Problems in the caffeinecirculationsystem

This post belongs also to the "lessons learned" category. With Plone 3, ZEO and supervisor combination you've probably configured your supervisor to start plone instances by running $BUILDOUT/parts/client1/bin/runzope. Problem is that with Plone 4 your $BUILDOUT/parts/client folder doesn't contain anything else than etc folder. You know starting instances by targeting supervisor to use $BUILDOUT/bin/client1 fg doesn't work like you'd expect (supervisor would control the client1 script - not the actual plone process). My colleague Jussi Talaskivi figured that using 'console' argument instead of 'fg' for bin/client1 script should do the trick. With 'console' argument stopping, starting and restarting Plone 4 instances with supervisor works like a charm. Below is full example of working supervisor configuration. [buildout] parts = supervisor [supervisor] recipe = collective.recipe.supervisor port = 8200 user = xxxx password = ...

This is reminder for myself and hopefully for other people too so that they don't have to waste several hours of valuable time looking for this simple piece of information. If you have experience setting up Plone 3 with ZEO and tempstorage (so that your sessions won't disappear in the middle of hardcore content managing) you might have trouble setting up same kind of setup while using Plone 4. Thanks to David Glick who enlightened   me that plone.recipe.zeoserver doesn't include whole Zope 2 in it's Python environment anymore. In this specific scenario this means that even though you have tempstorage in your eggs folder it isn't included in pythonpath when zeoserver part is being processed and this leads to below error message: Error: could not load package tempstorage: No module named tempstorage Package name: 'tempstorage' File name: 'component.xml' Package path: None For help, use bin/zeo-server -h Solution to this is to add this simp...

I've seen in here and there someone mentioning that usability of Plone is very good. Lot's of people - me included - like the fact that in Plone you don't have separate content management interface compared to some of Plones rivals. That counts for something when we're talking about good usability. Still that is only one quite small part of the whole picture. So what else is there? What do people like in Plone and where are the rough edges for end users? If general consensus is that Plone does have good usability, where is the actual proof of that? On plone.org I found one page in developer documentation mentioning following:  "Plone differentiates itself on usability. The intuitiveness of the user interface is what attracts people to Plone the most." I interpret this sentence meaning about the "one view for all" approach. What bugs me in this is that this whole sentence about good usability is about how the UI works compared to Plones competi...

Jon Stahl wrote recently a blogpost about Plone being three times faster than Dropal, Joomla and Wordpress . We had a small discussion about this in my workplace and as my colleague pointed out this wasn't a really that comprehensive test that you could state Plone being 3 times faster than it's competitors. This seemed a bit unfair test considering how fast this has been spread in tweet/blogosphere, so I decided to repeat the test with a bit more critical viewpoint. What's wrong in the original test? No one would consider opinion poll with 10 answers nowhere near trustworthy - it's all the same with requests. I didn't want to put up all the cms so I just set up second best (Wordpress 2.9.1) and compared that to my Plone development site (4.0a3). As a comparsion I did the first test with same ab command Jon used and my iMac gave following results: Wordpress: 7.13 requests / second Plone: 17.10 requests / second So far we have clear winner and Jons data hol...

Not too many people know, that you can register new domains through Google. This can be done when you're registering for Google Apps Standard Edition which is free and somewhat stripped version of their Google Apps Premium Edition. Latter one is tailored more to suit business needs. With $10/year prize tag it's not cheapest option, but you'll get "private domain registration to protect against spam at no extra cost, full DNS control and domain management, automatically configured to work with Google services, email, calendar, instant messaging, web pages and more also at no extra charge". As a comparsion GoDaddy offers .org domains at $14.99/year so it's actually not that bad offer. Google actually is just collecting the data and sending it to their partners (godaddy, enome) which does the registration. I decided to give it a try at January 11th. To my big surprise things didn't went that smoothly. It's been now one week since my order - the domain...

Today I committed last modifications to Plone Finnish translations to Plone collective. Overall there were quite a lot of things to translate as Finnish translations were reviewed last time over 2 years ago when Plone 3 first time appeared. Plone has developed quite a lot since that and 3.x branch has had missing translations for Finnish users far too long (and still has - I made translations for the 4.x branch only). One thing what troubles me is that I'm not entirely happy about all the translations I made. For some words I found it damn difficult to try find the same - or at least almost the same - expression from Finnish dictionary. The expression power of our language isn't just there yet and trying to browse how people have translated same words in other projects proved the case. There just aren't Finnish equivalent words for the certain English words. What those difficult words were then? Here's few ones popping in my mind: commit, checkout, revision, portlet. ...

Since we splitted our one huge Plone site to several smaller ones we've been looking for the correct procedure to keep things running smoothly and to make updates as painless as possible. So far we haven't found the right way and every update has had some problems. Some of the problems are related to the fact that we have about 24 sites to maintain and adding a new content type to all of them means lots of work. Below are all the steps needed for update (and solutions we've founded so far). 1. Add your new product to buildout.cfg eggs and zcml list. Do this 24 times and you'll find yourself thinking there has to be better way. Luckily there is; you can extend your buildout.cfg with some general config file (eg. deployement.cfg). Most tutorials describe a way where you have those two files living side by side in filesystem and you run buildout with -c deployement.cfg option, but this doesn't remove the actual problem. We have our deployement.cfg living in diffe...