Extending and customizing Plone 3

Note

I don’t remember this talk at all, but I see from my notes instructions for both buildout and generic setup, two things that caused me a lot of grief during my Zope/Plone days. In retrospect, these are tools that employ configuration over convention, which probably explains my dislike. (Danny 07/05/2011)

by Martin Aspelli

Plone core developer and author.

Agenda

  • Love the buildout
  • Embrace the egg
  • Policy: Repeatable
  • Dependencies
  • GenericSetup
  • Tests
  • Visual customization
  • Through the web development sucks

Interesting stuff

  • Plone 3 is built off smaller packages so easier to test and reuse
  • They want to nix through-the-web development cause it SUCKS
  • Tell SVN to ignore Eggs

Glossary terms

  • Policy Product
  • A pattern whereby a project has a single product which upon installation, installs all dependencies and customizations in one step.

Buildout

Sample:

$ paster create -t plone3_buildout test
$ python bootstrap.py

kewl stuff - start building Plone 3 this way instead of manually http://plone.org/documentation/tutorial/buildout

Policy Product

  • (((Read the tutorial on buildout!)))

  • (((Read onout setuptools (easy setup) handles versions with dependencies)))

  • Create a new egg:

    $ cd src
$ paster create -t plone example.policy
  • Namespace is example, package is policy, Zope 2 product is True, Zip-safe is False
  • Tell bouildout about products
    • Declare it as a development egg so buildoutdoesn;t go to cheese shop
    • edit things so its reconginized to Zope 2 and zcml
    • Edit buildout.cfg:
eggs =
     elementtree
     example.policy
 develop =
     src/example.policy
 [instance]
 zcml =
  ???

  • rerun buildout:

    $./bin/buildout -o (or do -N to not update the egg)

  • Egg now ready

  • zcml stuff

    • install dependencies:
      • <include package=”pone.browserlayer” />

Generic Setup

  • XML syntax - bleah

  • Extension profile bolts ont a base profile to amend or change configuration.

    • This is the most useful kind for third party developers

  • edit configure.zcml

  • include GS namespace
  • add in generic setup tag

  • managed via portal_setup but portal_quickinstaller knows how to install them too:

    $ mkdir -p example.policy/example/policy/profiles/default

Installation tests

  • Need to get boilerplate off presentation documentation
  • This sets up a Plone site for testing with our example
  • create test_setup.py which tests that we got basic setup right

Visual Customization

  • Zope 3 resources are customized with the ‘layer’ ZCML
  • Visual components involved