fidzu : Plone

This monday and tuesday Plone GSoC student Martin Lundwall and Zope GSoC student Uli Fouquet together with yours truly and Martijn Faassen worked on their respective GSoC projects at a mini-sprint here in Paris, located at Pilot Systems. Day 1 consisted most of discussing what to do next and how to refactor zope.introspector, which is the module that is common for both projects. During day 2 we did much of the refactoring, and the result was that towards the end of the day we started to see some primitive GUI parts to access the introspector code in zope.introspector.

Basically, the idea is that with zope.introspector you call IInfos(object).infos() to get hold of a sequence of IInfo objects, that contain information on the object. What infos you get depends on what the object is, so you will get an ModuleInfo for a Module and a ObjectInfo for an Object, for example. You'll also get ViewInfo objects if you object has views, and you will get RegistrationInfo objects if your object is registered in the component registry. A second module, zope.introspectorui will hold views for all the information objects in zope.introspector (possibly these modules will be merged, we haven't made up our mind yet). It will be easy to extend this with new information modules, they are just adapters.

zope.introspector and zope.introspectorui both run under Zope2, Zope3 and Grok, and grokui.introspector will contain the Grok views to browser and search for objects. On the Zope2 side, plone.introspector will do the same (despite the name it's so far a pure Zope2 project and doesn't need Plone at all, but we couldn't come up with a better name, as zope.instropector is already taken).

The sprint was not only a success for introspection, we now have a good path forward for the UI of the introspectors, it's also a success for Grok and grokcore.view, as zope.introspectorui defines view with grokcore.view, and this works just fine under Zope2!

The path forward now is to finish the infrastructure and views. Then what's needed is more information adapters, and writing them is easy, so others can do that!

Thanks to Martin, Martijn and Uli for a couple of fun and productive days. Thanks to Pilot Systems for the conference room and the yummy coffee!

I'm planning to attend the Plone Conference 2008, in Washington DC, later this year.

I have already visited the US in June, when I attended the Plone Symposium in New Orleans. On that occasion, I stayed in the US for ~30 days. This time around I was planning to bring my wife and dog (the cute Yorkie pictured at the top of this blog).

One thing that worries me though is that I've never took my pet on any flights, so I have no idea how pet-friendly airlines are. Just to get from Sao Paulo to the US (Houston) it's a ~9:30h flight. My dog is usually cool with traveling. Earlier this year I drove nearly 8h to the beach and we stopped twice on the way, but she did not pee until we arrived at the destination.

So I'm putting this out there, looking for any feedback from people that took their pets on flights.

Yep, I've got an iPhone. While I was in the US, I was offered for a fair price a used 1st gen model from somebody who bought the 3G. Since I did not obtain the phone as part of a contract or under any other restrictions, I happily installed a modified bootloader which activated the device and removed the SIM lock (all thanks to PwnageTool 2.0). So now I can enjoy this brilliant machine with my economical pre-paid plan (Simyo). German T-Mobile's iPhone plans just don't work for me (which is why I hadn't bothered to buy one yet).

After playing around with it, here are some observations:

- how do I create bullet lists in this WordPress client?

- sometimes apps aren't as snappy as you'd think they would be. For instance, it takes quite a long time for the Addressbook to finish loading.

- the UI is quite refined, as you'd expect from apple. Not only that, you can really tell that the engineers thought it all the way through: the little keyboard and its auto-correction, for instance, let me achieve good typing speed. Certainly nothing you'd imagine on a device as small as this. I also love how navigation works so intuitively, e.g how long alphabetical lists have a teeny A-Z index on the side. Tap your finger on a letter and the list jumps to that letter. You'd think the letters are too small for that to work reliably. But it just works.

- I haven't gotten GPRS to work yet. So for now I have to rely on WiFi for Internet connectivity. Phone works well though.

- the battery life doesn't seem to be all that great.

- I feel uncomfortable storing various passwords (which for instance the mail client requires) on a mobile device that's easily lost.

- shazam rocks

Yes, we have the best open-source professional CMS of the galaxy - and beyond - out here. With the age and of course the help of the framework developers and lots of others, Plone gained lots of functionnalities. A huge set of options to tweak a Plone site such it is your Plone site are now available through the Plone content panel.

As Plone professional, I have to train site managers for customers. And most of the new site managers I have to train are not IT professional. Most are marketing or communication executives. And when most of them have good functional skills and know what they want to do with their Plone site and how to provide information and services to visitors, it is somehow dificult to teach them about HTML/CSS filtering, Javascript adds, SMTP connection, Plone extension (un, re)installation, ZMI access and other potentially harmful control panels.

As a consequence, I sometimes need to hide potentially harmful control panels to such non technical managers on these sites.

I'm sure lots of you, dear Plone service providers who read these lines, are often facing such situations. That's why I think that there's a place for a new OTB role in Plone. I'll call it "webmaster" at the moment.

Such user could do most things a Manager is enabled to do through the Plone except accessing those harmful control panels.

To make short, a webmaster would have all Manager permissions granted except "View management screens". Of course, from there it's fairly easy to hide the links to ZMI, Extensions management and others from the control panels, but it does not solve lots of other things that requires some tweaks in the control panels.

Any though ?

Thank you to those who have already stepped forward to sponsor me for Plone Conference this year. Sponsorship will guarantee that I'll be able to participate in both the Documentation and the Theming sprints in Washington this year. The sprints (and seeing everyone I met in Seattle in 2006) is the driving force behind my request.

http://www.fundable.com/groupactions/groupaction.2008-07-17.5184386802

If you have any special requests (trade funding for help with a document, or help with a theme you are working on, please email me at donna@csquaredtech.com)