample Invoice will match Invoice 123 pdf but not Not_an_Invoice 123 pdf To add a type in the form at the bottom of the page enter the name of the rule and the type from the drop down and click Add This will create a rule at the bottom of the page and allow you to enter a pattern that matches the type of rule you created and select the content type you want to create from the drop down list You can then click Up and Down to move your item up and down respectively to increase its importance As an example I recently bought a digital camera Because the Plone Windows installer has CMFPhoto and PIL all set up it seemed a way to dump my pictures into an online photo album with minimum ease First I enabled the FTP se
486. s the permission to actually manage Plone s configuration and is usually given only to managers For this purpose this means only managers can go into the ZMI and see the information the tool provides You could quite easily add a nice looking skin for the Plone control panel or a portlet that displays this information in your site if you wanted Returning to init__ py add the initialization code for the tool There s a special initialization script for tools called ToolInit In this tool the __init__ py file looks like this from Products CMFCore import utils from stats import Stats from config import product_name tools stats Stats def initialize context init utils ToolInit product_name tools tools product_name product_name icon tool gif init initialize context The ToolInit function can take multiple tools in this case you have only one tool If you have multiple tools you can have only one product name and icon to show in the ZMI This is all that s needed to register the tool Now you have to complete the main module to turn it into an actual tool object 12 1 2 3 Altering the Tool Code Next add the code to the class to turn into a tool Like the content type this is just a matter of adding security inheriting from the correct base classes like so from Globals import InitializeClass from OFS SimpleItem import SimplelItem from AccessControl import ClassSecurityInfo from Products CMFCo
487. s the same data structure as a news item It retains the news item type Well in this case repurposing a content type is ideal For this example take the factory based type information for a news item load it into the portal_types tool and then call it a press release This will allow you to reuse all the existing code and information while giving you new options In the ZMI access portal_types and complete the following steps Factory based Type Information Press Release Use default type information This is now an instance of the configuration for a news item but it s called Press Release What advantage does this give you Well you now have another type of object that can be added through the Web by a user This gives the users of your site a really easy way to distinguish between a news item and a press release without mucking around with keywords or metadata It will also show up in searches and all other places as a press release You can now change the configuration for the press release and this will leave the configuration for the news item intact Changing the icon was discussed earlier in this chapter simply upload the image into your custom directory and then alter the Icon property in the portal_types page for a press release If you go to portal_workflow you can see that each content type has its own workflow Because this is now a new content type you can change the workflow for press releases only Perhaps press releas
488. s the top of the page are easy to add and remove Other examples are the boxes in the left and right columns which are called portlets Plone comes with several portlets and you can easily choose where to display certain portlets Finally this chapter shows how to customize Cascading Style Sheets CSS and images in Plone CSS affects everything in a Plone site In fact as you ll see in this chapter CSS deter mines all the colors all the positioning and a lot of the images you see If you have the ability to change the CSS code then you can change almost the entire look and feel of your Plone site All the options covered in this chapter show you the large degree of control you have over your Plone site 4 1 1 Administering Sites The first place site administrators should visit is the Plone control panel This is the way to access some of the administration functions of a site including the name and description of your Plone site user and group administration and any errors that occur within your site The term control panel is common so don t confuse it with the Zope Management Interface ZMI control panel that shows the low level ZMI options The Plone control panel is an ongoing attempt to provide a more user friendly interface for the functions provided in the ZMI Since the project is ongoing it s hard to predict what functionality will be available in the future Instead I recommend you go to the control panel and see what fu
489. s to find the element The skin starts by looking at the first layer assigned to that skin in this example custom If the skin can t find the element in the first layer it moves to the second layer in this example gruf It continues looking through the list of layers until it finds the element for which it s looking If it can t find the element then a 404 error is raised and returned to the browser A similar concept is the use of the PATH environment variable in most systems When entering a command or looking for a program the operating system looks through the directories on the file system as specified in the PATH environment variable A similar approach happens for layers where the layers are looked through in order to find that element By allowing higher layers to take precedence over lower layers developers and administrators now have the ability to customize and manipulate their site through the layers If you don t like a particular element of a Plone skin then by moving that element up a layer you can custom the result You can sort your skins and layers in Plone with the portal_skins tool which Pll cover next 166 7 1 1 2 Managing Skins with the portal_skins Tool You use the portal_skins tool in Plone to define the skin and layers behavior The portal_skins tool also provides a service and application programming interface API for creating and using skins To access the portal_skins tool go to the Zope M
490. s to the search box in the top right corner of a site element 2 in Figure 7 8 To see the macro find the script named global_searchbox and the quick_search macro contained within it The main template continues through main macros pulling information from different templates and scripts and builds the page as it goes After this section the main template reaches the main content of the page which is the object being rendered In Chapter 6 I explained the difference between a slot and a macro recall that a template defines slots that are then filled by the content Really there s only one slot of any importance for content and I ve mentioned it many times the main slot One common pattern in Plone that may be confusing is how to define a slot inside a fill slot For example the following is the definition for the css_slot lt metal cssslot fill slot css_slot gt lt A slot where you can insert CSS from a template gt lt metal cssslot define slot css_slot gt lt metal cssslot gt This design pattern looks a little odd but it defines the slot and then re creates the fill slot If you look at the main template carefully those slots are actually inside the header use macro so the header macro may fill this slot But you also want the end template to fill the slot so for this reason the slot is redefined This means one slot can now be filled in two places which is a useful technique for changing the templates Scan
491. s topic The equivalent on Windows is the user who runs the service by default this is the LocalSystem account Again you can change the user that Plone runs as If you re trying to run Plone on a Windows computer that doesn t have services which I don t recommend or support then Plone will be running locally as the user who started the server manually Some products may require the installation of extra software that provides features such as image manipulation document conversion and so on If you ve installed any of these tools then bear in mind that they may require a bit of work so that they ll interact with your Plone site successfully For example I installed pdftohtml on Windows for Portable Document Format PDF conversion but for the command to be read I had to run the service as a user with more privileges so Zope could interact with this software In this case since the server was behind a firewall this wasn t a problem 9 1 5 1 2 Getting Emergency Access If you ve got a Plone site but can t access the ZMI because you don t know or have forgotten the password then you can get an emergency access account To do this you need to have file system access to the instance of your Plone site If you don t have this you ll need to find some way to do this first To do this go to the root of your instance and call the zpasswd py script You ll find this script in your Zope directory in ZOPE_ HOME On my co
492. s will take the code from the ZMI and dump it into a Python module for you You can find the source code for DCWorkflowDump in the collective at http sfnet projects collective but you can also find a zip file of the code on the Plone book Web site at http plone book agmweb ca To install DCWorkflowDump unzip the file and copy the directory called DCWorkflowDump into the Products directory of your Plone installation To check that you re in the right directory your Products directory should also contain a directory for DCWorkflow among other things Then restart your Plone instance Once you ve restarted Plone go to the particular workflow in the ZMI and you ll notice a new tab called dump Click that page to get the dump screen and then click Dump it to dump the workflow to the screen This will take your workflow and format it in Python for you Save that file to your product and you now have a Python file you can manipulate This product is a great tool because it allows you to create the workflow in the ZMI and then distribute and alter it through Python 9 Chapter 9 9 1 Setting Up Security and Users Plone has a powerful and fine grained security model It provides a myriad of options for security at all levels so each object can have custom security for a user a role a group and so on To put this chapter in context I d like to share this interesting quote with you Security is hard Jim Fulton chief Zope architect
493. search will return the intersection of the index results so this will find all items that mention Plone and are published You can t do searches that are the union of results however you could do multiple results and then add the results together but this is a rather unusual case though TIP If you do a search with no values then the entire contents of the catalog are returned By default all searches add values for effective and end dates ensuring that you see content only between these times unless the user calling the search has the Access inactive portal content permission 11 1 2 4 1 Searching a Field or Date Index To search a FieldIndex pass through the value of the field Any hits that match will be returned for example to search for all the image s in a site use the following results context portal_catalog searchResults Type Image A field index can take a range of objects as well and the index will attempt to find all the values in between by performing a comparison of the values This range could be between two dates two numbers or two strings it really depends upon the value of FieldIndex You do this by passing a dictionary to the index rather than just a string The dictionary should contain two values a list called query which contains the values to be tested and a range which defines a range of the values The range is a string of one of the following e min Anything larger than the smallest ite
494. searching inside the portal_catalog object and making it registerable with the portal_types tool You ll also need to import the configuration variables and permissions as well So that takes the following two lines from config import plone_product_name product_name from config import add_permission edit_permission view_permission Returning to the class you have to add two base classes to make it fully Plone compatible PortalContent and DefaultDublinCoreImpl You also need to give the class a meta_type Each product in Zope has a unique meta_type class PloneSilverCity PortalContent DefaultDublinCoreImpl1 meta_type product_name One requirement of Plone is that it knows what base classes the content type implements Other parts of the application will need to know what classes are implemented So explicitly state what classes the content type implements like so 339 __implements__ PortalContent __implements__ DefaultDublinCoreImp1 __implements_ 12 1 1 6 1 Adding Security to the Class If you ve already decided to give the actions security you also need to apply this security to the class In an object publishing environment such as Plone anyone can call any method of the class through the Web unless it begins with an underscore This is obviously bad and you need to protect all your methods To do this inside the class make an instance of the ClassSecurityInfo class You do this with the following line
495. sfer Protocol SMTP server Plone uses to send e mail Portal Settings Clicking this link allows you to alter portal settings discussed in the Changing the Title Description and E Mail Addresses section of this chapter e Skins Clicking this link allows you to set the current skin discussed in Chap ter 7 Users and Groups Administration Clicking this link allows you to alter users and groups discussed in Chapter 8 e Zope Management Interface Clicking this link takes you to the ZMI Throughout the rest of the book I reference the Plone control panel if the current feature is accessible from there however the remainder of book uses the ZMI for altering properties 4 1 2 Using the ZMI The ZMI is the basic interface that gives you access to Plone s underlying Zope interface Before Plone existed the ZMI was the main way to access edit and manage a Zope site and its content This was originally the Web interface for the content management system Of course nowadays Zope isn t really an out of the box content management system but instead is an application that sits under a system such as Plone After quickly playing with the ZMI you ll see why it isn t suited as an interface to a content management system One thing the ZMI does provide is a simple interface to the underlying Plone and Zope infras tructure You can find many of the basic features mentioned in this chapter through Plone but you ll need to use th
496. sing Validators in the File System To specify validators on the file system add the validator to the metadata file The validator section of the metadata file would look like this validators validators validate_scripti validate_script2 This will run the two validation scripts validate_script1 and validate _script2 in that order A validation script will examine the data and add errors to the form controller state if there s a problem The contextType and button options need a slightly different syntax Validations are run on the context being executed for example a document or image You could have a different validator execute for the document and for the image For example to have a different validator script run when this is invoked as a document add the following line validators Document validate_script2 You can vary the validator depending on the button clicked on the form by appending the name of the button in the form to the left side of the validator The name of the button must begin with form button For example lt input type submit name form button buttoni value First gt 198 The metadata file would then look like the following validators buttonl validate_script1l The is a space for the context type so if as previously you wanted this to occur for button1 on a document then the metadata file would look like the following validators Document button1 validate_script5 7 1 3
497. sion of Plone those changes will affect the file system But you can now download and install those changes because you ve customized it in your database you ll keep the customized version Each content type in Plone will have a setting in the portal_types tool Although each content type in the portal_types tool has only one setting that type can have an unlimited number of actual objects in your database The configuration is looked up when needed so if you change the configuration you ll update all the objects of that type in the database 11 1 1 3 Content Type Registration in the portal_types Tool To access the registration information go to the portal_types tool in the ZMI You ll be presented with a list of all the content types registered in this Plone site Most of these content types are recognizable as something you d add through the Plone interface with a few exceptions such as Plone Site TempFolder and so on Each of these objects is an instance of factory type information which is the name for a par ticular type of configuration Click any of these objects to access the type s information for example when you click an event you get the local copy of the information about the content type You can alter this through the Web to change your configuration The following are the values in that form Title This is a title for the content type Description This is the description that appears for this content type Th
498. site and I ve discussed the content types that come with Plone such as documents images and so on So far however you ve been restricted to just these content types and the ones provided as products that you can find on the Internet But the most powerful part of Plone is the core topic of this chapter manipulating these content types In this chapter I compare and contrast the different object types in Plone This provides some insight into development tactics for your own projects Then I cover the content types and how they re registered inside Plone This registration provides the basis for customizing the types into the format you d like Then I move onto content categorization and searching tasks you ll want to know how to perform Armed with this knowledge you ll be able to make key decisions about how to develop your site and create new content types So I ll now whet your appetite about manipulating content types Once you can customize an entirely new content type you can have users adding and editing almost anything you want Some of the examples include the following e Users can upload an image of a cell culture that s dissected and manipulated using imaging libraries and is then presented to the user in a certain format e Users can upload an MP3 audio file extract the title and artist from the audio file and place it inside Plone e You can build an entire e commerce store letting Plone users add items such a
499. ss of the server in the address bar For example 295 set the address to the path of your Zope server such as ftp localhost 8021 and you ll get access to the objects in your site as shown in Figure 10 10 A ftp localhost 8021 Microsoft Internet Explorer File Edit View Favorites Tools Help 2 Dacl_users File Folder A chapters File Folder localhost Dportal_actions File Folder Dportal_catalog File Folder Server localhost Ga portal_controlpanel File Folder User Name admin Dportal_properties File Folder m portal_quickinstaller File Folder portal_skins File Folder Click here to learn about browsing FTP 4 portal_types File Folder sites E portal_workflow File Folder E Software File Folder a caching_policy_manager 0 bytes File a content_type_registry Obytes File a cookie_authentication Obytes File error_log Obytes File a HTTPCache Obytes File sa index_html 857 bytes File MailHost Obytes File a plone_utils 0 bytes File a portal_actionicons 0 bytes File a portal_calendar 0 bytes File a portal_discussion 0 bytes File a portal_externalfiles 0 bytes File portal_Factory Obytes File a portal_form Obytes File a portal_Form_controller Obytes File a portal_groupdata 0 bytes File a portal_groups Obytes File 12 29 2003 4 55 F 1 6 2004 10 40 PI 1 7 2004 1 10 AM 12 29 2003 4 55 F 1 3 2004 9 57 PM 12 29 2003 4
500. ssage ID that identifies the item to be translated For example a string such as Search may have a message ID of search_widget_label The message ID allows the string to be identified uniquely and the translation to be repeated 6 1 1 2 1 i18n translate This translates the contents of an element with an optional message ID passed as a statement For example the following will create a message ID of title_string lt hi i18n translate title_string gt This is a title lt hi gt This example is for a piece of text that s static and doesn t change However in some situations the piece of text could be taken from a database or an object and is dynamic By leaving the translate statement blank the message ID is composed of the value in the field In the following example if the title returned by the path expression here title was Alice in Wonderland then that title would be passed to the translation tool If no translation exists the original value will be inserted lt hi tal content here title 118n translate gt This is a title lt hi gt The translation command is probably one of most common i18n tags you ll use and you ll see it throughout the Plone templates It not only enables you to translate static parts of your site such as form labels help messages and descriptions but also the more dynamic parts of your site that could change more often such as page titles 135 6 1 1 2 2 i18n domain This sets the d
501. ssor or mutator Suppose you wanted to filter the value of a field such as always correcting the spelling of your company 377 name or changing the value of some other fields when a certain field changes Then you could do so by overriding the default methods In the following example you ll make a new method called getSpecialBlurb that takes the blurb someone has entered and manipulates it before returning to the client In this case you re replacing the text Perl getSpecialBlurb Article class Article BaseContent def getSpecialBlurb self The view for an article blurb self getField blurb get self blurb blurb replace Perl Python return blurb You ll also need to change your field so that it uses this method StringField blurb searchable 1 widget TextAreaWidget accessor getSpecialBlurb In this example anytime the blurb field is accessed in a view or edit page for example the value of getSpecialBlurb is returned Archetypes knows to access that method because the name of the method is defined as a string value passed to the accessor parameter There s one bit of trickery involved to access the raw value of the attribute you need to get the field and then call the get method This is the rather confusing blurb self getField blurb get self line The pattern of getting the field and then calling a method on it is actually quite common in Archetypes The pract
502. t s a little tedious but by repeatedly checking the actions and then using the up and down buttons you can alter the order Do this and you ll note that the tabs now appear in a different order on your Plone site 96 4 1 3 8 3 Why Is the Text in Lowercase Plone changes the case for many features such as tabs to lowercase in the style sheet To turn off this option you can alter the style sheet which is discussed later in this chapter in the Changing Images and CSS section 4 1 3 8 3 1 Book Web Site Adding a New Tab A nice navigation helper is to add a tab or remove one in the portal tabs So in this sidebar you ll add a tab that points to the Software folder and you ll remove the news and members tabs which in my site is pointless Return to the ZMI and click portal_actions Scroll to the bottom of the form to the add form I filled out the form with the following values e name Software id software_tab action string portal_url Software e permission View category portal tabs visible selected Further I found the actions for news and members and deselected Visible not forgetting to hit Save of course Returning to the Plone interface you ll now see those new tabs The key value here is Action which is a TALES expression These are discussed fully in Chapter 5 The Action value points to the URL of the folder you re pointing to in my case it s Software and is in the root of my Plone site
503. t Wi privacy and will not give the address away to any third parties or expose andy clearwind ca I Send a mail with the password Figure 3 3 Errors on a form If you ve completed the form correctly then you ll be given the option of logging in immedi ately Click the Log In button to log in You ll see the page shown in Figure 3 4 36 home news members you are here home navigation l Home og in Welcome name You have been registered as a member Password Click the button to log in immediately gt login gt login gt Forgot your password gt New user Figure 3 4 After registering If you already have a username and password or are returning to a site you ve previously joined then you can enter your name and password in the boxes in the left column of the site and click the Log In button 3 1 2 Enabling Cookies To log into a Plone site you must have cookies enabled If you access a Plone site and try to log in with cookies disabled you ll get a friendly message telling you that cookies must be enabled with a link to more information To enable cookies perform the following steps depending on your browser Internet Explorer 6 x 1 Select Tools gt Internet Options 2 Click the Privacy tab at the top of the screen 3 Move the slider to Medium and click OK Internet Explorer 5 x 1 Select Tools gt Internet Options 2 Click the Security tab at the top of the screen 3
504. t Plone For example running the following command will start Plone sudo Library StartupItems Plone Plone start To test whether Plone has worked use a browser to go to http localhost 9090 you should see the Plone welcome page Also in that ReadMe file you ll find the username and password that Plone has set up for you to access the server 25 2 1 2 2 Installing Using an RPM RPMs are available for the Red Hat Mandrake and SuSE distributions You can download the latest packages from http www plone org download The RPM requires that Python 2 3 is installed To find out which version of Python you have run the following command in a shell python V Python 2 3 2 In this case Python 2 3 2 is installed if you don t have this RPMs for Python are available from the Python Web site at http www python org After downloading the files install us ing the standard rpm command fortunately the Plone installation prints some really useful information For example root lappi i386 rpm ivh Plone2 2 0 0rh 2 i386 rpm Preparing HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH HHH HHHHHHHHHHHHHEHE Aaa 100 Making group plone not altered if already exists Making user plone 1 Plone2 HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHEEH HHH HHH 100 Creating initial main instance Instance created Listening on 127 0 0 1 8080 initial user plone with password plone Setup of initial database in main instance usr lib plone2 1ib p
505. t because it ll continue to show up in your list of items until you make one of the previous actions Edit it Edit it and then perform one of the previous actions As the reviewer you can make any change you d like to do so feel free to change the content by using the edit tab Once you ve moved content out of the review state by publishing or retracting it it will no longer show up in the review list Of course this assumes you do have someone as a reviewer for your site this usually although not necessarily is also the user who created the Plone site as an administrator In Chapter 8 I ll discuss how to add and edit users and give some users the review role 3 1 4 8 3 How Do You Edit a Published Document Once a document has been published it must be retracted to be edited To do this select Retract from the workflow drop down menu which will move the item back into the visible state Once it has returned to the visible state you can reedit it and placed it back into the review queue This step although a little annoying is necessary to ensure that all content goes through a review step For example you have to ensure that any edits made to a page are appropriate by reviewing the content Users with the manager role can edit the content at any time so they can quickly go in and fix a typo without having to go through the review step It s assumed that users with a manager role are trustworthy If you re a manager as de
506. t being transitioned has been deleted it takes the object to which you d like to return the user Pass to the exception the folder you d like the user to be redirected to see the Moving Objects section later in this chapter ObjectMoved newObject newObject This tells workflow that the object being transitioned has moved Pass to the exception the folder you d like the user to be redirected to see the Moving Objects section later in the next chapter 223 getDateTime This is a method that takes no parameters and returns the DateTime object that relates to the transition For example to find out what state is being transitioned to and when the following is a Script Python object that will tell you just that information This script logs the information about the transition into the log file parameters state_change st From 4s to s on fs state_change old_state state_change new_state state_change getDateTime context plone_log st TIP When you re writing a Script Python object you may need to print to the log file to help with debugging A script called plone_log does this which takes a string and passes it to Plone s logging functions Hence calling context plone_log is a useful tool for debugging When assigning a script to a transition you have two choices before and after As the names suggest a script that s set assigned to before runs prior to the transition running This
507. t it s missing closing elements and has invalid nesting Listing 6 4 An Example Broken Page Template bad_template pt lt DOCTYPE html PUBLIC W3C DTD XHTML 1 0 Transitional EN http www w3 org TR xhtml1 DTD xhtmli transitional dtd gt lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtm1 gt lt head gt lt title gt lt title gt lt head gt lt body gt lt p gt lt div gt This is bad HTML XHTML or XML lt a tal contents string someUrl gt lt a gt lt p gt lt img gt Further it isnt indented lt body gt lt html gt If you run Listing 6 4 through HTML Tidy you ll see the errors in the template and get nicely indented code as shown in Listing 6 5 Listing 6 5 The Output from HTML Tidy tidy q i bad_template pt line 11 column 1 Warning lt img gt element not empty or not closed line 10 column 1 Warning missing lt div gt line 10 column 39 Warning lt a gt proprietary attribute tal contents line 11 column 1 Warning lt img gt lacks alt attribute line 11 column 1 Warning lt img gt lacks src attribute line 9 column 1 Warning trimming empty lt p gt lt DOCTYPE html PUBLIC W3C DTD XHTML 1 0 Strict EN http www w3 org TR xhtml1 DTD xhtmli strict dtd gt lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtm1 gt 153 lt head gt lt meta name generator content HTML Tidy for Linux x86 vers 1st August 2003 see www w3 org gt lt ti
508. t pagus Figure 3 20 Adding a plain text file If the file is recognized as being text then the contents of the file are shown in the Web page and are editable through the edit tab Otherwise the file is downloadable and users must download it to their local hard drive and edit it there Afterward they can upload it to the system You ll note that a file object also has an extra download tab that lets you directly download the file 59 3 1 5 3 Adding and Editing Events An event can be something that will happen in the future or something that happened in past You can add events to Plone and they show up on the calendar To add an event select Event from the drop down list An event has more information than most Plone objects however most of it is self explanatory see Figure 3 21 home news members Bandy you are here home members andym s home event 2003 12 29 4309715491 navigation l Home 3 Members andym s Home Edit Event Fill in the details of the event you want to add Event Details Title Monthly Staff Meeting Event Location Enter the location where the event will take place Boardroom One Event Type Multiple event types possible by depressing Ctrl or Apple key on Mac Appointment Convention Social Event Work Description brief description of the item The regular monthly meeting for all staff This is Figure 3 21 Adding
509. take ten minutes Personally I ve never had a problem with this and Archetypes has gotten me out of many sticky situations when all of a sudden the specification changes from four content types to fourteen One anecdote I ve heard concerns a Web site development company When the company visits clients it takes along a programmer As the client describes its needs the programmer furiously types away into Archetypes Before the meeting is finished they can demonstrate a quick prototype of the working product to the client Overall most of the Plone development team has adopted Archetypes as the way to develop products so it has a great deal of mind share and really has become the standard for Plone development Some of Archetypes other key features are as follows e It automatically creates view and edit pages so you don t actually have to write any page template code 360 361 It maintains unique object IDs Every object you create will have a unique ID that users can t change This means you can always find an object even if it has moved It creates references between objects Each object can have any number of relations to any other objects For example you could have any number of link objects attached to a news item It has standard security setup All the security work is done for you so if you want the default setup you don t have to change anything e It has alternate storage options such as storing your
510. taken to produce pages you can now attempt to optimize However the first problem is finding where to optimize Please note that if you enable all three of these profiling tools you ll find that your Plone site really starts to slow down by a significant magnitude Each of these profilers exacts a toll on performance for the number of hooks it has to install You should always uninstall or turn off these profilers after using them to ensure that your site is running at maximum efficiency Also if you enable all three of these profilers you ll start to profile the profilers and that s when things start to get confusing I recommend you start with Call Profiler Then turn on each of the other profilers in turn turning off the preview profiler until you have enough information 14 1 2 5 1 Call Profiler This Zope product takes a request such as getting a front page and reports the ob jects that were used and how long was taken by each You can find Call Profiler at http zope org Members richard CallProfiler Despite comments on the download page the product isn t integrated into Zope 2 6 Install the product in the standard way and then restart your Zope To enable Call Profiler go to the ZMI control panel and select Call Profiler The product works by installing hooks into an object so that when the object is accessed the amount of time spent on rendering the object can be measured This means Call Profiler will be activated only
511. tal gt Description This is a demonstration site for Plone Add Plone Site Figure 2 13 Adding a Plone site After clicking Add Plone Site a Plone site will be created This may take a minute or two on slower machines because a great deal of processing occurs The screen will then redirect you to the Plone welcome page 2 1 4 Configuring the Web Server Once Plone has been installed you may want to configure the Plone site so that it runs on a different port has FTP capabilities logs to a different file and so on This section covers these basic setup issues Note that you aren t configuring the Plone sites themselves you re altering the configuration of the underlying Web server NOTE If you ve installed on Windows using the Windows installer then most of this configuration is provided through a nice user interface program see Configuring the Server on Windows earlier in this chapter NOTE If you ve installed using Mac OS X or the Windows installer then you ll find one extra file plone conf which contains port definitions used in the main Zope configuration file 30 Zope 2 7 creates a configuration file inside each instance installed All the configuration for the server is located in that one file A full list of the configuration options is available in Appendix A To find the configuration file look for a file called zope conf located in the etc folder of your Plone installation Some installers Wi
512. ted for them when they join a site This folder is set up with particular security so only that member and administrators can add and edit the content in that folder To access your personal folder click the my folder link in the personal bar in the upper right corner of the site In the upper right corner you ll also see a my preferences link clicking this will open a list of personalization options You ll see two choices at the moment you can change your password or you can go to the personal preferences and change key preferences in your site The change password form allows you to change your password To complete the form give your current password and the new password twice After you ve changed your password the change will be immediate You don t have to log in again just remember your new password when you return The personal preferences form allows you to set a number of preferences that change how you see the site These preferences are stored on the server so they re retained between uses of the site see Figure 3 7 40 Figure 3 7 Changing preferences The options are as follows Member Details Full name Andy McKay E mail andy clearwind ca Content editor Select the content editor that you would like to use Note that content edit specific browser requirements None gt Listed status Determines if your user name is listed in member searches done on this Listed Unlisted Edit
513. ten used in the user interface For example when the action is used as a tab this value is the text in the tab Id This is a unique ID for the action Actions This is the action that s to be performed For example when the action is used as a tab this action is used as the link This field is a TALES expression see Chapter 5 for more information Condition This is a condition that has to occur in order for the action to be used For example when used as tab if this condition is met the tab will appear This field is a TALES expression see Chapter 5 for more information Permission This is the permission the user has to have in order to have this action This permission has to be met in order for the action to be used see Chapter 9 for more information on security Category This categorizes the actions In Plone this distinguishes the actions so they re used in different sections of the user interface For portal tabs the category value is portal_tabs Visible This indicates if the category is active Since actions usually relate to visual elements the term visible is used 4 1 3 8 2 Introducing the Top Tabs In the following sections you ll alter the portal tabs in two different ways as an example You ll change the home tab to say welcome and you ll move the members tab to the left of the news tab The actions for the portal tabs are stored in the portal_actions tool so to alter these click portal_actions in t
514. tent and its author 11 Right slo This is where portlets added to the right _slot property display 12 Footer Shows information at the bottom of the page 13 Colophon Shows more information below the footer I haven t covered one section of this template the content All the text from Welcome to Plone down to The Plone Team is content added and edited by the users This is the main slot in the page template which is filled in by a the particular content type or page template as you ve seen Chapter 6 covered using slots in that chapter I showed how by using the main slot you can ensure content appears inside a Plone page So given these components of your Plone page how do you customize a particular part The answer is to find the matching part of the main_template see which part it calls and then customize that For this reason I ll cover the main template in detail At first glance the main template looks quite long and complicated but it s mostly all macros and its main purpose is simply to pull content from other areas You can find the main template by clicking portal_skins clicking plone_templates and then clicking main_template The philosophy behind the main template is that a user shouldn t have to alter the actual configuration of the template unless there are major changes planned Because the main template pulls all the content from other places inside Plone you can alter the assembled page by customiz
515. th p strip for p in path split if skinname not in path path insert path index custom 1 skinname path join path skinsTool addSkinSelection skin path out append Added 4s to 4s skins skinname skin else out append Skipping s skin skin return n join out That s it Your product is now ready to run 12 1 1 10 Testing the Product To test restart your Plone instance so that it ll read the product directory in If you haven t already developed your product in the appropriate products folder then place it there now as part of your standard installation process If there are any problems with your product then Zope may start but the product may show up as broken in the control panel Then install into Plone using the Add Remove Products page in the Plone control panel Now you should be able to go to a folder and add a source code object The icon will be your icon in the skin and the name is what you defined in the file system After adding this you ll get the edit page Note that the URL now has silvercity_edit_form on the end and shows the nicely altered edit form You could add some code select a language and click Save or you could upload a file from your computer After clicking Save you ll be taken back to the view function and sure enough the code will be shown with the syntax highlighted This product is a little example of how simple writing a product
516. the roles assigned to them To assign the reviewer role to this group select the checkboxes that correspond to the reviewer role for that group as shown in Figure 9 7 Groups Overview Up to Plone Setup Groups are logical collections of users such as departments and business units Groups are not to permissions on a global level you normally use Roles for that and let certain Groups have add new group roles group name member reviewer manager owner remove group S Development E O O ml amp Marketing Ci E Ci E SB Sales O O O E S amp Supervisor E E O E SB Systems B O T IE gt apply changes Figure 9 7 Setting up reviewer role for the Supervisor group You ve made it easy to give out the reviewer role to users and you can now manage and ad minister the reviewers through the Plone interface Furthermore it s easy to programmatically calculate the reviewers because you can examine the group and get a list of its members The idea of groups having roles is actually a minor paradigm shift from standard Zope devel opment since in that scenario yowre used to individual users being assigned roles You can still do that in Plone of course but assigning roles to a group is easy in Plone NOTE By definition when the permission for a user on an object is calculated a few factors are taken into account First the roles assigned to a user are calculated Second the roles a user gets from its groups a
517. the Web site its purpose was the following You can download a scaled down version of the program that NASA scientists use to operate Spirit and Opportunity Updates are also available for Maestro that contain real data from Mars that you can add to your copy of Maestro Turning to Plone the group responsible for this site developed a site that looks great quickly and easily In this case a large number of community members and volunteers helped the members of the Maestro team develop the site Figure 7 14 shows the working Plone site 200 MAESTRO HEADQUARTERS ou are here home welcome to maestro head Welcome to Maestro Headquarters News Apri 22 2004 Maestro has been revived We received great news this morning new Maestro f has been approved to continue production of Maestro data releases Our sponsors have been very pl with the reception of Maestro by the public and want to see our outreach effort continue through the mission The new releases will be less frequent but will cover a longer period of time Please check back for new updates Dee IO AANA Whe t bah d 2 4 Oe t ieee Bese 4 AB A Ae Ah ee A nbn Akb Mai Figure 7 14 The Maestro site You ll probably recognize some similar signs of a Plone site the tabs across the top the per sonal bar in the top right corner and the usual breadcrumbs Other than that the site looks quite different from the standard Plone site In the following section
518. the amount of processing power it has available it s called CPU bound To find out how much load the server is under in Linux use the top command In Windows the Task Manager accessible by pressing Ctrl Alt Del will give you similar statistics The recommended speed of your CPU depends upon the size and traffic load your Plone server will be under but a 2GHz processor is a good starting point 14 1 2 4 2 Amount of memory Zope likes to use a great deal of memory as objects are loaded from the ZODB Of all the key features giving a Zope server more memory is probably the best thing you can do To find out how much load the server is under in Linux use the top command In Windows the Task Manager accessible by pressing Ctrl Alt Del will give you similar statistics The recommended amount of memory depends upon the size and traffic load your Plone server will be under but a 512MB processor is a good starting point If you can afford more memory it s recommended You can make a few tweaks to the memory parameters in Plone by increasing the target number of objects in the cache By default Plone ships with 400 objects in the cache For a site you could increase this to 5 000 as shown in Figure 14 2 Although this increases memory usage this will also 403 Database Activity Cache Parameters Flush Cache 8 Database Management at Control_Panel Database main Help Total number of objects in the database 1 Total numb
519. the default language setting for newly created items English Password policy Determines if users can choose their initial password If the password is s user it s easier for the user to create a bogus account If this is a concert Figure 4 3 Portal options The portal settings are as follows e Portal title This is the title of the site that will appear in the title for browsers breadcrumbs navigation e mails and so on The default is Portal 77 Portal description This is the description for the portal which is currently used only in syndication e Portal From name This field is related to various functions such as a lost password or the send to a friend function Plone sends the e mail messages with this name attached The default is Portal Administrator Portal From address This is the address used for the e mails that Plone sends The default is postmaster localhost Default Language This is the default language that s given in the properties of an object Password policy New users have two options they can either enter a pass word or enter a password that s then e mailed to them Although in both cases they have to enter an e mail address the latter choice ensures that the e mail address they enter is valid e Enable External Editor Feature This will turn on External Editor which is an advanced editing tool It requires that External Editor be installed on the user s computer C
520. the editor you ve selected All you need to do is find a good editor for editing the page templates Since page templates are just Extensible HTML XHTML I use a simple editor that supports Extensible Markup Language XML The following sections discuss two example editors Dreamweaver and HTML Kit 10 1 4 5 5 Dreamweaver MX Change the meta type Page Template part of the configuration file to point to Dreamweaver For example in my installation this is as follows meta type Page Template extension pt editor C Program Files Macromedia Dreamweaver MX Dreamweaver exe Clicking the pencil icon to edit in External Editor now opens it directly in Dreamweaver as shown in Figure 10 14 Unfortunately Dreamweaver will not open in each file in a separate instance which means you can edit only one file at a time 302 Macromedia Dreamweaver Mx The title 1 2068 0 192 168 60 103 8080 test html Sil File Edit View Insert Modify Text Commands Site Window Help 7 wt python reorder here objectIds with here objectIds 5 gt amp nbsp 8 9 tal replace here title_or_id gt content title or id lt span gt 10 1 tal condition template title ll tal replace template title gt optional template tiftle lt span gt lt h2 gt 12 13 14 we Template lt em tal content template id gt template id lt em gt lt p gt lt P gt lt P gt lt P gt lt gt Applicati
521. the field name You can optionally pass in any number of keyword parameters as needed For instance from Products Archetypes public import IntegerField a simple field for age age IntegerField age Table 13 1 Fields Available in Archetypes Name Type Default Description Widget BooleanFiel oolean ComputedWSdgele storage of true or false for a field values DateTimeFidldte and CalendarWifgetstoring dates and times time ob jects 367 Name Type Default Description Widget FileField Files FileWidget Storage for large chunks of data such as plain text files Mi crosoft Word documents and so on FixedPointFitked DecimalWidket storing numerical data with fixed points point numbers FloatField Floats ImageField Image IntegerFieldInteger LinesField Lists PhotoField Image ReferenceFifleference StringField String TextField String DecimalWidkget storing numerical data with floating points ImageWidg tores an image and allows dynamic resizing of the image StringWidgdtor storing numerical data as integers LinesWidgetA list of data such as keywords PhotoWidgeSame as an image field but has more default image sizes ReferenceWicigetains a reference between this object and another StringWidge amp string field optimized for smaller strings say fewer than 100 words TextWidget A string field optimized for larger strings say larger than 100 words The string can also be transformed into multiple
522. the left portlets portlets _fetcher Footer Copyright and other message Macro portal_footer in footer Colophon Miscellaneous messages for the bot Macro colophon in colophon tom Armed with this information it s now a matter of customizing the macro or the slot to change the look and feel of the page Again it s recommended not to actually customize the main template itself but to instead customize the parts that the main template calls The next section shows a few example customizations you can make to Plone 7 1 2 6 Examining Example Customization Snippets The following sections show some examples that demonstrate simple customizations you can do to your Plone site Some solutions provide one or two different ways of performing the same task 7 1 2 7 Removing a Block One rather neat trick is to be able to easily remove a block from the user interface such as the path bar or the search box You have two ways to do this the most obvious is to customize the macro that displays the element For example to remove the breadcrumbs you could click portal_skins click plone_templates click global_pathbar and then turn off the element in the page template level for example you can change the following lt div metal define macro path_bar id pathBar tal define breadcrumbs python here breadcrumbs here portal_url portal_url here portal_url gt To this add the following line of code lt div metal define macro path_bar
523. the project and it improves code reuse The other layers of adding scripting Plone happen roughly in the following order e Template attribute expressions These provide expressions and a way of inserting little snippets of logic or simple paths in many places e Script Python objects These are simple scripts that execute in Plone in a restricted environment e External method objects These are more complicated modules that don t execute in restricted environments e Python products This is the key source that the CMF and Plone is written in this offers access to everything in Plone Python products are an advanced subject and are covered in Chapter 14 After an expression the next level of complexity is Script Python object This object allows for multiple lines of Python code and you can call it from an expression When you call a Script Python object you re incurring a small amount of extra overhead as Plone makes a switch into that object However that overhead is minimal because there s a trade off between clarity separation and performance My advice is to put as much logic into Python as possible and keep page templates as simple and as clean as possible It s easy to move it back later if there s a performance hit but at least you ll understand what s happening later 6 1 2 1 Using Script Python Objects A Script Python object is may you might traditionally think of in Plone as a script It s a sni
524. thon Archetypes handles almost everything else including creating view and edit forms for the developer This allows you to develop con tent types quickly and with a minimum amount of code The less code written means a lower probability of bugs less code to maintain as Plone changes a quick development cycle and generally lower costs Because the entire product is based upon this object description it allows you to use tools to generate that product For example ArchGenXML which I ll cover later allows you to generate a product in a Unified Modeling Language UML tool You can then take the output of the UML model and pass it through ArchGenXML to have a product instantly appear in Plone you don t actually have to write any code If you found that writing the product in Python in Chapter 12 was a little too much like hard work then this chapter is something you ll appreciate This doesn t mean Archetypes is right for every product sometimes I ve found Archetypes to be a little too much For example in one case my content type had one field but about 16 different permutations on the data on that field were presented which meant little of the existing Archetypes framework was used That was an extreme case however Most of the time you ll find Archetypes is exactly what you need Several people complain that Archetypes makes life a little too easy for developers and of course it s hard to charge people much for work that can
525. tion project All the content added to the Plone Web site was under the open publication license Growing interest in Plone made a commercial book more feasible and in the summer of 2003 Apress and I started this book I used some of the material from the old book with the original owners permissions With the change to Plone 2 I added a large amount of new material This book is now published under the Creative Commons license which al lows for the reuse of this work as long as the original author is attributed However you may not use this work for commercial purposes For more information see the license online at http creativecommons org licenses by nc sa 1 0 2 Chapter 2 2 1 Installing Plone This chapter explains how to install Plone on a variety of platforms and set the basic configu ration options for Plone If you want to try Plone really quickly then your best bet is to go to the live demonstration site at http demo plone org you can try adding and editing content immediately without installing anything Unlike the other chapters reading this chapter from one end to the other may not make the most sense Instead I ve broken this chapter down by operating system so you can read only the sections you need to in order to install Plone Plone will install on any of the platforms that Zope supports Windows Mac OS X Linux most Unix platforms and Solaris For a Plone server a high performance computer will obviousl
526. tle gt lt title gt lt head gt lt body gt lt div gt This is bad HTML XHTML or XML lt a tal contents string someUrl gt lt a gt lt img gt Further it isnt indented lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt The complaints about proprietary attributes can be a little annoying To check that your page template is valid XML pass the xml flag The output is less verbose and just points out the missing tags tidy q xml bad_template pt line 15 column 1 Error unexpected lt body gt in lt img gt line 16 column 1 Error unexpected lt html gt in lt img gt 6 1 3 3 Conducting Syntax Checks When you edit a page template in the ZMI Zope performs a syntax check on the document for things such as invalid tags If a tag is invalid an error will be shown on the template while you re editing it through the Web If like me and as I demonstrate in Chapter 7 you write most of your page templates on the file system then a simple syntax check for a page template is really useful Listing 6 6 is a Python script that resides on your file system and runs independently from Zope To run this you must have a Python interpreter and the Python module PageTemplate must be importable To make PageTemplate importable to your Python interpreter you must add the Products directory of your Zope installation to your Python path You have several ways to do this covered in Appendix B Listing 6 6 Error Checking Page Templ
527. tlog gt level all lt logfile gt path INSTANCE log event log level INFO lt logfile gt lt eventlog gt lt logger access gt level WARN lt logfile gt path INSTANCE log Z2 1log format message s lt logfile gt lt logger gt This is where you can change the path to the file by defining a new file The values that are logged are based upon a level sent with error messages more serious messages are sent with higher levels By default only information and the previous message are sent to the log but that value could be one of the following CRITICAL ERROR WARN INFO DEBUG and ALL If you wanted to log only errors then you d change level INFO to level ERROR 3 Chapter 3 3 1 Adding and Editing Content Adding and editing content is a simplification of the sheer power that Plone has available to leverage Creating content rich and feature rich Web pages with Plone is an absolute breeze If you have Plone installed locally then this chapter shows you how Plone works straight out of the box However if you don t have Plone installed then don t worry you can try Plone online by going to http demo plone org Before you can alter or edit a Plone site you need to log into a Plone site If you installed Plone you should have the username and password that came with the installation This user has the role of an administrator user which allows you to log in and alter any content Most users of a Plone site will jo
528. tml self _raw_language None def getLanguage self Returns the language this code has been lexed with return self _raw_language def getRawCode self Returns the raw code return self _raw def getHTMLCode self Returns the html code return self _raw_as_html def getLanguages self 333 Returns the list of languages available langs for name description in list_generators langs append name name value description langs sort return langs You ll have to add one other method which is an edit method that allows you to upload a file or a string This one method will read the file and see if there s anything in the file if there is then it will be read and a filename determined Then the code language and filename will be passed to the generate function You ll store all this in the attributes mentioned earlier as shown in Listing 12 2 Listing 12 2 The Method for Handling Edits def edit self language raw_code file The edit function that sets all our parameters and turns the code into pretty HTML filename if file file_code file read if there is a file and it s not blank if file_code raw_code file_code if hasattr file name filename file name else filename file filename set the language to None so set by SilverCity language None self _raw raw_code our function generate_html does th
529. to a page by default the left middle and right columns The middle column contains the content for the object being currently viewed This is where most of the user functionality is for adding and editing content completing forms and so on The left and right columns contain a series of boxes that display information Each of these boxes is called a portlet A variable determines which portlets display at a particular point in time The best way to understand these portlets is to look at the default portlets that ship with a Plone site You can find the parameters for the portlets in the portal object To access this go to the ZMI ensure you re on the root Plone site and click the properties tab This opens a list of properties including left_slots right_slots and document_action_slots see Figure 4 7 NOTE In earlier versions of Plone the portlets were called slots This is a common term that conflicts with the page template term slot so it was changed to portlets for version 2 In certain places in the code and in the text you may see the term slot used In these contexts the words slot and portlet are synonymous 83 Contents View Properties Security Plone Site at Plone Undo Properties allow you to assign simple values to Zope objects To change property values edit the Name Yalue Type T title Plone Book string m description The Plone Book site aj text ma m email_from_name Portal Administrator
530. to your system should you forget your username or password 2 1 1 2 3 Starting Plone in Debug Mode Up to this point you ve started and stopped Plone in production mode This is the fastest way to run Plone and is recommended For developing add ons in Plone or debugging problems you ll need to start Plone in debug mode This mode is the recommended way of running Plone when you re developing products and skins as you ll do in later chapters This method isn t the default because you ll note that Plone is about ten times slower than normal To start Plone in debug mode select Start Programs Plone Plone Debug Mode and a command prompt will appear all the log information will be printed to this window see Figure 2 8 WINNT s stem32 cmd exe plone bat P em importing module word_to_html Problem importing module rest Problem importing module word_to_html 2003 09 19T20 55 42 INFO lt gt ZODB Opening database for mounting 22452080_105674 7459 364000 2003 09 19T20 55 42 INFO lt gt ZODB Mounted database 22452686_1656747459 364008 a t temp_folder 2063 69 19T26 55 46 INFOC gt ZServer HTTP server started at Fri Sep 19 20 55 46 2 663 Hostname picard Port 80 2063 69 19T26 55 46 INFOC gt ZServer HTTP server started at Fri Sep 19 20 55 46 2 603 Hostname picard Port 8686 2663 69 19T26 55 46 INFOC gt ZServer FIP server started at Fri Sep 1 26 55 46 20 83 Hostname picard Port 21
531. top right corner of the green border you ll see an Add New Item drop down menu and a State drop down menu Click the Add New Item menu to open a drop down list of items to add see Figure 3 10 amp document 45 Figure 3 10 Adding a document from the green drop down menu To add a new document select Document Alternatively if you look in the body of the page you can see another Add New Item drop down box Again click the down arrow to open a list of items that can be added and then select the item you d like to add see Figure 3 11 Sect E Document title dym s Home Page P gt cut gt copy Pa Figure 3 11 Adding a document from the main folder s content menu Using the Add New Item list from the green border is a handy menu since it s available most of the time NOTE If yow re familiar with Zope you should never never never add con tent from the Zope Management Interface ZMI Depending upon how you ve installed Plone you may have already seen the ZMI and used it for customiz ing and developing Plone through the Web However adding content through the ZMI will create content items that are incomplete and don t Begin Side te bar 3 1 4 3 Understanding Where to Add Content The easiest place to add content at the beginning is in the user s member folder accessi ble by clicking the my folder link Although this is useful it s probably not the best ap proach for a long term sol
532. tory you should find the file you uploaded What you ve got now is a hybrid storage solution that stores the file on the file system and the metadata about the object description keywords and such in Plone This is better than the Web server only solution because it allows the content to have security metadata and so on If you really wanted by configuring your Web server correctly you could have the content served by Apache by reading the directory from the externalfiles directory 10 1 4 3 FTP Access into Plone Using FTP is one good way to put and get content so that you can edit it without having to use a browser To enable FTP in Plone ensure that it s enabled in the server Returning to Chapter 2 you can see how to add and edit services like this In short make sure your Zope configuration file zope conf has the following in it lt ftp server gt address 21 lt ftp server gt NOTE If you re going to have your server use port 21 you must ensure that nothing else is listening to that port Furthermore for most Unix systems you ll need to start your service as root so that it has permissions to connect to the low numbered port To do this you ll need to set the effective user in your Zope configuration file See the Setting Up Security on Your Server section in Chapter 9 Next you ll need an FTP client to access the server If you re on Windows then you can just use Internet Explorer by entering the addre
533. tp localhost com Plone Document123 document_edit_form even if the action permissions didn t allow this For this reason you should always have permissions on the actual actions that will be performed If you were a user who could view an object but couldn t edit it you could still alter the URL to get to the document edit form No real harm has been done yet because once you submitted it the security would be rechecked and you d be denied permission Normally actions are used as tabs in Plone but since they can be called programmatically they could be used in any way To call an action programmatically you call the listFilteredActionsFor method of the portal_actions tool Given an object this will return to you a Python dictionary keyed on category for all the actions for an object actions context portal_actions listFilteredActionsFor object This gives you the following site_actions category site_actions name Small Text url javascript setActiveStyleSheet Small Text 1 visible 1 id small_text gt permissions View and so on The green tabs at the top are a combination of two categories object and object_tabs The actions returned from the method are a Python dictionary whose keys are the groupings of the category for that action So to get just the actions object for one category for example all actions in the object category yo
534. tputPage SimpleItem manage_options 12 1 3 1 Testing the Tool Now that the tool is done you can test that it works First restart your Plone instance so that itll read the product directory in and register your new tool Second access the ZMI and go to the Add drop down box in the top right corner You ll notice that PloneStats is now in the drop down list so select this option and click Add The next form will list the tools available in the PloneStats product in this case just one appears as shown in Figure 12 3 Add PloneStats Note these are normally only useful inside a CMF site C PloneStats Add Figure 12 3 Adding the tool Select the tool and click Add To test that the tool works click it You should see a series of statistics as you saw earlier on ZopeZen This tool is simple because I m really not sure what presentation people want if I make a standard reporting tool then you can use it as you want Some ideas that spring to mind are a page in the control panel a little portlet box a Portable Document Format PDF that contains pretty graphs and is e mailed to the manager or an API that s an external reporting tool such as Crystal Reports could use At this point I ll wait and see what happens in the future 13 Chapter 13 13 1 Developing with Archetypes Archetypes is a framework for automating the development of products in Plone Once a de scription has been written for a content type in Py
535. try it This example has just two fields in the form the e mail of the person submitting the form and some comments from that person For this form the e mail of the person will be required so you can respond to their comments 6 1 4 2 1 Building the Form The form is the largest and most complicated part of this procedure mostly because there s so much work that has to be done to support error handling This form is a Controller Page Template object called feedbackForm To ensure that it s wrapped in the main template I ll start the form in the standard method lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtm1 xml lang en US lang en Us 160 118n domain plone metal use macro here main_template macros master gt lt body gt lt div metal fill slot main tal define errors options state getErrors gt One addition here is errors options state getErrors which will place any and all errors into the errors local variable for later use Because of the requirement for the form to post back to itself you set this action in TAL with the expression template id This path will pull out the ID of the template and insert it into the action so this path will always work even if you rename the template Note that you re also adding the i18n tags you saw earlier to ensure that this form can be localized lt form method post tal attributes action template id gt lt legend i18n translate legend_feedback_form gt W
536. ts into your Products directory In Windows that directory is located at c Program FilesPlone 2DataProducts In that directory you ll see a series of other directories including CMFPlone CMFCore and so on The directory ExternalFile should now be one of those directories You can now skip to testing the installation in the server 10 1 2 3 2 Performing an Example Installation on Unix First youll need to download the product from Zope org at http zope org Members arielpartners ExternalFile 1 2 0 ExternalFile 1 2 0 zip and save it to your computer Second unzip the file most Unix systems have an unzip program already installed If so execute the following commands unzip ExternalFile 1 2 0 zip 278 Archive ExternalFile 1 2 0 zip creating ExternalFile CVS After unzipping you ll get the directory ExternalFile You know that the ExternalFile directory is the product directory because inside that directory is a whole bunch of Python files and text files including INSTALL txt and README txt which contain information about how to install Now move the ExternalFile folder not its contents into the Products directory This command will depend upon the configuration of your server but in my case this is as follows mv ExternalFile var zope Products 10 1 2 3 3 Testing the Installation in the Server After installing a product you ll need to restart Plone for the products to be registered in Plone Once you ve restarted yo
537. tting that ID in the URL such as http localhost 8080 Plone To make this friendlier you need to translate the request to the Web server from http yoursite com into a request for a correct object inside Zope You have two slightly different ways to do this based upon your requirements If you re using a proxy Web server or basing sites upon domain names then you can use a Virtual Host Monster VHM This is a friendly and powerful object that will make your life so much easier so I fully recommend using it You need only one VHM in the root of a Zope instance The VHM object sits at the root of a Zope site and intercepts all incoming requests it then alters the request so that the request goes to the part of Zope that you want To create a VHM in the ZMI go to the root of your Zope and select Virtual Host Monster from the Add drop down box in the form that opens enter an ID For example enter vhm the actual ID doesn t matter At this point if you re using a proxy Web server in front of Plone continue to the configuration for that Web server in the Configuring the Proxy Server section This next step is necessary only if you aren t using a proxy Web server Click the VHM object you added in the ZMI and then select the Mappings tab which will present a list of the available mappings for hosts on this object The mapping takes an incoming request and maps it to Plone with the following syntax host path where host is
538. tup has finished installing Plone on your computer The application may be launched by selecting the installed icons Click Finish to exit Setup Figure 2 4 Final setup screen 19 To start Plone access the Plone controller by going to Start Programs TRA Plone TRA Plone The controller is an application that provides a nice user interface for starting and stopping Plone It begins with the Status page which lets you easily start or stop your Plone installation see Figure 2 5 J Plone Controller Plone Status fe E3 Plone Status Q Status Q Emergency User Start Plone is not running E About Plone is configured to run as a service Site Management View Plone Zope Management Interface Figure 2 5 Plone isn t running As shown in Figure 2 5 the screen displays the status of your Plone installation Plone doesn t start automatically you ll have to click Start to start Plone Once you ve clicked this you may have to wait a minute as it completes the startup process see Figure 2 6 l Plone Controller Plone Status OF x Plone r Status i Ports i Status Pl 2 Emergency User Stop one is running E About Plone is configured to run as a service Site Management View Plone 20 Figure 2 6 Plone is now running When Plone has started you can access the Plone site by clicking the View Plone
539. two tabs Users and Groups Click the Users tab to access the list of users in the system The form is rather self explanatory you can remove a user reset a password resetting the password sends the user an e mail anyway or change an e mail all from this form as shown in Figure 9 5 239 home software chapters feedback admin you are here home navigation Home A Ga Chapters Users Overview Software a Up to Plone Setup Click the user s name to see and change the details of a specific u the user You can also edit the e mail addresses and add remove P add new user user search search user name e mail address reset password amp andym Andy McKay E andy clearwind c amp gavin Gavin Roussel Ea gavin clearwind amp luke Luke Tymowski EJ luke clearwind ce amp ralph Ralph Nitschke E3 ralph clearwind c OLE c gt apply changes Plone and its visual design is Copyright 2000 2004 by Alexander Limi Alan Figure 9 5 Editing users By clicking a user you can access the preferences form for that user make any changes and then click Save To add a new user click add new user This opens the form to register the user and allows you to edit the data for that user Because the number of users in a site can become quite large the data will be batched in the familiar Plone manner You can enter a search string which will search through all the users
540. type pc getToolByName self portal_catalog call the catalog and loop through the records results pc numbers total len results bytype bystate for result in results set the number for the type ctype str result Type num numbers bytype get ctype 0 num 1 numbers bytype ctype num set the number for the state state str result review_state num numbers bystate get state 0 num 1 numbers bystate state num return numbers def getUserCount self The number of users pm getToolByName self portal_membership count len pm listMemberIds return count 12 1 2 2 Turning the Package into a Tool To turn the package into a tool you have to do the same process for the content type In other words you have to register the tool in the _ init__ py module Just like in the content type example make a config py file that contains all the configurations The config py file looks like this from Products CMFCore import CMFCorePermissions view_permission CMFCorePermissions ManagePortal product_name PloneStats unique_id plone_stats The security for this product is simpler but that s because the product is quite simple all it does is interact with other tools and produce some statistics There s nothing for users to 356 add edit delete or otherwise interact with This means you have really only one permission ManagePortal which i
541. type isn t sufficient this may be an option Although it s a useful sounding option I ve never seen a good use for Scriptable Type Information over the standard factory based type information so don t worry about it 11 1 1 4 Storing Content Type Information on the File System You ve now seen how this information is stored in Zope but it does of course come from some where on the file system This information is normally stored on the product in a dictionary usually called factory based type information Listing 11 1 shows the factory information about Folder which is a product that shows folders in Plone This was taken from PloneFolder py file located in the CMFPlone directory Listing 11 1 Factory Based Type Information factory_type_information id Folder gt meta_type Plone Folder gt description Plone folders can define custom view actions or will behave like directory listings without one defined icon folder_icon gif gt product CMFPlone gt factory addPloneFolder gt filter_content_types 0 gt immediate_view folder_listing gt actions Ge id view name View action string folder_url permissions CMFCorePermissions View category folder 310 The Python dictionary closely maps the forms you saw in the Plone interface for example meta_type
542. u could just access that key of the dictionary For example actions object will give you a list of all these actions category object name Contents url http localhost 8080 Plone folder_contents gt visible 1 id folderContents permissions List folder contents and so on 309 You ll note that as long as you provide the object you re examining it goes to the portal_types tool and finds all the actions for your particular portal_type as well as any other actions that may be relevant If you wanted to add a new tab for a content type all you need to do is go to portal_types click the content type and select the Actions tab Then add your action If the action were to appear as a green tab for the content type then you d have to ensure you made the category object_tabs 11 1 1 3 3 Other Objects in the portal_types Tool Looking at the portal_types tool you ll probably notice you can add other object types to the folder such as DTML Method External Method Script Python and Scriptable Type Informa tion The first three of these options are present to provide support for the last option in the list Scriptable Type Information Scriptable Type Information lets you define a type but create your own constructor permissions and construction script through the Web instead of having them defined for you If the default permission for a content
543. u want to change the look and feel of the site you have to change only that one template rather than all the content Allows certain users to add and edit content If specified users can add and edit content easily then there s no need to send content to the Webmaster or Web team Instead the user who wants to create a page can do so and edit it as much as necessary Applies rules to whom can publish what and when Your business rules might not want just anybody publishing content on your Web site for example people in marketing would be able to publish to the press release part of the site and not to the engineering section Can apply business rules to content If a person from marketing creates a press release somebody in legal might need to review that document In this case the document will be passed through a review process that ensures it won t go live until these reviews are done Can search and index information intelligently Since the CMS can keep track of structured information about the content such as author s name publication date modification dates categories and so on it can produce listings of content by author recent content and so on It can also provide searching capabilities that are much smarter and more useful than just a simple textual search Although this example portrays paybacks that are more significant for large organizations organizations of all levels benefit from this approach In fact typ
544. ually doing that is a little tricky and depends greatly upon how the product youre trying to install is packaged To show this in more detail the following section explains how to install an example product CMFExternalFile which itself is covered in the Managing a File in Plone section One of the nice things about CMFExternalFile is that it actually comes in two parts with two downloads First you have the Zope specific code called ExternalFile If you ever wanted to use this product outside of Plone in plain Zope you could do so Second you have the Plone and CMFE specific code called CMFExternalFile Most products don t need two installs they come self contained as one product 10 1 2 3 1 Performing an Example Installation on Windows First youll need to download the product from Zope org at http zope org Members arielpartners ExternalFile 1 2 0 ExternalFile 1 2 0 zip and save it to your computer Second unzip the file For this you could use WinZip which you can find on most Windows computers these days I prefer 7 Zip which is available from http www 7 zip org After unzipping you ll get a directory called ExternalFile Inside that directory is the product directory see Figure 10 2 You can tell this because inside that directory is a whole bunch of Python files and text files including INSTALL txt and README txt which contain information about how to do the install 277 amp C Documents and Settings a
545. ue Although a worklist is a convenient way of storing this information Plone doesn t use them Instead Plone uses ZCatalog directly to query objects that are workflowed Since the DCWork flow worklist uses the catalog tool the end result is the same 8 1 3 2 6 Editing Scripts The Scripts tab lists the scripts that are available this workflow This list is actually a standard folder in the ZMI and you can add almost anything there Since the main reason you d want to do this would be to add a script to perform advanced handling of transitions you should add only Script Python objects here To add a script from the Scripts tab select Script Python from the Add drop down menu and give the script an ID The script is passed one and only one object which is the base workflow expression object for more information on this object see the Editing Workflow Scripts section later in this chapter For example if you need to access the actual object in the workflow you can use a Python script such as the following parameters state_change obj state_change object What happens in this script is up to the developer you can run almost anything here You can trigger events and you can access other workflows and transitions For some example scripts see the Sending E Mail Notifications and Moving Objects sections later in this chap ter When the script executes it will execute as the user who initiated the transition
546. uld plug this into your workflow e mail notification script from Chapter 7 to enhance it For example for the workflow e mail notification script you may recall that you did the following for user in mship listMembers if Reviewer in mship getMemberById user id getRoles This loops through every user and checks if they have the membership role The pre vious script was called getGroupUsers and placed in the portal_skins custom folder This means you can access it through the context namespace through acquisition in short con text getGroupUsers object will return you the users users context getGroupUsers object for id in users user mship getMemberById id Now you re sending an e mail to everyone in the group instead of all reviewers 9 1 4 4 User Information in Page Templates In Chapter 6 you made a page template that allowed a user to give feedback to the site administrator through a form In that form an input box allowed a user to type in an e mail 262 address which you then validated However if a user is logged in and you know the e mail address then it d be nice to fill it in automatically for the user The existing code for the input box is as follows lt input type text name email_address tal attributes tabindex tabindex next value request email_address nothing gt Now if a value for e mail exists in the request from an earlier attempt at filling out the form then you should
547. umber starting from one e even This is true for an even indexed iteration for example 0 2 4 cone e odd This is true for an odd indexed iteration for example 1 3 5 mae e start This is true for the first iteration e end This is true for the last iteration e length This is the total number of iterations e letter This is the iteration number as a lowercase letter for ex ample a z aa az ba bz za zz aaa aaz and so on starting from one e Letter This is the uppercase version of letter e roman This is the number as a lowercase Roman numeral i ii iii iv v and so on starting from one Two other values are available in the repeat namespace that are rather unusual and rarely used first and last These two variables allow you to store information about data in the iteration By using the value you want to store in an expression a Boolean value will be returned For the variable first true indicates that this the first time the value has occurred in the iteration Likewise for the variable last true indicates that this is the last time the value has occurred in the iteration Here s an example of this lt ul gt lt li tal repeat val context objectValues gt First lt i tal content repeat val first meta_type gt Last lt i tal content repeat val last meta_type gt lt b tal content val meta_type gt lt b tal content v
548. up too much RAM lower this value e Maximum age of a cache entry This is the amount of time in seconds this object will stay in the cache e Cleanup interval This is how often the cache gets cleaned Because the requests for the object actually reach Zope this does nothing to reduce network traffic it just causes Zope to render the result quicker Selecting the Statistics tab in the ZMI will report statistics on exactly how many hits were returned by the cache and how many were passed onto the object If too many hits are being passed on to the object you may consider altering the cache configuration by having fewer REQUEST variables or increasing the time spent in the cache 414 14 1 2 9 Assigning Caches To add an object that s on the file system to the cache simply specify the name of the cache in the metadata file for that object Chapter 7 discussed using metadata files Plone already does this on a large number of images on CSS and on JavaScript For example plone_skins plone_images pdf_icon gif metadata reads as follows default title Pdf icon cache HTTPCache This signifies that the image will be cached using the HTTPCache Most objects on the file system would be more suitable for adding to the HTTPCache rather than the RAMCache 14 1 2 10 Caching Content Types Caching content types is a little trickier and requires using the Caching Policy Manager Plone installs this tool by default and you can find
549. ur server go to the ZMI and access the Product Management screen of the Zope control panel This screen will list all the products installed on the server If you installed the product successfully you ll see that it s now listed as shown in Figure 10 3 279 Contents View Properties product Management at Control_Panel Products Type Name Archetypes Installed product Archetypes 1 2 2 final TreeFolder2 Installed product BTreeFolder2 BTreeFolder2 1 0 CMF ActionIcons Installed product CMFActionIcons CMF Calendar Installed product CMFCalendar CMF 1 4 2 CMFCore Installed product CMFCore CMF 1 4 2 CMFDefault Installed product CMFDefault CMF 1 4 2 CMFFormController Installed product CMFFormController 1 0 beta6 CMFPlone Installed product CMFPlone 2 0 RC2 CMF QuickInstallerTool Installed product CMFQuickInstallerTool 1 4 CMFTopic Installed product CMFTopic Unreleased OCWorkflow Installed product DCWorkflow DCWorkflaw 0 5 ExcelExample Installed product ExcelExample ExternalEditor Installed product ExternalEditor 0 7 ExternalFile Installed product ExternalFile 1 2 0 ExternalMethod Installed product ExternalMethod External Method 1 0 0 Formulator Installed product Formulator Formulator 1 5 0 GroupUserFolder Installed product GroupUserFolder 1 21 MIMETools Installed product MIMETools OILS CO Le OO Le OL C Le OL OL OO
550. used the Windows or Mac OS X installer then you ll find these port definitions in plone conf These values are then imported into the main configuration file So on a Mac to change the port you ll edit plone conf from this PLONE_WEBSERVER_PORT Hi HOSS esa S aes Saa SSeS This is the port you will access your Plone site from Set this to a port number above 1024 not used for any other server on your computer define PLONE_WEBSERVER_PORT 8080 to the following Z define PLONE_WEBSERVER_PORT 80 31 2 1 4 2 Using the Debug Mode By default in Zope 2 7 debug mode is enabled Note that Plone runs significantly slower in debug mode approximately 10 20 times slower To turn this off add the following line to the configuration file debug mode off To make the out of the box experience more impressive for Windows users debug mode slows Plone down on Windows even more than on Linux it ships with debug mode off already If you have a Plone site running and want to know if debug mode is running go to por tal_migration in the ZMI and look at the variables listed there this will tell you if debug mode is enabled 2 1 4 3 Using Logs By default there are two logs in Plone an access log that you can produce site statistics from and an event log that contains debug information about Plone products The event log is the place to find errors and messages in Plone The default configuration looks like the following lt even
551. username that exists in your Plone site At the moment this page template is pretty limited Only a user with the manager role can view this page it can show only one member at a time and the information for the user is rather thin In Chapter 6 Pll show how to expand this example and add some component reusability as well as the ability to translate the text into other languages 6 Chapter 6 6 1 Introducing Advanced Plone Templating and Scripting The previous chapter covered how the Zope Page Templates system works To understand page templates Chapter 5 also covered the object hierarchy acquisition and Template Attribute Language Expression Syntax TALES Using the code from the previous chapter you were able to generate dynamic Web pages The chapter also showed an example page template that plugged the code together covered the building blocks of the templating system in Plone and provided the key information you ll need in order to use Plone It s now time to move onto some of the more advanced features of page templates and templat ing in Plone in general First Ill introduce the Macro Expansion Template Attribute Language METAL and Internationalization I118N namespaces Like the TAL namespace these pro vide functionality to the site developer For those itching to know exactly how a Plone page is plugged together the Hooking Into Plone Using METAT section provides many of the answers Up until now I ve shown how
552. ut using the ZMI is that changes are instantaneous If you change an object and then refresh you see the change immediately assuming you have no cache This isn t the case with the file system If you change something in the file system it isn t updated in Plone This is for performance reasons Plone has no way of knowing you made that change so it must update the Zope cached copy of that object Without getting into file system notification trickery a Plone site has two states production and debug mode When Plone is in debug mode it checks all the directories finds files that have changed and then updates Plone This means you can make a change and it will appear immediately When run in production mode however your changes will not happen until you refresh the skin see Chapter 11 or you restart Zope For obvious reasons if you re developing skins in Plone then running in debug mode is the way to go Chapter 2 showed you how to change the configuration for Plone so that it runs in debug mode As a quick recap open the zope conf file inside the etc directory of your installation and ensure the debug mode directive is set to on 196 7 1 3 5 Using File System Objects The FSDVs allow the mapping of only those Zope objects that have been specifically configured to be used in this manner It determines the Zope object based on the extension of the filename The contents of that file are the contents of one attribute of the o
553. ution Most noticeably it creates long URLs for example Mem bers andy Docum It also means your content isn t accurately reflected in the navigation tree As you ll see later a few solutions exist for this the most common solution is to make a folder and give certain users the right to access it For example that folder may be Help or News The Using Folder section later in this chapter discusses adding folders and Chapter 9 discusses using group workspaces and security 3 1 4 4 Editing a Document Once you ve clicked to add a document you ll be taken directly to the edit page with a mes sage telling you that the document has been created If this doesn t happen you can click a document and then click the edit tab Again you ll see that the edit tab becomes highlighted in green see Figure 3 12 46 home news members Bandy you are here home members andym s home document 2003 12 29 2162990559 navigation Home 3 Members andym s Home Edit Document Fill in the details of this document Document Details Title test document Description brief description of the document This is a test description Body text This is some test body text Foras vulputate vulputate sudo letatio vel amet ir distineo sino Sagaciter duis nisl feugait sed abi iusto duis Iusto secundum brevitas lenis ventosus Si duis suscipit humo reprobo Minim ant
554. value for Blurb Figure 13 1 The blurb part of the content type With just those four lines of code you ve added a field to your content type The standard form elements that you d expect in Plone are present if you edit something and come back later the old value is shown errors are handled gracefully and so on As a demonstration of how easy it is to modify change the label in the form to appear as Article Blurb and change the field to be required To do this make the following changes StringField blurb required 1 searchable i widget TextAreaWidget label Article Blurb Here you ve added the required 1 parameter which makes this field required and a label parameter If you restart Plone and add a new article the user interface has now changed to reflect the new schema The field is now called Article Blurb 364 Article Blurb Enter a value for Article Blurb Figure 13 2 The Article Blurb part of the content type This isn t just a cosmetic change the change reflects the alteration of the underlying schema and this is the real power of Archetypes Just comparing this to writing products in Python you can see that all the drudgery has been removed from writing a product It s like this If you can define a schema you can throw together an archetype in absolutely no time Once you ve done that you can edit it easily and have the changes take effect If you do make any of these changes
555. vari ables and Uniform Resource Locators URLs This book contains lots of screen shots of Zope Python and Plone Since Plone is a rapidly developing product the screen shots might vary slightly from the version of software you re using these changes should be minor and shouldn t affect your understanding of the system For this book the following versions of software are used although this book is specifically written with these versions in mind all the software should work on these and later versions for some time to come Plone 2 0 was the most recently released version of Plone at the time of writing This is the second major release of the software and it provides many new features over 1 0 including group user management a new interface and an improved Zope distribution It s strongly 14 suggested you start any new projects in 2 0 or later rather than using the earlier versions of Plone Version 2 0 of Plone has the following dependencies Zope 2 7 CMF 1 4 2 and Python 2 3 3 All of the code examples in this book have been specifically designed not to be dependent upon these versions or a particular operating system However there may be situations where this isn t the case I apologize for any inconvenience Originally a group of Plone users keen to produce quality documentation came up with the idea of this book We released the first version of that book on the Plone Web site as an open source documenta
556. ver it quickly grew into a thriving open source project as more developers became involved The contributions from these developers form the Plone product that s now available 1 1 3 10 1 Example Plone Sites Many Plone sites exist some are obvious because of their looks and some aren t The following is just a small sample of the more diverse sites 10 Plone http www plone org Plone Demo Site http demo plone org Zope org http www zope org Liquidnet http www liquidnet com Design Science Toys http www dstoys com Give Kids the World http www gktw org Propane http www usepropane com Maestro Headquarters http mars telascience org More Plone sites are available at http www plone org about sites including sites that provide a quite different user interface Without knowing about the development of these sites it would in fact be hard to tell that these sites use Plone 1 1 4 Getting Involved in Plone s Development Although Plone has an impressive list of features its list of wants even more impressive For this reason the project is always on the lookout for new people willing to contribute time for the project Fortunately because Plone is focused on the end user there s a need for a very broad spectrum of disciplines Volunteers in a range of areas rather than just coders or Web developers are welcomed Plone needs user interface developers usability experts graphic desi
557. vide a good overview of Python Dive Into Python Apress 2004 Based on Mark Pilgrim s popular Web based tutorial this books treats readers to a fast paced introduction to the Python language This is a great book geared toward experienced program mers Learning Python Second Edition O Reilly 2003 This book covers ver sion 2 3 of Python and provides a good overview of Python and all the new features This is good for relatively new programmers Practical Python Apress August 2002 This highly practical introduc tion to Python offers insight into the language s array of features The reader can immediately put this knowledge into practice following along with the creation of ten interesting projects including a Web based bulletin board and a Graphical User Interface based file sharing application e Python Essential Reference Second Edition Sams 2001 A refer ence book that provides a great overview of all the key libraries and functions This is an excellent book for experienced programmers This book uses the following conventions e Italics New terms are italicized Appendix C contains an extensive glossary that defines all acronyms Also links that appear in the user interface are italicized e Bold If there are instructions within the text that include something you should type on your keyboard these words are in bold e Code font A monospaced font indicates filenames folder paths code
558. vileges will be needed only during the debugging phase as you add and remove schemas and objects Once your development has settled down or you move to production this won t be necessary Next in the ZMI click archetypes_tool and select Connections This allows you to map the con tent type to the database adapter type The easiest way is to map the default to your database connection If you wanted you could of course map specific types to different databases Now you ll change the schema to use the new storage For this you need to import the appropriate storage class from SQLStorage in this case PostgreSQLStorage Then you need to set the storage parameter on the fields you want to store in the relational database At this point you ll note that you can put as many or as few fields inside the rela tional database as you want you could have all the fields in the database or just some Either way there will be content stored inside your Plone database but at the least it ll be an object that has an ID Anyway in the example schema you have two fields an integer age and a string email as shown in Listing 13 4 Listing 13 4 A Content Type Using SQLStorage from Products Archetypes public import BaseSchema Schema from Products Archetypes public import BaseContent registerType from Products Archetypes public import IntegerField StringField from Products Archetypes public import IntegerWidget StringWidget from Products Archet
559. wanted to put a custom message at the beginning of the time then you d add a slot at the beginning of the time_template inside the define macro The slot is called time and is as follows lt html gt lt body gt lt div metal define macro time gt lt div metal define slot msg gt Time slot lt div gt lt div tal content context ZopeTime gt The time lt div gt lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt Now in the calling page template you can call the fill slot lt html gt lt body gt lt div metal use macro context time_template macros time gt 132 lt div metal fill slot msg gt The time is lt div gt If there is a message then the macro will display i here lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt The end result is that you ll see the time slot filled in as follows lt html gt lt body gt lt div gt lt div gt The time is lt div gt lt div gt 2004 04 15 17 18 18 312 GMT 7 lt div gt lt div gt lt body gt lt html gt 6 1 1 1 7 How Plone Uses Macros and Slots Both macros and slots are similar inasmuch as they both extract content from another tem plate and insert content but they do this differently The difference comes in how they re used Macros are elements of a template that are explicitly called but slots are like holes in a template that you expect other templates to fill in for you For example in Plone s case the portlets such as the calendar navigation and s
560. with You are here The normally green tabs across the top of content This will show only if the content is editable by the current user The actual tabs shown are de termined by actions This determines how the tabs are rendered in HTML The little drop down actions in the top right corner of the context bar A message shown whenever some thing changes The header on a piece of content The main part of a piece of content The bottom part of a piece of content where the comments on an object will appear Slot or Macro Macro cacheheaders in global_cache_settings Slot head_slot Slot css_slot Slot javascript_head_slot Macro site_actions in global_siteactions Macro quick_search in global_searchbox Macro portal_tabs in global_sections Macro personal_bar in global_personalbar Macro path_bar in global_pathbar Macro content _ views in global_contentviews Macro content_actions in global_contentviews Macro portal_message in global_statusmessage Slot header Slot main Slot sub 184 Name Description Slot or Macro Left portlets The slots or portlets show on the left Macro left_column in of a page There are a few definitions portlets fetcher here column one slot is the whole left column and portlets one slot is then the slot If neither of these slots is de fined it calls the macro Right portlets The slots or portlets show on the right Macro right_column in of a page See
561. wn in Figure 13 5 You can now alter and edit your Word document Each time you save the file it will be loaded back into Plone and transformed 388 iy 1140 0 localhost 8080 Plone Professional_Resume doc body Microsoft Word contents File Edit View Insert Format Tools Table Window Help k sHai6R 8 76 x 2 2 Arial Black 2 Snagit EY Window or t see pe ee Be ee pe ee aA pee en ge ee peewee Gaue Profession Title Professional Res Body Max Benson Experience Max Benson Exp enence 1990 1994 Arbor Shoe Southridge SC National Sales Manager Increased sales from 50 million to 100 million Doubled sales per representative from 5 million to 10 million Suggested new products that increased earnings by 23 2Bee ofal 4 Page 1 Sec 1 1 1 At 1 Ini Coli REC TRK ExT ovr a a Figure 13 5 The document loaded into Word TIP http sf net projects archetypes http www logilab org projects portaltransforms documentation 13 1 6 1 Going Further Writing Content Types in a UML Diagram So you have a complicated content type and the idea of writing it manually is boring Well never fear because ArchGenXML is here This is a neat product that allows you to write your content in a UML graphical modeling tool and develop a product straight from that Phillip Auspberg developed ArchGenXML and Jens Klein has provided some excellent docu menti
562. xplains in great detail all the options The following are the essential options to set http_port 80 httpd_accel_host virtual httpd_accel_port 0 http_access allow all http_access allow localhost These last two lines are security rules for allowing access from browsers Because this was tested behind a firewall these are lax rules If you re running Squid externally you should read up on access rules in detail The easiest way to secure this is to change http_access allow all to http_access deny all Finally add the following line to the configuration file redirect_program usr bin squidGuard c etc squid squidGuard conf This sets up the redirect through Squid Guard using the configuration file at etc squid squidGuard conf SquidGuard doesn t come with a configuration file but a stan dard one that uses the virtual host configuration looks like the following dbhome var lib squidguard db logdir var log squid acl default redirect http 192 168 2 1 8080 CCC VirtualHostBase http www agmweb ca 80 CCC Plone VirtualHostRoot p CCC Finally Squid has the configuration you need to redirect traffic so that the host monster under stands it Incoming requests will be handled by Squid and then passed to Plone 289 10 1 3 2 3 Microsoft Internet Information Services Using Internet Information Services IIS isn t my preferred server of choice however many companies use IIS so I ve included this sectio
563. y generator python lt xml version 1 0 encoding utf 8 7 gt lt DOCTYPE html PUBLIC W3C DTD XHTML 1 0 Transitional EN http www w3 org TR xhtml1 DTD xhtmli transitional dtd gt lt html xmlns http www w3 org 1999 xhtm1 gt lt head gt lt title gt source2html py lt title gt lt meta http equiv Content Type content text html charset utf 8 gt lt link rel stylesheet href default css gt lt head gt This means you just need to look at this API and alter it slightly Add a module called source py in the PloneSilverCity directory In this you ll write the code that will provide the interface to the library this new module contains no Zope specific or Plone specific code at this point This module has three main modules it ll tell you all the possible languages you can use it ll take some text and return the correct parser and finally it ll actually perform the translation First add the following create_generator function which gives you the correct parser from SilverCity import LanguageInfo from StringIO import StringIO def create_generator source_file_name None generator_name None Make a generator from the given information about the object such as its source and type if generator_name return LanguageInfo find_generator_by_name generator_name else if source_file_name h LanguageInfo guess_language_for_file source_file_name return h get_default_html_generator else
564. y the following tips help you find an action e If you re looking at an action on a piece of content such as view or edit then it s on the particular content type in the portal_types tool e If you re looking at an action for the site then it s in the portal_action tool e If you can t find it so far look in a related tool for example joining and logging in are in portal_membership e If you can t find the action you re looking for after trying the previous tips go to portal_actions to see the list of tools and look through all the action providers Plone looks up the actions for content types in the following manner e For an object all the actions are queried e For each action the conditions permissions and visible properties are checked if they pass then the action will be returned 308 e Each action will be shown in the user interface usually in the form of tabs at the top of the content or the top of site e The URL for this action is the URL of the object with the actual Action ap pended to the end For example on a document at http localhost com Plone Document123 the URL for an edit would be http localhost com Plone Document123 document_edit_form You should notice an important security issue here the values for the conditions permissions and visible properties relate to showing the action in the list of actions This means if users really wanted they could alter the URL and go to ht
565. y designed to be an industry strength server and since it s feature complete it s no longer being developed By keeping a server such as Apache up to date you re ensuring that a robust secure server is facing the world Of course if you re developing an intranet or other application with trusted users this may not be an issue Figure 10 5 shows how such a setup would exist the figure doesn t show actual computers just services A request would normally come from the Internet to the firewall and then go to Apache and then to Plone It could be that these are all different boxes The essential point is that there should be no access to Plone from untrusted users except through a proxy 283 Firewall Request External Y Proxying server e g Apache Internal Proxy after re write Y Virtual Host Monster Internal traversal Plone i Figure 10 5 How virtual hosting works Putting a Web server such as Apache in front of Plone provides a whole host of useful services that ZServer doesn t have For example Apache can provide the following Uniform Resource Locator URL rewriting Secure Sockets Layer SSL support caching content deflation vir tual hosting proxying to other Web services incoming request sanitation and so on The most commonly asked question is how to change a URL from http localhost 8080 Plone into something more friendly such as http yoursite com This is called URL rewriting Whilst
566. y make Plone perform better Plone is a complicated system that requires processing power and memory In general it s recommended you don t go into production with a machine slower than 2GHz with less than 1GB of Random Access Memory RAM if youre serving a large Web site It works fine with setups as low as 500MHz and 64MB of memory for more modest sites however For advanced information about the performance caching and acceleration of Plone see Chapter 14 For a base installation of Plone you ll need about 50MB of hard drive space If you already have installations of Zope or Python then this will be a great deal less you ll need about 2MB You must also account for the Plone object database which can grow to almost any size depending upon the amount of data you store To use Plone you need a Web browser that can access the server If users want to log into your site then they must have cookies enabled JavaScript isn t required but will provide a richer user experience Because of the large amount of Cascading Style Sheets CSS in Plone modern browsers will see the correct Plone interface in a richer more attractive way however it should be quite functional in any reasonable browser I recommend any of the following browsers e Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 5 and later e Netscape 7 0 and later e Mozilla 1 0 and later e Opera 7 0 and later e Konqueror 3 0 and later e Safari 1 0 and later 15 16 Plone als
567. you can gain emergency access here There is currently no emergency user configured Figure 9 16 Creating a new emergency user To create a new user click Create User In the pop up dialog box add a username and pass word This will create a file that contains the username and password on the file system 269 Similarly clicking Change Password will alter that user s password After adding or altering a password you ll need to restart Zope To restart Plone go to the Control tab click Stop and then click Start Next click Manage Root and give the username and password you just entered You ll be logged in as the emergency user which means you can t create objects but you can now create a new user for yourself and log in as that user 9 1 5 2 Using External Authentication Systems Plone stores all its users inside the Zope object database in a separate user list as you saw in Chapter 8 As ever this isn t perfect and at some point you may want to use another service to authenticate your users The most common alternative system is LDAP or Microsoft s Active Directory which communicates using LDAP However you may actually want to integrate with another application that stores its users in a relational database At the time of writing ActiveState s ASPN site uses Zope for all the content but users can authenticate by using Microsoft s Passport system Actually installing extra user authentication schemes is p
568. you the news as well but in the following sections I ll show how to remove that 4 1 3 8 Altering the Site Tabs In a Plone site various tabs refer to different sections or parts of a site Using tabs is a familiar concept in Web site design and is common in sites such as Amazon MSN and Plone sites 94 Two main types of tabs exist portal tabs and content tabs The portal tabs are blue and appear at the top of the Plone site The default ones are home news and members The following sections show how to customize these The content tabs are green and appear when an item can be edited The content tabs as the name suggests are related to content Chapter 11 covers how to alter these tabs The tabs you see in a Plone site are formed by a collection of actions so to understand how to modify these tabs you ll take a quick look at actions in general 4 1 3 8 1 Introducing Actions In Plone certain people can perform certain tasks at different times in different parts of the site These various tasks are called actions Plone translates them into tabs links and other elements They re a highly configurable way of providing navigational elements for a site Each action has the following properties that can be configured in the ZMI Exactly where you configure them depends upon where the action is stored The following is a list of the properties for a default action Name This is a user friendly name for the action This name is of
569. ypes SQLStorage import PostgreSQLStorage from config import PROJECTNAME schema BaseSchema Schema IntegerField age validators isInt storage PostgreSQLStorage widget IntegerWidget label Your age StringField email validators isEmail 392 index TextIndex storage PostgresSQLStorage widget StringWidget label Email class PersonSQL BaseContent Qur person object schema schema registerType PersonSQL PROJECTNAME Finally restart Plone and register your content type in your Plone site You re now ready to test it If you create a PersonSQL object everything should proceed as normal and as expected for the content type But of course the real test is if you look at your database You ll see that in the database you have a new table called personsql and in that table you ll find four columns uid parentuid age and email Using psql you can see this db d List of relations Schema Name Type Owner public personsql table www data db d personsql Table public personsql Column Type Modifiers che ESS eee SE RE SARU te uid text not null parentuid text age int email text Indexes personsql_pkey primary key btree uid The column for age has been created as an int and the column for email has been created as text These are mappings created
570. ython AccessControl Owned py 79 DeprecationWarning Owned getOwner 1 is deprecated please use getOwnerTuple instead DeprecationWarning Created initial database content look at etc plone2 main zope conf Run then etc rc d init d plone2 start to start Plone2 you may create new Plone instances with mkploneinstance As shown in the previous output to start Plone run the following etc rc d init d plone2 start To test that Plone is working use a browser to go to http localhost 8080 you should see the Plone welcome page The username plone and the password plone have been created for wk you 2 1 2 3 Installing on Debian Linux Plone is a standard package in Debian and moves through the standard release process so you ll want to either get the stable or get the unstable version of Plone depending upon how your Debian installation is configured To install Plone simple use Debian s apt system to get the package This is an example installation 26 agmweb home andy apt get install plone Reading Package Lists Done Building Dependency Tree Done The following extra packages will be installed zope zope cmf zope cmfcalendar zope cmfcore zope cmfdefault zope cmfplone zope cmftopic zope cmfworkflow zope formulator zopectl Suggested packages zope cmfwiki python unit zope devguide zope book Recommended packages zope cmfforum zope localizer The following NEW packages will be installed plone zope zo

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