Monthly Archives: 2009-7

Putting views, like sitemap, into Plone content tree using Easy Template add-on

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Plone has two kind of pages

  • Content pages which have a path and will appear in the navigation and in the sitemap. These are stored in the database.
  • View based pages and template based pages which usually present an action  (accessibility, sitemap, contact info form). They do not appear in the navigation. They are stored as source code on the file system. You cannot navigate to view based pages and just click edit. To change them you need to use various customization methods (add-on product, Zope management interface) to modify the code.

Sometimes it is desirable, for the sake of uniformness, to put view based pages (accessibility, sitemap) into the content tree. For example, one could want to have the sitemap link appearing only in the navigation tree under the site section “About this site”.

Plone add-on product Easy Template provides an easy method to show any Plone view(s) on a normal page. Easy Template uses Django like template syntax (Jinja 2 engine). It gives you great power to drop dynamic content easily on pages. Easy Template also has some security awarness ensuring the members using it cannot escape from their sandbox.

Easy Template works in WYSIWYG and non-WYSIWYG modes

  • You can directly mix templates into text in Visual Editor (Kupu). This is mostly useful for non-HTML aware content editors, who use WYSIWYG editor and can use snippets from a reference card prepared by a developer. Note: Visual Editor has some limitations or undesired behavior. Sometimes it tries to put arbitary HTML tags into text (  which breaks the template code).
  • You can write templatized HTML source code in “raw” mode. You can write source code on “Template” schemata in Edit view.

1. Example how to show a sitemap on an arbitary Plone page

  1. Install Easy Template (if you are a developer I suggest you to try trunk version)
  2. Create a Templated document content
  3. Write some arbitary text in Kupu
  4. Put in the code snippet {{ view(“sitemap”, “createSiteMap”) }} which triggers the sitemap view rendering
  5. Save and view the document in View mode

Picture 1

It turns out to be:

Picture 3

There is no such thing as a “views reference” for Plone. View names and functions can be figured out by searching and reading through ZCML and Python files in Plone source tree. Some developer insight is needed. For example. for sitemap we can do the grep search:

grep -Ri --include="*.zcml" sitemap *

Then read Products/CMFPlone/browser/configure.zcml and Products/CMFPlone/browser/sitemap.py.

The same thing works in portlets. Use Templated Portlet portlet type. See Easy Template PyPi homepage for the full reference of the product’s potential.

About the author Mikko Ohtamaa

Setup.py sdist not including all files

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Setuptools has many silent failure modes. One of them is failure to include all files in sdist release (well not exactly a failure, you could RTFM, but the default behavior is unexpected). This post will serve as a google-yourself-answer for this problem, until we get new, shinier, Distribute solving all of our problems.

I b0rked the release for plonetheme.twinapex. Version 1.0 package didn’t include media assets and ZCML configuration files. Luckily Python community reacted quickly and I got advised how to fix it.

By default, setuptools include only *.py files. You need to explicitly declare support for other filetypes in MANIFEST.in file.

Example MANIFEST.in (plonetheme, built in PyDev):

recursive-include plonetheme *
recursive-include docs *
global-exclude *pyc
global-exclude .project
global-exclude .pydevproject

About the author Mikko Ohtamaa

XHTML mobile profile transformer and cleaner for Python

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Mobile phones, and especially mobile site validators, are very picky about the validy of XHTML. It must not be any XHTML, but special mobile profile XHTML. Also, search engines like Google, will punish you in the mobile search results if your site fails to conform to mobile profile.

This is especially troublesome if you display external content (RSS feeds, ATOM feeds) on your mobile site. Incoming HTML cannot be guaranteed to follow any specification.

To solve this problem, we have created gomobile.xhtmlmp Python library which helps you to transform any HTML to content to valid XHTML MP. The library is piloted on plonecommunity.mobi site which  uses aggregated content from varying sources. The library is based on lxml.html.Cleaner. The library is part of GoMobile project which aims to create world class Python mobile web development tools.

1. Highlights

  • Turn any incoming HTML/XHTML to mobile profile compatible
  • Enforce ALT text on images – especially useful for external tracking images (feedburner tracker). ALT texts are required by XHTML MP.
  • Protect against Cross-Site Scripting Attacks (XSS) and other nastiness, as provided by lxml.xhtml.clean
  • Unicode compliant – eats funky characters

As an example we integrated gomobile.xhtmlmp  to Feedfeeder Plone add-on product.

Enjoy.

Helping people and writing Plone developer API manual – killing two birds with one stone

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Plone developer API documentation could be better. For this very reason, people ask questions regarding how to do a simple thing or two in Plone code. Asking questions is often the only way to fight through the monstrous codebase. Luckily these questions usually receive answers from the active community in product-developers@ list and IRC.  See also prior mailing list dicussion.

However, asking the same questions again and again, or asking the question in the first place, is undesirable way to proceed. A proper way to fix the problem would be have a proper documentation voiding the need to ask the question in the first place. Since documenting Plone API is a huge task, I propose the following to get things bootstrapped:

1. Wherever and whenever someone asks a question regarding Plone code development do not answer directly

2. Instead, write the example code snippet and commit it to https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.developermanual/trunk (collective commit access needed)

3. Give the link to the SVN trunk file as an answer This way we should slowly start building up a “developer reference” which covers the most common API use cases.

https://svn.plone.org/svn/collective/collective.developermanual/trunk is a mess. Do not care about this little detail. Just toss in your .txt files. The docteam and I will properly proof-read and structure it in the future. As soon as we code snippets keep flowing in I am happy!

1. Example

Here is how I helped some unlucky person struggling with DataGridFrield and created some documentation during the process.

Private email question:

I have been using your excellent DataGridField add-on on a projet, where as webmanager I add variable lists of information within an objet.  However now I would like to build a script that would insert new rows and content automatically : let’s say a User calls a specific objet ‘A’ from time to time, I would like to have a DataGridField that will record incrementally these calls (with columns like “when”, “how long”, “what result”) each time they are made, without the User having to do anything.

I tried to find an answer in the code but I’m not fluent enough in Python yet to understand everything I read.  Could you tell me how I could build that script or where shall I look for clues ?

Private email answer:

I hope this helps – wrote it for you:

Please also read some guidelines I tried to come up for documentation.