February 2000 - Zope

Re: [Zope] using zope for broadcast e-mail messages...
by Anthony Baxter 23 Nov '00

23 Nov '00

>>> chas wrote > Zope's dtml-sendmail tag is excellent - it makes sending > e-mail a breeze. It reminds me of a similar tag that > Cold Fusion added and which I've noticed many sites use > for sending out customized newsletters (the "Allaire > ColdFusion Application Server" header being the giveaway). > > > Now, doing the same in Zope, I can loop over the user > profiles in our database to extract name, e-mail, and > even customize the content of the newsletter as follows : > > > <dtml-in ZSQL_Select_User_Profiles> > >  > To: <dtml-var firstname> <<dtml-var email>> > From: robot <robot(a)ourdomain.com> > Subject: <dtml-var random_inanity> > > Dear <dtml-var firstname>, > > blah blah content (also dependent on his/her likes/preferences) > >  > > </dtml-in> > > > Nothing groundbreaking so far. But the question then is : how > is this going to work if the user database numbers 200,000+ ? > It will take almost half a day to complete and this can't be > done in one form-submission or page load ! Why not use ZClient to make the request to do the mailout? It can just happily sit there for half a day (or whatever) chugging along, without screwing up if your browser goes away. Anthony -- Anthony Baxter <anthony(a)interlink.com.au> It's never too late to have a happy childhood.

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<code> tag?
by Mike Winter 24 May '00

24 May '00

Hi, just a quick question: how do you get Zope to display DTML without evaluating it? -- Mike Winter | mfw127(a)mail.usask.ca U. of S: 966-4759 TR Labs: 668-9323

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FYI: Zope Weekly News
by Mike Pelletier 23 May '00

23 May '00

G'day, Zope Weekly News is a digest of some of the useful and interesting events which have occurred on the various Zope mailing lists and the Zope.org site. It is published each Wednesday evening. New Products and Announcements * Paul Everitt announces Sybase support in a joint press release. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013946.html http://www.digicool.com/News/Sybase * "Zen" released ZRadius, a product which allows you to authenticate web users via the Radius authentication protocol. http://www.zope.org/Members/Zen/ZRadius * Anthony Pfrunder announces VisualZope 0.1a. From his web page: Basically, the "goal" of VZ is to provide a SIMPLE visual editing system for graphic designers which works cross-browser and takes advantage of the acquisition and role systems within Zope. What follows is a brief description of the components which make up the final VZ system (probably more accurate than previous posts). http://163.182.196.200/zwiki/VisualZope * Jeff Sheldon has started a weblog of his experiences with Zope. Jeff Sheldon is new to Zope, and is not a professional programmer. His weblog is a valuable resource to those also starting out with Zope. http://weblogs.userland.com/zopeNewbies/stories/storyReader$0 Updates * Zope 2.1.0 beta 2 has been released. This release includes fixes for issues found in beta 1, an updated load_site.py script and Martijn Pieters' patches to implement try/except/else and try/finally in DTML. Unless something major comes up, this will be the final beta before 2.1.0 final. http://www.zope.org/Products/Zope/2.1.0b2/ * "4am" has submitted an update to his PythonMethod product. It allows methods, written in Python, to be created via the Zope web management interface. http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/PythonMethod * "Drew" contributed an update to his Photo product. It generates thumbnail views of images at the user's preferred size. Requires PIL. http://www.zope.org/Members/Drew/Photo * Itamar Shtull-Trauring announced ZCache v0.2. ZCache is a Python Product which allows you to cache expensive methods, taking strain off your server. It also generates 'Last-Modified' headers, aiding browser and proxy caches. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/014115.html http://www.zope.org/Members/itamar/ZCache Zope.org items * "Zen" submitted a tip he picked up from Michel Pelletier. He explains how volatile attributes work, and how to populate them when your object is loaded from the database. Volatile attributes are attributes which do not get written to the database, and are good for data which changes frequently. http://www.zope.org/Members/Zen/tips/VolatileAttributes * "AlexR" submitted a How-To detailing the use of the DTML entity syntax. "DTML entities" are chunks of DTML which look like this: "&dtml-title_or_id;" http://www.zope.org/Members/AlexR/EntitySyntax Notable Discussions * DTML is a HUGE topic this week. Discussions spill across several lists. A very good job is done of identifying DTML's weak points. Many hold that the difficulty in using DTML comes from it's roots as a reporting language-- it isn't supposed to be used for logic. The problem is, there isn't yet an easy replacement for DTML as a programming language. Python Methods are cited as an excellent start on providing a means of moving logic out of DTML. Christopher Petrilli mentions that DC is looking at grooming Python Methods for inclusion in Zope. Others feel that reporting vs. programming is a forced distinction, and that it is awkward to have to use two different solutions. The claim that generating HTML is actually a rather complex task, and the powerful but ugly features of DTML are a necessary evil. DTML is compared to Perl! <gasp!> Otherwise, lots of very useful tips for using DTML are revealed. An excellent read for DTML beginners and wizards alike. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013710.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/1999-November/002088.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/1999-November/002102.html * Darcy Clark alerts the list of Jon Udell's latest article mentioning Zope. Jon's article discusses the ease of using Zope with Windows databases, the pain of using it with Unix databases, cheers ODBC, and jeers lack of a similar magic bullet for Unix. The thread then continues to discuss the relative merits of various free databases and using them with Zope. http://www.byte.com/column/BYT19991104S0001 http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013711.html Also, Karl Fast does an excellent job of summarising the thread, generating more sage comments. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013762.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013812.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013813.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013840.html * Francois-Regis CHALAOUX posed a question about using Zope with virtual hosting. Several useful responses were generated. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013678.html http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013688.html * Ben Galbraith submitted a comparison of Zope and Cold Fusion and solicited comments. Some of the usual suspects offer theirs. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013730.html * Otto Hammersmith started a thread about Zope and security. In it, he speaks of some of the security pitfalls that unsuspecting Zope users could experience. Brian Lloyd submits some solutions. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013779.html * Paul Everitt wrote in to remind us that there is a zope-dev(a)zope.org list for technical discussions. A brisk discussion developed to debate what constituted a technical discussion. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013796.html * Theodore Patrick launched a lengthy thread with questions about the effect of threading in Zope. A number of folks from Digital Creations provide answers. The discussion moves on with high volume and content to the topics of benchmarking and performance tuning Zope. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/013808.html * Farzad Farid revives the uncacheable image thread. Because Acquisition can lead to different URLs being generated for images when viewed from different locations, it makes caching difficult and can generate excessive traffic. Others offer advice to solve this problem. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope/1999-November/014021.html * David Harrison asks zope-dev how to return an image generated on-the-fly by an External Method. Answers found. http://lists.zope.org/pipermail/zope-dev/1999-November/002107.html Mike Pelletier

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Fix for SiteAccess bug affecting ZCatalog users
by Evan Simpson 11 May '00

11 May '00

There's a subtle bug in current and older versions of SiteAccess which can cause ZCatalog and dependent Products to fail. If you use an Access Rule in your root folder which alters REQUEST.path (for virtual hosting purposes, for example) then all ZCatalogs will return incorrect objects. In Products/SiteAccess/ChangeBehaviors.py, delete lines 68 and 69, or comment them out so that they look like: #if allow_btr: self.before_traverse(object, response) #entry_name = '' This ought to fix the problem. Please let me know if it doesn't. If nobody says anything, this will become SiteAccess v0.2.1 Also, a word of warning: Since ZCatalog doesn't store information (such as the request's hostname and port) used to determine object access paths under virtual hosting, you should avoid adding objects to a Catalog via one virtual host (or raw access) and retrieving them via another. Cheers, Evan @ 4-am

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Can Zope extract an image (BLOB) from an RDB ?
by chas 22 Mar '00

22 Mar '00

I've got 8000 photos (jpeg format) stored in an Oracle database. The table that contains the photos has these columns which are of interest : PICTURE LONG RAW PICTURE_LENGTH NOT NULL NUMBER(14) My goals in order of progression are : 1. Extract the image from the database using ZSQL methods 2. Serve that image up directly to the web browser 3. Save the image to the filesystem or, even better, create a Zope Image Object Unfortunately, I'm stuck at step 1. Doing a request on the database with ZSQL methods is returning : Error, oci.error: (911, 'ORA-00911: invalid character\012') Is there any way for Zope to handle this or is this going to involve python-DCOracle scripts instead and then uploading into Zope ? Thank you very much in advance, chas

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Different Login Screens for Management and User?
by James W. Howe 08 Mar '00

08 Mar '00

In creating my web site, I'm planning on limiting access to certain portions of the site to registered users. When a user attempts to "view" these areas, if they haven't logged in, I want to display a login page and get their name and password. I also want to provide a way for the web site management team to login and perform management activities. I would like to present a different login screen (maybe just a basic auth dialog) to allow access to management functions. I've been playing around a little with GUF, but I haven't found a way to present two different login screens based on the type of page being accessed. Is this type of functionality possible with Zope? Would the LoginManager allow for this sort of thing? Thanks. James W. Howe mailto:jwh@allencreek.com Allen Creek Software, Inc. pgpkey: http://ic.net/~jwh/pgpkey.html Ann Arbor, MI 48103

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Newbie missing something obvious
by jeffr＠odeon.net 07 Mar '00

07 Mar '00

Greetings all, I've been running Zope with the zserver web server for a while now, and the setup was a breeze. I've been very impressed with Zope. Now I've been tasked with installing Zope on another machine which is running Apache 1.3.11. From the documentation it looks like Zope+PCGI is going to suit my needs the best, but I'm having problems getting it to work (no surprise, given the large number of HOWTO's on the subject). I can get to the Welcome to Zope! page, and I can view the QuickStart material, but I'm unable to log in to the management interface. I'm also unable to access Zope at: www.mydomain.com/Zope only at: www.mydomain.com/cgi-bin/Zope.cgi so I'm sure it's an Apache/rewrite problem. I've made sure that the username and password are what I think they are via the python script zpasswd.py, and given that I can access the Welcome to Zope/QuickStart material I think I've got Zope configured correctly. After reading through the various HOWTO's on the subject I've got my httpd.conf file entries set as follows (the Gotchas for Zope Beginners HOWTO was very helpful, as was the Zope and Apache on RedHat 6.1 HOWTO, even though they were slightly contradictory on the syntax for the RewriteRule). I'm using RedHat 6.0, Zope 2.1.4, Python 1.5.2, and Apache 1.3.11. Zope was installed from source, Python and Apache from RPMs. Here's the relavent bits from Apache's httpd.conf file... LoadModule rewrite_module modules/mod_rewrite.so AddModule mod_rewrite.c ScriptAlias /cgi-bin/ "/home/httpd/cgi-bin/" # # "/home/httpd/cgi-bin" should be changed to whatever your ScriptAliased # CGI directory exists, if you have that configured. # <Directory "/home/httpd/cgi-bin"> AllowOverride None Options ExecCGI Order allow,deny Allow from all </Directory> # Zope configuration maps /Zope/ to the Zope.cgi CGI script RewriteEngine on RewriteCond %{HTTP:Authorization} ^(.*) RewriteRule ^/Zope(.*) /home/httpd/cgi-bin/Zope.cgi$1 \ [e=HTTP_CGI_AUTHORIZATION:%1,t=application/x-httpd-cgi,l] (Note: the RewriteRule is all on one line, without the \. The trailing / after ^/Zope and after Zope.cgi have been removed per the Gotchas for Zope Beginners HOWTO.) I'm at a loss here. I'm positive I'm missing something obvious, but I can't figure out what it is. Thanks for the help, Jeff Robertson jeffr(a)odeon.net

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Re: zope 2.1.3-1 deb package
by Petr Knapek 06 Mar '00

06 Mar '00

Hi Gregor, sorry that I answer now, but I havn't be on e-mail past few days. I tried to chenge the content of an external method in binary release and it worked as I had written. The zope has seen the change automatically without any additional 'Edit' of the external method. That is the 2.1.3 zope deb package seems to have different functionality. I have to note the binary release was 2.1.2 and not 2.1.3. I havn't tested it with binary release 2.1.3. Petr -- Petr Knápek PVT.NET, e-mail: petr.knapek(a)pvt.net, tel:+420-5-41 558 394 PVT a.s. - pvt.net, Veveří 102, 659 10 Brno, Czech Republic

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ArsDigita .. request for comments
by Kent Tenney 05 Mar '00

05 Mar '00

Does anyone out there have opinions on Phil Greenspun's app server; http://www.arsdigita.com/index.adp and the ArsDigita Community System http://www.arsdigita.com/pages/toolkit/index.html I want to set up a niche portal and am looking at Zope and the above ACS Any input would be appreciated thanks, Kent

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Common GenericUserFolder problem ...
by Darran Edmundson 04 Mar '00

04 Mar '00

Hi All, I bashed my head against GenericUserFolder for three hours tonight trying to get the simplest of scenarios up and running - no luck so I'm turning to the list for help. My exact problem shows up in the archives with advice from Zen: >>got the simple login screen. I entered the values 'jorge' for the username >>and 'secret' for the password. When I pressed Ok, I didn't see the >>index_html file for the folder, instead I got the login screen once >>again. Can someone help me out with some ideas on what I might have done >>wrong (or not done at all?) >Sounds like you havn't granted permission for user jorge to view the >documents. Simple way to test this is to edit userRoles so that >jorge is a member of the Manager role. I've done both this and explicitly returning _.int('1') in the userAuthenticate method. Same problem. Turning debug on in the GUF source yields: 2000-02-29T13:30:46 PROBLEM(100) GUF URL is http://127.0.0.1:8080/Test2 in validate ------ 2000-02-29T13:30:46 INFO(0) GUF Successful authentication for user ost124 (http://127.0.0.1:8080/Test2/acl_users) ------ 2000-02-29T13:30:46 PROBLEM(100) GUF gufid = ------ 2000-02-29T13:30:46 PROBLEM(100) GUF URL is http://127.0.0.1:8080/Test2 ------ 2000-02-29T13:30:46 PROBLEM(100) GUF Returning ost124 from http://127.0.0.1:8080/Test2/acl_users validate (roles=('Anonymous', 'Manager')) ------ 2000-02-29T13:30:46 PROBLEM(100) GUF URL is http://127.0.0.1:8080/Test2 in validate ------ 2000-02-29T13:30:46 PROBLEM(100) GUF Failed to authenticate with http://127.0.0.1:8080/Test2/acl_users - crawling up ------ 2000-02-29T13:30:46 PROBLEM(100) GUF Failed Authentication with http://127.0.0.1:8080/acl_users As the user is explicitly given the manager role which has all possible permissions checked, how can I possibly fail authentication? Any help is much appreciated. Cheers, Darran.

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