Plone/Zope

by Kuiyu Chang — last modified Aug 25, 2008 04:42 PM

Relating to Zope/Plone

Learning Plone/Zope

Setup

Install Linux for best performance and stability, the Ubuntu Linux Distribution is highly recommended! If you use windows, cygwin (a POSIX environment on Windows) is strongly recommended.
Install latest version of Plone . A self-contained Windows Plone installer is also available.
Install subversion
(Optional) Install Eclipse IDE with Plone
(Optional) Install PostgreSQL DBMS

Essential Reading

Plone How-tos
Plone patterns and best practices
- See last section on how to debug Plone code
ZPT - Zope Page Templates
Creating content for Plone 2.1
Working with structured Text
Archetypes
ZSQL: connecting Plone to external DBMS

Online Reference

Sample Code

Archetypes
- Quick & dirty way to build your product, check out the following into your plone instance: ArchExample
  - do a restart after you check out this, or enable debugging
  - when installed, ArchExample will create a new custom content type called: article, which you can add anywhere within your plone site using the add content link. You can modify the source to create different fields in this custom content type.
Plone Collective has hundreds of Plone products

Enable Debugging

Recommended: set debug-mode=on in {instancehome}/etc/zope.conf

This way you won't have to restart zope everytime you make some changes to it.

This works for most scripts and files except for i18n translation po files, which will still require a restart for changes to be effective.

To debug cpy and cpt scripts, where print statements do not work, call:

  context.plone_log("print whatever you wish to debug")

to print something to the event log.

Also read about how to debug insufficient privileges

Install Zope/Plone

Executive Summary

Zope is an application server. Plone is a collection of modules served by Zope. You need to understand this basic concept to follow the correct installation order:

Install Zope, then

Install Plone

1 Install Zope

1.2 Linux Users

Install Zope using your Linux distro's package manager. The following steps are for Debian/Ubuntu Linux console:

1 Switch to root user by typing the following command followed by your user (not root) password:
sudo bash
2 Install zope2.9 (or latest version compatible with your target plone version, I am using 2.9 in this example, for your case, replace 2.9 with the correct version) using ubuntu package manager, or the following commands (first line updates your local DB):
apt-get update
apt-get install zope2.9
3 Create a zope instance (which is just a directory where all your zope db/config files are stored), specifying a directory (/var/lib/zope/mypreciouszope, and picking an admin login/password by entering:
/usr/lib/zope2.9/bin/mkzopeinstance.py
4 Restart Zope:
/etc/init.d/zope2.9 restart
5 Now you should be able to connect to your local zope instance via a web browser using the URL http://localhost:9673

By default port 8080 is used for Zope Management Interface (ZMI) and port 80 for plone on Windows, different from Linux which uses 9673 for both ZMI and plone. Prior to installing, please disable any Web servers like IIS or Apache running on Windows or change the default plone and ZMI port numbers to some other values

1 Download the latest Plone for Windows installer from http://plone.org

2 Run the Plone installer, which will install both Zope (port 8080) and Plone (port 80) for you.

3 Fire up the Plone control panel by selecting start/All Programs/Plone/Plone

4 Start Plone via the Plone control panel

5 You can now access your

plonesite @ http://localhost:80 and ZMI @ http://localhost:8080

2.2 Linux Users

I strongly discourage you from installing Plone using the distro package manager because their version of Plone is typically out of date by a year or more. You should install Plone manually since it is very simple:

1 Download the latest Plone for all platforms (not "Plone for Linux" which requires compilation) from http://plone.org

2 Uncompress the downloaded file into /home/{yourname} and copy all the subdirectories within it, e.g., CMFPlone, ATContentTypes into your Zope instance's Products subdirectory, typically in /var/lib/zope/{yourzopeinstance}/Products/:
tar xvzf Plone-2.5.1-UnifiedInstaller.tgz
cd Plone-2.5.1
cp * /var/lib/zope/{yourzopeinstance}/Products/
3 Restart zope:
/var/lib/zope/bin/zopectl restart
4 Using the admin user/password you created in step 3 of Zope Installation, login to the Zope Management Interface (ZMI) http://localhost:9673

5 Select "add a new Plone Site", give it a name， e.g., mypreciousplone

6 You can now access your plonesite using the URL:
http://localhost:9673/mypreciousplone

How to unit-test Plone?

All students working on Plone projects must unit test their Plone products. Please learn to write professional code by writing unit-tests as you code.

Authenticate Plone 2.5 with OpenLDAP?