Customizing the viewlets in main_template — Plone CMS: Open Source Content Management
Originally from del.icio.us/tag/plone by
Maurits van Rees: eXtremeManagement on Plone 3.0
At the beginning of the assignment, eXtremeManagement was fit for
Plone versions 2.1 and 2.5. We want is working with Plone 3.0 too, as
that is expected to be released in spring or summer 2007. At the time
of writing (halfway through June) Plone 3.0 is in beta status. So
some things may still change that eXtremeManagement needs to react to.
But currently all automatic tests of the eXtremeManagement pass for
Plone 2.5 and 3.0. Plus: a test of migrating the current database of
the Zest projects site to Plone 3.0 worked fine. So what was done to
reach that point?
General actions
The general steps that every product needs while upgrading from Plone
2.5 to Plone 3.0 are described in the Upgrade guide on plone.org.
Some steps were already taken for Plone 2.5, like setting up the
workflows with GenericSetup. Some steps are very simple. An example
is that this:
get_transaction().commit(1)
needs to be replaced with:
transaction.commit(1)
The other ones that needed checking in eXtremeManagement were:
-
Searching users/groups via the Membership tool is deprecated; it
turns out eXtremeManagement does not use any of the deprecated
methods, so fifteen minutes of checking was all that was needed
here. -
Portlets have a new infrastructure. Needed action: check that our
classic portlets still work in Plone 3.0. They turn out to work
fine. In the future we may want to investigate what the benefits of
switching to the new portlet system are. A downside is that this
would be incompatible with Plone 2.5, so it would require a separate
branch. -
main_template.pt now uses Zope 3 viewlets. eXtremeManagement is
not using an own version of that template, so no action was needed.
In fact, we were not even using that template, which does not
sound like the best idea. So I changed our templates to use the
page layout as given by the main_template. -
The "Sharing" tab is now a global action. In previous Plone
versions you had to explicitly add a Sharing action to your content
type if you wanted to see the sharing tab when viewing that content
in the Plone user interface. On the sharing tab you can share this
content with others. Specifically in the case of eXtremeManagement:
we have this tab on Projects, so we can give developers the Employee
role and assign Tasks to them.On Plone 3.0 this action is now always available. This means that
currently some of our content types actually list this tab twice, as
they explicitly add it to themselves already. The problem now is
that you cannot actually do this correctly on Plone 2.5 and 3.0 at
the same time: either you have no sharing tab in 2.5 or you have two
sharing tabs in 3.0. Since 3.0 is beta still, I opted to have it
working correctly in Plone 2.5 only. Once Plone 3.0 is officially
released, we can easily fix this on a branch. Or probably: at that
point we can move 2.5 compatibility to its own branch and have trunk
specifically for 3.0 support.
More fixes
There were some other steps that needed to be taken before
eXtremeManagement would work on Plone 3.0. Some might need to be
added to the general list and some may be specific for
eXtremeManagement.
Viewing content
When you have a Content Management System like Plone it is nice if you
can actually see some content. At first try after migrating the
current Zest database to Plone 3.0 on a local test instance, none of
our content types were actually visible. Change set 43353 lists the
changes that were done to make ProjectFolders viewable again.
(Change set 43354 has the changes to the other content types.) Some
lines could be removed from content/ProjectFolder.py as they were
already in the GenericSetup profile. That profile needed some changes
too, in this case the file
profiles/default/types/ProjectFolder.xml. The most important are
the additions of the aliases. Those lines should now look like this:
<alias from="(Default)" to="base_view"/> <alias from="edit" to="base_edit"/> <alias from="properties" to="base_metadata"/> <alias from="view" to="base_view"/>
It could be that this is only needed because our types inherit from
OrderedBaseFolder and not from e.g. ATFolder. If your own
content type is also not visible on Plone 3.0, I would advise you to
add these aliases as a first try.
Actually, the properties alias is superfluous on Plone 3.0 (but
not on 2.5, so we will keep it for now). On 3.0 the properties of
content can be reached via the normal edit form.
Portlet classes
Some html classes have been deprecated, so you should not use them in
your templates anymore. Specifically, get rid of portletItemLast
and lastItem in portlets. See change sets 43533 and 43987. And
get rid of portletDetails in favour of portletItemDetails.
See change set 43555. Adding a header and footer like in 43535 is
also nice:
<dt class="portletHeader">
<span class="portletTopLeft"></span>
Portlet title
<span class="portletTopRight"></span>
</dt>
...
<dd class="portletFooter">
<span class="portletBottomLeft"></span>
<span class="portletBottomRight"></span>
</dd>
Workflow actions
The general list of things to do when preparing your product for Plone
3.0 already mentions workflows: they need to be done in GenericSetup.
That was already done for eXtremeManagement. But this turned out not
to be enough. Our content types had a drop down list with workflow
actions, but they were not clickable. So you could not do any
workflow actions, at least not from the usual drop down workflow menu.
This has been put right in change set 43600 by adding a url to the
workflow action, instead of having it empty (which worked fine in
Plone 2.5). This is the change for
profiles/default/workflows/eXtreme_Iteration_Workflow/definition.xml:
<transition transition_id="complete" title="Finish"
new_state="completed">
- <action url="" category="workflow">Finish</action>
+ <action
+ url="%(content_url)s/content_status_modify?workflow_action=finish"
+ category="workflow">Finish</action>
But this means that most add-on Products for Plone have no functioning
workflow in Plone 3.0, assuming that most Products have an empty url
for that action. This also means that when you change the id of a
transition id, you also need to remember to change the url, else the
old transition is still done or at least tried. In fact, did you
notice that exact mistake in the code above? Probably not. I know I
did not. 
The transition id is complete, so the action url
should have ended with that as well and not with finish.
Can we make this simpler? Yes. I provided a fix for core Plone so it
would accept the empty urls that most workflows have. I only just got
commit privileges to core Plone, partly based on this proposed fix
probably, so change set 15335 is my first actual commit there. This
meant that I could revert my earlier change to eXtremeManagement.
Maurits van Rees: eXtremeManagement on Plone 3.0
Originally from Planet Plone by
from Yoda http://plonewars.com/2007/06/18/maurits-van-rees-extrememanagement-on-plone-30/
“Very deliberately there was no ‘CMS Watch data’ and to arbitrarily assign numbers is totally lame.