vsbabu.org : zope

Interview with Ploners

2004-01-17T19:27:31+05:00

OSDir.com Interview: In October O'Reilly Network and OSDir held a contest where our readers could vote from a number of open source projects to send six to Comdex as representatives of the open source community. Surprisingly one of the least known came out on top of the list over other popular projects like Eclipse, OpenOffice, KDE and Gnome. At least it was a surprise to us. I've followed up with Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan of the Plone project to find out a bit more about this darkhorse, and why it was so popular.

Formulator makes life easy

2003-07-17T18:57:26+05:00

I had made various notes to self to look into Formulator for Zope, over the last year. Never got around to it till now.

According to the author Formulator is an extensible framework that eases the creation and validation of web forms.

Very nice. With two small Python scripts and a PageTemplate, I could make a system for making web databases - ok, think of it like a spreadsheet, or a database with just one table. I can see enormous uses for this, mainly for making quickly sharable datasets on the web.

Server side python

2003-07-09T11:17:18+05:00

Russell Beattie has a post about the subject. I made a comment on his weblog about that.

For future reference, I'm posting my comment as an entry here too.

Point to ponder: I feel kind of silly posting my comment there as a post here. Feels like duplication (well, it is) and some kind of copyright issue. Zzzz…

Resetting Zope's session timeout

2003-05-16T09:49:11+05:00

Zope's transient object session timeout defaults to 20 minutes. To set the timeout, go to /temp_folder/session_data and change the timeout there. When the timeout is changed, all objects in the session are cleared - so better not do this while people are on-line.

Unfortunately, this value gets reset to 20 minutes, every time Zope is restarted. My Zope servers are restarted every morning at 6:30am. I hacked in a reset script that is called at 7:10am every day. This script sets the timeout to 3 hours. It can be called using XML-RPC or through simple wget.

Getting undo history

2003-03-25T18:15:16+05:00

Something funny was going on with a Zope installation I am interested in. I wanted to eliminate the "human error" factor :-) Like everything in Zope, it is pretty easy if you are brave enough to look at the source.

Plone roles on

2003-03-24T18:02:57+05:00

I've not been tracking Plone development for a while - an year to be exact. Recently, I got a mail from Plone team that demo accounts can be had at demo.plone.org. I registered myself and checked out some of the installed products.

It rocks!

zxref

2003-01-27T11:17:10+05:00

I'm working on a Zope project that has quite a few code and HTML objects, in one folder. For programming documentation, and for quick reference, I wanted to print out a report that shows a list of all the objects in the folder and other objects in the same folder that calls this.

Here is a simple Python Script to do that.

Confidential Python?

2003-01-21T17:39:55+05:00

I love Python mainly because of the elegance with which it helps in solving problems. Those strengths are now causing a problem :-)

Here is the deal. I've an upcoming requirement - it is not yet finalized, but I've a strong feeling this will be there as an afterthought - where there needs to be confidential validations on confidential data

"Getting" Zope!

2003-01-07T06:36:40+05:00

Huima has some excellent points on what makes it difficult to make people understand and support Zope. Readers have some excellent comments too. Personally, I believe, Zope Corporation needs to have a dedicated marketing team that can map solutions based on Zope to common customer needs. Not everyone gets the idea that it solves 80% of *almost any* problem right-away and 20% is for you to solve, very easily.

Zope and TCPA

2003-01-06T14:57:49+05:00

An interesting thread from the Zope mailing list: Zope killed by TCPA?

Why Zope?

2002-12-17T19:07:40+05:00

The perennial question again came up in Zope mailing list. Considerations for using Zope. It is an interesting thread to read.

Another thread is about opinions from ex-PHP developers. I wanted to write about it, but Wankyu Choi explained it very nicely and then a bit more.

Running a Tidy XML-RPC service using Zope

2002-12-16T09:57:30+05:00

Zope can expose every object via XML-RPC. For more information on Zope's XML-RPC capability, read the excellent How-To by Amos Latteier.

I use a simple Python script to clean up HTML using Tidy. Here's the code for that. Just put it under Zope and you can run your own Tidy XML-RPC service easily!

CMFCollectorNG

2002-12-04T09:44:21+05:00

Andreas Jung released the next generation issue tracker tool that can be used within CMF. CMFCollectorNG. In my opinion, here are the best features:

Zope on Mandrake

2002-11-18T11:29:54+05:00

Nexedi maintains RPM packages of Zope, compiled for Mandrake. Very easy to install using urpmi. Check out the link above to see their wiki on using it.

As of this writing, they provide 2.5.1 RPMS, not Zope 2.6.

ZPT Basics

2002-11-01T10:20:16+05:00

DevShed.com concludes its four part series on Zope Page Templates. I liked the presentation of this article a bit more than their usual articles. In my opinion, Page Templates are as close as you can get to the holy grail of content-logic separation.