Peterbe.com - Stuff in Peter's head

World Plone Day here in London, England

October 21, 2008
0 comments Plone

On the 7th of November my company, Fry-IT is hosting the London arm of the World Plone Day in our office. It's basically an event for Plone developers, Plone companies and other people interested in Plone to meet up and promote or learn or share something about Plone. To quote the "FAQ":

"What is the goal of the World Plone Day?
The World Plone Day (WPD) is a worldwide event. Our goal is to promote and educate the worldwide public about of the benefits of using Plone in education, government, ngos, and in business."

The "invite" is here. I'm really looking forward to meeting everybody and put faces to people whose blogs and mailing lists posts I read. My colleague Lukasz has a nice map to our office and I recommend that you contact him to say you're coming.

Interesting lesson learnt on shortcut taking in usability

August 2, 2007
3 comments Plone

In Plone 2.1 (don't know about other versions) the default date input used by the CalendarWidget uses 5 dropdowns (year, month, day, hour, minute) plus a little popup calendar which you can use to avoid flipping the dropdowns. When the underlying value is not set the dropdowns look like this:


2007/--/-- [#] --:--

where the little [#] is the popup calendar widget. The year 2007 is preselected because they assume that most of the cases you'll just be selecting a month and a day since is highly likely that the year will be that of today's year. So far so good.

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Learning about ATFolder's security

March 22, 2007
0 comments Plone

I just learned something interesting about ATFolders in Plone. For the non-Plone readers, an ATFolder is Plone's take on a normal Zope Folder but based on Archetypes instead. To begin with, Plone overrides the function manage_addFolder which means that if you do context.portal_url.getPortalObject().manage_addFolder(...) in Plone you get an ATFolder instead of a normal Folder. Fair enough.

The problem I had was that ATFolders override the manage_delObjects() function not only is it's security defined in the container, it also does a security check within. I don't know why but I'm sure there's a reason. What this means is that you can't use some_at_folder.manage_delObjects([...]) in External Methods and expect no Unauthorized errors.

I solved this security problem I had by instead creating a normal Zope folder by doing it this way instead:


portal_root = self.portal_url.getPortalObject()
adder = portal_root.manage_addProduct['OFSP'].manage_addFolder
adder('PlainZopeFolder')

TAL here hack in Plone

April 28, 2005
1 comment Plone

Had to do a very useful and ugly but also smart hack in Plone today.

In the portal root I have a Document with Id index_html that the client is changing with the WYSIWYG editor. What I wanted to do was to change some METAL calls in the <head> tag of that one document. In fact, what I wanted to do was to cover up the left hand column which is done this way:


  <head>
       <metal:override fill-slot="column_one_slot" />
 </head>

The problem was that the index_html Document is a Document so I can't edit it's TAL. I could have customized document_view.pt but that would have applied for all Document objects in the site. Here's how I solved it:

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