December 2003 - Zope

Mike Kobar/TMG/CSC is out of the office.
by Mike Kobar 25 Dec '03

25 Dec '03

I will be out of the office starting 12/24/2003 and will not return until 12/30/2003. In my absence, for urgent ELCADD issues please contact Pat Corriveau at 860-433-1692, or Tom Hamilton at 860-433-0486. I will answer all un-answered mail upon my return. --Mike--

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Members can't log in
by Mico Siahaan 24 Dec '03

24 Dec '03

Hi, I am new to plone. We are using Plone to develop our community site. But strange thing happen: Members can't log in. If a member try to log in by filling login form, then appear this message: -- You are not currently signed in because you are not accepting cookies. Please make sure that your browser is configured to accept cookies. If you are still reaching this page after correctly configuring your browser, here are some possible reasons: You may be running web filtering software that disables cookies. If so, you will need to configure the software so that it enables you to accept cookies from http://www.python.or.id Your computer may be behind a firewall or proxy server that prevents cookies from being sent to or from your browser. If so, you will need to ask your systems administrator if the problem can be fixed. -- We already configured our browsers to accept cookies. We are using: 1. Zope 2.6.1 2. CMF 1.3.2 3. Plone 1.0.5 Zope is running behind Apache using RewriteRule Thanks -- Mico Siahaan ------------- mico(a)intermatik.co.id

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Sessions and User Authentication
by kittonian 24 Dec '03

24 Dec '03

I'm doing a project for a band's fan club and the objective is to have users go through a registration process (consisting of 3 separate pages), a review stage, have an e-mail confirmation sent to them with a clickable link that they can then click on and confirm their registration, and a members only section of the website where only the fan club members are allowed to gain access. I have all the pages created and the database all designed and running. I even have all the select fields based off of a table in the db and working properly. I am not sure how to proceed on a number of levels. 1. I need to have the members login from the first page of the fan club. Since their user information is stored in the database and I do not want to create a user account in zope for each user (there will be tons of users) I need to have them authenticate to gain access only to that specific members folder. At no time should anyone be able to bookmark a members only page and access it again without first authenticating. I also need to make sure that after a specific amount of time of inactivity their session expires. 2. I need to properly validate each and every form field in specific ways (i.e. for the phone number there should be no letters entered and only the correct amount of digits should be allowed). There are a lot of fields which all need specific validation rules. 3. I need to have sessions for the signup process so that the user can go back and correct information if they need to do so prior to confirming their submission and being sent the confirmation e-mail message. Can anyone give me a hand with these issues? This is the last portion of this signup process and I need to get it done quickly since the band's new record is coming out in a couple of weeks. I am always in #zope on freenode as well as on irc.macgenius.net port 6667 in #macgenius. My nick is kittonian. Thanks in advance for any and all assistance. kittonian

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Dynamic Metafile for All Players (Using MP3)
by KJZZ Webmaster 24 Dec '03

24 Dec '03

I just put into production a process for dealing with MP3 audio in Zope which (while it does not read the id3 tag) does support the most common media players in the most common browsers. If anyone is interested and would like to download the prototype of the code for zope, you can download the .zexp file here: http://jtsitedesigns.freezope.org/mediafolders/ (They do not allow audio on the freezope servers, nor do they have the ExtFile product installed, so this is not functional. But it will get you in the ballpark). I would like to post this on the Zope.org site as a Zope product, or distribute this as a .Zexp file, but I am new to creating products from scratch in Zope and am a bit unsure as to the best way to go. If anyone is interested in helping to develop this, please let me know. Additionally, if you would like to see how this works on a live site, see: http://kjzz.org/news/arizona/archives/200401/legislatureends Any feedback you might have for how this process works with a number of browsers and players is more than welcome. Thanks, John T.

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Zope as a desktop CMS?
by Frederic Faure 24 Dec '03

24 Dec '03

Hello, I'm trying to find a solution to help a friend manage his little web site that he currently handles using independant, hand-made web pages. His site only contains a bunch of essays and articles, and a blogging sectino. On the PHP front, EasyCMS looked simple enough and didn't require MySQL... but it seems like the navigator bar is static, and you need to add new article titles manually. Forget it. Zope could be an interesting solution, but he must have a full WYSIWYG HTML editor to create/revise his documents, so hand-made HTML or structured text won't do. Besides EasyPublish (to which I cannot register the free version, as their registration server is currently acting up; Must be Xmas), what do you suggest I try? Mozilla's Composer accessing objects through either FTP or WebDAV (not sure Composer supports WebDAV)? Some add-on that can be installed inside the ZMI so my friend can just click on say an Edit button, to be presented with a WYSIWYG editor? Thanks for any tip Fred.

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eCommerce for Zope / Plone: ZWarehouse, e-Tailer, others?
by Gerry Kirk 24 Dec '03

24 Dec '03

Has anyone taken a look at ZWarehouse? Version 0.8 is in dev and 0.9 is supposed to provide Plone and ZODB integration. Installation seems a bit hokey atm, having to import the product as a binary file. I'm going to take a closer look at it soon. I saw a case study on zope.org that refers to a product e-Tailer. That product appears to no longer be open source. Are there other ones out there worth considering? I know of CMFCommerce, but it needs a fair amount of work. Cheers, Gerry

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Zope 2.7 startup in RedHat
by Anand Shah 24 Dec '03

24 Dec '03

How does one create a service/startup script for Zope to start automatically upon booting a machine, particularly for Zope 2.7 I am using Fedora as the OS Do I have to use this document as a guide? http://old.zope.org/Members/markoer2/resources/howtos/resources/howtos/ redhat_startup Please let me know... Kind Regards, Andy

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Zope used as development environment for *general* dynamic website programming like portals?
by falk.hertel＠t-online.de 23 Dec '03

23 Dec '03

Hallo Sirs, may I ask you all a simple question? "Is there anywhere a CMS program that is optimal for (complex) offer/seek portals?" All offered CMS on the market seem to be written only for editors although they could be used - when making some modifications on them - e.g. for portal development also, shouldn't they? Obviously there does not seem to exist a 'development environment' that combines the advantages of PHP editors (e.g. PHPEdit, Zend Studio, Maguma) and CMS (Typo3, Mambo, PHPNuke, etc.) and HTML-WYSIWYG editors (Dreamweaver, Fusion, GoLive, etc.)!? The problem so far is that... * a CMS mainly consists of a collection of scripts - without comfortable screen/surface and made only for editors. Therefore they have a very comfortable account management und a powerful script collection. * a PHP development tool does not have a comfortable surface and e.g do not support a comfortable way to access to databases (like it is e.g. done in Visual basic: the 'data control') . Therefore it comes with good development instruments like a debugger. * WYSIWYG editors have a bad support of dynamic programming (PHP scripts, database connection/queries, ...). Therefore they have a very comfortable possibility to build up a screen by drag&drop and they also care for the different browser versions. At the moment you can build up a portal only with several html and php supporting programs, and have to switch between them. Isn't there anywhere an environment that puts them all together and makes fast and easy dynamic web programming in general possible? Is Zope such a tool?? Or what are the advantages (and disadvantages?) of Zope here? * Are there import facilities for e.g. (Netobjects) Fusion (.nod) to take over their Navigation and templates? Or nice export possibilities? * Is there a debugger? * Does Zope care for different browsers? * Is there a Drag&drop facility for building templates? * Is Zope able to generate and manage a navigation bar (with open up under-layers) from the site tree-structur (see NO Fusion e.g.)? ... How would you compare Zope to e.g. Typo3 ? Do you know Typo3? Hmmh, is there any 'source' where I could get a general overview about CMS systems to find out which one is best for my purpose? Many thanks for your help!! My best regards to everybody, Falk PS: Merry christmas!

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Database Datatypes
by Wade Pearce 23 Dec '03

23 Dec '03

Greetings all, I come to you with the hope the problem I have is easily fixed. Anyway, our server owner decided it was time to install the latest Debian hot fixes. Unknown to him (and undocumented by the hot fix), it proceeded to update Zope from 2.2 to 2.5.2 and Postgres from 6.5 to 7.2. Due to voluntary nature of our developers and the existence of legacy stuff in our website, we needed to keep these older versions running while a new website was built replacing our legacy stuff. Luckily, the upgrade hasn't caused as much trouble as we thought it would. In fact, Zope and Postgres seem to have coped quite well with it (thanking the big guy upstairs for that one). We've just run into one problem. The current website uses a lot of <dtml-call "REQUEST.set...> calls to push database field values to the top of the memory pile. In the previous version, if a returned value from the database was an integer, the variable assigned that value in the REQUEST.set would also assume an integer datatype. So, if "SELECT count(*) as total from table_1" was a Z SQL Method called in a DTML document and there was a <dtml-call "REQUEST.set('table_1_total',total)"> in the DTML document, then table_1_total would assume the datatype of integer. The problem we have now is that in the above example, table_1_total is assuming the datatype of string, so in fact, table_1_total = '0' not table_1_total = 0. This causes us problems all through the site, as any statement such as: <dtml-if expr="table_1_total > 0" will always be true, because '0' > 0. Now, is there a way to fix this or is it a design feature of the later versions of Zope/Python that requires a tightening of code? Just wish we had the time to take the machine down and give it the new hardware it needs so as we could have taken a rollback checkpoint prior to the upgrade. Any help greatly appreciated. Wade Pearce

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LocalFS FIX for Zope2.7b3 and PloneLocalFS released
by Andreas Heckel 23 Dec '03

23 Dec '03

Hi all, after installing Zope2.7Beta3 (Python2.3.2) I had to make some fixes to get LocalFS working. You can get it at: http://www.easyleading.org/Downloads/ There you can also find an initial release of PloneLocalFS (requires my fixed LocalFS package) Andreas

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