Collective.xdv headaches
I've been wanting to use collective.xdv on a couple of projects I've been working on as a) it seems like a sensible approach to Plone theming and b) the thought of playing around with all those portlet managers and zcml code again makes me want to sob.
As anyone who's played around with xdv will know, getting it to install is not the easiest thing to do. Having said that I've managed to get it working on OSX (both Leopard and Snow Leopard) after following the documentation, and even got it working on Windows. After these minor triumphs I thought actually installing it on my Ubuntu web server (running Ubuntu 8.04) would be a breeze. Not so.
I followed the general install instructions on plone.org to get xdv set up but buildout tripped over when trying to install lxml. So, no xdv. Ok, so I followed the instructions for installing on OSX and added 'lxml' to the parts = section and used the static lxml recipe à la OSX:
[lxml]
recipe = z3c.recipe.staticlxml
egg = lxml
force = false
This time lxml installed and buildout ran. But, when I started up Plone I was unable to add a new Plone site, getting this error:
('No traversable adapter found', {'extension_profiles': ({'product': 'kupu', 'description': 'Kupu is a cross-browser visual editor.', 'for': , 'title': 'Kupu', 'version': u'1.4.16', 'path': 'plone/profiles/default', 'type': 2, 'id': 'kupu:default'},), 'args': (), 'base_profiles': (), 'default_profile': 'Products.CMFPlone:plone'})
After posting to plone-users with this and the zope debug traceback, Martin Aspeli isolated where the problem was occurring and suggested clearing out my buildout-cache(s) before trying again.
In the meantime I stumbled across this page describing how to install Deliverance on Ubuntu 8.04 and 9.04. This suggested that you need to use libxslt1-dev as part of lxml as opposed to libxslt-dev. So, I gave this a try which worked.
In summary here's what I did to get it working:
- Removed 'lxml' from the 'parts' = section of my buildout.cfg
- Removed the [lxml] section from my buildout.cfg
- Cleared down my buildout-cache of any lingering lxml products
- Ran # apt-get install libxslt1-dev
- Ran buildout
When I started up Zope I was able to add a new Plone successfully and install xdv.
The irony of all this is that xdv is supposed to save designers and integrators time (and sanity) when theming a Plone site. However, getting it running has actually cost me a big slice of time I don't really have. Due to the problems I had I more or less decided to abandon Plone and use Wordpress for one of the sites I'm building.
Still, early days for xdv I guess.
Review of Plone 3 for Education by Erik Rose
Packt Publishing's latest addition to its Plone-related titles is Plone 3 for Education by Erik Rose. It's an excellent short introduction to setting up Plone within the context of a school or university, covering topics such as using Plone as a Virtual Learning Environment (VLE), installing third party products, using multimedia, theming your Plone-based sites and system-level concerns. Despite its focus on education it would serve as useful companion for anyone starting out with Plone.
Erik Rose of Penn State University's WebLion group distills his considerable experience in using Plone in an educational context into ten chapters which roughly divide into three distinct sections: chapters one to seven concentrate on using third party products to extend Plone's functionality, chapter eight briefly examines theming and chapters nine and ten cover making your Plone site live and how to manage backups and upgrades.
The book assumes some familiarity with Plone, but to no great depth, at least for the first few chapters. Chapter four gets more advanced, covering how to extend Archetypes-based content types with schemaextender. I found this very useful and explained in a way that I didn't find overly complex.
Leaving setting up courses and faculty directories, many of the use cases in the first section of the book are common enough to be of interest to those outside education. Chapter five covers setting up blogs using a combination of standard Plone content types and add-ons, including Scrawl and QuillsEnabled. Chapter six covers multimedia, including the use of plugin media players such as collective.flowplayer and getting started with podcasting using Plone4Artists Audio.
The book provides and overview of Plone theming in chapter eight. This isn't exhaustive by any means (after all there is a separate, much bigger book dedicated to that subject) but should serve as a useful introduction to the subject.
As a non-systems person I found the last two chapters, "Going Live" and "Maintenance, backups and upgrades" useful summaries of some of the systems-level issues to be considered when running Plone-based sites. Chapter nine includes a handy section of setting up CacheFu and Squid to improve your site's performance; something it's vital to have at least a basic understanding of as anyone who's dabbled with Plone will know.
The book's main strength is in providing overviews of some of the main features and peculiarities of Plone without overloading the reader with too much detail. For anyone operating as a one-person outfit or with limited time will find it extremely useful.
New Plone-specific blog
"Sorry, there seems to be an error" is my new Plone-specific blog. Well, there's not much new about it — at the moment it's mainly made up of archival posts taken from my main website which was losing a bit of focus.
The name is taken from the message I seem to get the most when I'm creating new Plone sites.
Posts will concentrate on Plone theming, integration and any other random Plone-related stuff I stumble across.