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Managing networked projects / Outsourcing work
by Heimo Laukkanen 02 Nov '03

02 Nov '03

Hi ya all, I would like to open discussion and collect some thoughts - and why not even best practices - on how people have and are managing Zope-projects that are too big for their companies or go momentarily over their capacity. Like we all know, outsourcing or hiring a contractor is not as straight forward as some people might think. Even with a well written specification - during the production issues might be raised that need elaboration and tightly knit co-opration between the customer and people who do the work. It is no wonder that user centric design and extreme programming ( usecases, usecases, usecases ) have become popular methodologies within Zope development. Distributed development has worked very well, though I'd say that is more thanks to certain individuals who are champions of a certain product or idea and make sure that those issues will be solved - rather than a development style or methodology. The facts that Zope and Plone evolve very fast are possibly issues that limit the amount how much people can and are willing to outsource. Since there are no designpatterns and well known metrics by which to measure developer's work for an non specialist it could be next to impossible to judge the quality of work during the project. Results can naturally be judged by the fact whether software works and meets the requirements. Also because of the nature of development I believe that for a lot of people/companies/organisations doing it by themselves and figuring out problems on their own is essential part of learning the system and becoming also better developers, adding more value to their own intellectual capital. If you would like to extend the framework - you most likely would like to get your new tools included into the framework core and share the future development costs with others. However this adds a new layer of complexity to the project management, since now the requirements are not solely your requirements but suddenly there are others who contribute their thoughs and want to change things. Naturally you could just release the readymade code - but that would not guarantee that anyone would take it and use it - or want to contribute back to it. So - when would I outsource or use contractors? If possible, I would only outsource clear bits of the whole product - something that requires as little as possible continuous communication and co-operation with other teams during the development. Optimal would be that each outsourced bit could be developed as their own separate projects / processes. If we would be talking about doing something that either party hasn't done before - I would definitely require someone from the contractor to join the onsite team if economicly feasible. Same would go if for example the reponsibility of creating an architecture would lay on the shoulders of the contractor. Reasons for onsite work are mainly for transferring ic from contractor to the onsite team, so that the work a contractor does would not create automatic lock in to just that contractor. How to do the work? If possible, a shared coding standard or a sort of concensus would be great. In any case a shared code repository and code review throughout the project would be a must. Tracker to manage bugs and other issues, including changes to requirements - and documentation written during the work, for example to a wiki. Regular meetings online or offline. Irc is good, but it is much better to have voice discussions and shared whiteboard / workspace. Clear metrics by which the project will be judged and payments paid. How others have done it? ( Just a good read : http://www.nwc.com/story/singlePageFormat.jhtml;jsessionid=LZX3DXZCSO1U0QSN… ) -huima

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do i have username and password
by Marion Willow 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

do i have a user name and password i am using my user name and password for FreeZone to log in to zope and it is not working how do i log in to zope do i have username and password if so, what are they if no, how do i get thanyour for your assistance respectfully from marion

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Embedding a calendar in a Plone 2 document
by hpinson＠indepthl.com 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

Hi. I have created a default Plone 2 beta document (index_html) that will serve as the home page of a plone site. Rather than having the calendar show up in the right slot-- I am being asked to put the calendar in the default document. This macro call fails to produce the calendar: <div metal:use-macro="here/calendar_slot/macros/calendarBox"> Calendar </div> I think the macro is not calling the portlet correctly, or the default document type does not know about macros. There is no XML namespace definition in this document type that I can see. Adding the namespace defintion does not seem to help, but I am proabably doing that wrong. Any suggestions to get the calendar into the document? Harlow Pinson Indepth Learning Email: hpinson(a)indepthl.com Web: http://www.indepthl.com Voice: 505-994-2135 FAX: 208-475-7678

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error(200) zdaemon process 859 terminated by signal SIGXFSZ(25) .
by Chuck Aamdi 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

I have be runnnig Zope & cmf for my Organisation for a while everything functioning fine and also have created other zope author content managers who have been updateing their folders .I now recieved this error(200) zdaemon process 859 terminated by signal SIGXFSZ(25) . I have no idea whats going onfrom the web links it states The connection was refused when attempting to contact www.breconbeacons.org:8080 .This site is live and only the static data from Apache is working all the zope absolute links and a few reference links all broken . I have stopped tomcat on the our external web server abd tried to run zope > ./start . Plz help I have read about the fact zope db is not multiuser/RDBMS but I assume this is not the problem . Cheers -- Chuck Amadi, ICT Systems Programmer, Brecon Beacons National Park Authority Direct Line: 01874 620440 FAX: 01874 622574 EMAIL: chuck.amadi(a)breconbeacons.org _______________________________________ \ \ \ Chuck Amadi,ICT Systems Programmer \ __________ | \ \ / \___-=O`/|O`/___| \ . \_______\ / | / ) / / `/-==__ _/__|/__=--| / / * \ | | / / (o) /______________________________________/ Nid yw'r farn a fynegir gan anfonwr y neges hon o anghenraid yn adlewyrchu barn Awdurdod Parc Cenedlaethol Bannau Brycheiniog. Neges yw hon a fwriadwyd ar gyfer y derbynnydd/derbynyddion yn unig ac fe'i hanfonir yn gyfrinachol; os ydych yn ei dderbyn mewn camgymeriad, a fyddech gystal %/1??iso8859-15?â rhoi gwybod i ni (yn it(a)breconbeacons.org) ac yna dil%/1??iso8859-15?ëwch bob copi. The views expressed by the sender of this message don't necessarily represent those of Brecon Beacons National Park Authority. This message is intended for the addressee(s) only and is sent in confidence; if you receive it in error, please can you let us know (at it(a)breconbeacons.org) and then destroy all copies. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Brecon Beacons National Park Authority takes every care to keep its network free from viruses. All emails are scanned and verified virus-free by Sophos Anti-Virus software. *** IT IS THE RECIPIENTS RESPONSIBILITY TO CHECK ALL MESSAGES FOR VIRUSES ***

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2 Sites - 1 server - 2 names!
by Paulo Jorge de Oliveira Cantante de Matos 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

Hi all, The situation is as follows: I have zope installed in my server (which has a dynamic IP address) under which I wish to host 2 websites (foo and bar for examples) and I wish to register (www.bar.net and www.foo.net respectively) that will redirect to each of the site they refer to. bar.net can be fully served by zope since it uses nothing but zope, however, foo needs apache because I want it to serve a phpbb forum (because neoboard is not as nice as phpbb unfortunately). Is this possible? What should I read in order to configure this system? Any ideas or experience with similar configurations? Best regards, -- Paulo J. Matos : pocm(a)mega.ist.utl.pt Instituto Superior Tecnico - Lisbon Computer and Software Eng. - A.I. - > http://mega.ist.utl.pt/~pocm --- -> God had a deadline... So, he wrote it all in Lisp!

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Authentication.
by Jason C. Leach 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

hi, I'm having a problem with Authentication. I can't seem to get anything but Anonymous User from user/getRoles or user/Getusername in a ZPT. Even if I create a new ZPT in the Root folder 'when I am loged on as manager', then 'test' the page I get Anon User. My only line is: <p tal:content="user/getUserName">roles</p> I'm using a very current version of Zope and Mozilla Firebird. Note the ZMI seems to know how I am just fine. Tells me 'Loged in as jason' on the blue bar at the top. j.

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Strange behavior with IE and XP
by Dennis Allison 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

A bit OT, but I'd appreciate any input ... I have a user of our Zope system who has problems with her XP/IE6 machine, but not with other machines. One of our sites has both a edit/authoring component (xml) and a review component (processes and rendered XML). She normally opens two browsers, one pointing to th e authoring component, the other to the review component--and moves back and forth as part of the edit/review cycle. And she's working on a dialup line. The site front-end is pound which distributes into Zope 2.5.1 in this case. She frequently experiences one or another of the two browsers locking up. She is the only user reporting this problem. I am reasonably sure this is a client-side problem--I seem to remember that IE on XP has some problems which may be ascerbated by slow lines. Has anyone else seen this kind of problem? Any solutions? workarounds?

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Which RedHat Version?
by Charlie Jones 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

I'm installing a local server at home and I am wondering which version of RedHat works best with Zope 2.6.2? I currently have a patched version of RH9, but Zope seems to crash after and hour or so. Before I start randomly installing various versions, I thought I would consult the list. Any help would be great. thanks, Charlie Jones

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Re: [Zope] Which RedHat Version?
by Dennis Allison 01 Nov '03

01 Nov '03

RH 7.3 seems to be exceptionally stable. I have not tried RH8. I have had problems with RH9. You should use Python 2.1.3 which does not build on RH9.

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Using Zope to manage and serve large files
by Heimo Laukkanen 31 Oct '03

31 Oct '03

Often when my customers have got used to Zope and especially Plone as the UI to manage their website, questions go to using Zope and Plone for document management in intranet. It is old story that we all know how Zope sucks while serving large files compared to Apache. Serving large files from filesystem with Apache however takes out the whole point of using Zope - security mechanism etc. Has anyone achieved to combine Zope and Apache/php to serve and manage large files in a way that allows metadata and security of the files to be managed in Zope, but actual serving happens from Apache so that ZServer does not hog memory and processor. I thought about the possibility to integrate Apache/php and Zope via a database and tokens that are passed from Zope to Apache. The scenario could be following. 1) Apache and Zope are serving data from the same domain. Zope could be www.myfoobar.com and Apache could serve download.myfoobar.com 2) within the portal I would have a portal_external_storage_tool that defines the configuration and methods for storing and serving data outside Zope, including the database that is shared 3) Content types are own content types based on Archetypes and include logic for handing over the download to Apache 4) When user within the portal wants to download a file, the view / download function of the content type ( that is protected with Zope security machinery ) writes into the databse a token based on user, time, file or so. 5) User is transparently directed to the application in the download host to download the file. Token would be passed within the url 6) Download application checks that the token is valid for that file and that time - and starts serving data to the client. Has anyone done anything similar - or do you have other ideas on how to implement such? -huima

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