[Zope-PTK] Impressions of the PTK from my Christmas project

[Tres Seaver]

Simon Coles wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> Over the holidays I spent a few hours messing with the PTK, with the
> intention of using it as a base for the pdworld.org site I am
> intending to create. I jotted down my impressions and sent it to some
> of the people internally to NIP, and Chris Withers suggested I
> forward it to this list to give some real world feedback from a PTK
> amateur.
> 
> For background, I'm reasonably familiar with Zope, Linux etc. I don't
> get to do real work that often, so tend to lose touch with the detail
> of things until a holiday comes up and I get a chance to get my hands
> dirty. So consider me a reasonably aware techie who hasn't spent much
> time with Zope recently. Given it was a holiday, I wasn't benefiting
> from the adult aid and assistance of my NIP colleagues either :-)
> 
> Because this is personal stuff, I'm looking for things that I can get
> done quickly before my wife gets really upset with me :-(.

That is motivation I can grok, fershure. :)

> pdworld.org would be a site which people could "Join" and get a
> username and password. From there could create documents in their own
> folder with information on events, resources, etc. In short, plain
> and simple PTK stuff (I hope :-).

Yep, those are the usecases the PTK is aimed at.
 
> So I need to customise the look & feel, create some new types of
> content, and generally get the thing into a state where non-techie
> people can use it (my audience will be quite new to The Internet). My
> understanding of the PTK is that it should provide a base where I can
> do this with a few hours work.

Depending on the customizations you need, a "few hours" is about right.
 
> Unfortunately, from my experience it seems it is not yet something
> someone like me can just plug in, customise a bit, and get it working
> (however primitive the site may be) before my wife starts complaining.
> 
> I'm pretty sure I could create my own portal content, and I have now
> tracked down where all the look & feel is. However, its still not
> clear in my mind what happens to my customisation over upgrades. Do I
> customise DemoPortal or create my own? What's the
> advantages/disadvantages? I did read the mailing list archives but
> must confess I wasn't sure what to do here.

You have hit on a fairly tricky problem.  How can we continue (and maybe
we can't) to distribute "sample" look-and-feel, knowing that everyone
who
makes serious use of the product will customize it?  We need to be able
to make some changes (to introduce new features, for instance), but how
can we do that without stepping all over our users' customizations?

This problem is of the variety called "wicked";  easy answers don't
abound.
Fortunately, we are working on the problem, and should have a better
answer
Real Soon Now (TM).  The desiderata for this solution include:

 * Deploy all "sample" UI via the filesystem (so you can update the
   baseline via CVS, for instance, if you have edited it directly).

 * Allow you to override the supplied UI piecemeal.

 * Allow you (and us) to provide true "skins" for the portal (alternate
   DTML as well as style sheets).
 
> There are niggly little bugs in places, validation etc. isn't
> finished (confusing error messages), and as a whole the thing is
> nowhere near finished in lots of areas so I would have to spend a lot
> of time on ironing out little problems to make it usable.
> 
> It was a pain to install as well, and I had to try a number of
> versions of Zope and the PTK before I got something that worked. CVS
> checkout or a download? With or without the bits? Moving stuff
> around.... do I really need to import this? Where to? If I wasn't
> experienced with Zope I would have gone completely nuts just trying
> to install it.

CVS is still the preferred method of getting the PTK;  we work pretty
hard not to have the CVS trunk in an inconsistent state.  Tarballs are
(still) just snapshots.  I can install the PTK into a brand new 2.2.4
Zope
in about 5 minutes:

 * Check out the PTK CVS:

   0. cd /usr/local/zope

   1. cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.zope.org:/cvs-repository login

   2. cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs.zope.org:/cvs-repository co ZopePTK

 * Fetch the PythonMethod product:

   0. wget
http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/PythonMethod/PythonMethod-0.1.7-nonbin.tgz

   1. tar xzf PythonMethod-0.1.7-nonbin.tgz

   2. mv lib/python/Products/PythonMethod ./PythonMethod-0.1.7

   3. rm -r lib

 * Link/copy the PTK filesystem products and PythonMethod into the
Products directory:

   0. cd Zope-2.2.4-src/lib/python/Products

   1. ln -s /usr/local/zope/PythonMethod-0.1.7 ./PythonMethod

   2. ln -s /usr/local/zope/ZopePTK/ZCallable .

   3. ln -s /usr/local/zope/ZopePTK/PTKBase .

   4. ln -s /usr/local/zope/ZopePTK/PTKDemo .

 * Link/copy the import files for the PTK's through-the-web products
into the
   import directory:

   0. cd /usr/local/zope/Zope-2.2.4-src/import

   1. ln -s /usr/local/zope/ZopePTK/PTKDemo/Wizard.zexp .

   2. ln -s /usr/local/zope/ZopePTK/PTKDemo/DemoPortal.zexp .


 * Load the TTW products:

   0. Restart Zope.

   1. Select the Control_Panel/Products "import/export" tab.

   2. Import 'Wizard.zexp'.

   3. Import 'DemoPortal.zexp'.


 * Create a portal:

   0. In the root of the Zope instance, select 'Portal' from the add
list.

   1. Fill out the wizard forms; pay special note to the directive to
supply
      a "manager" user with the same ID but a different password than
your
      normal manager user.

 * Customize the DTML in the portal.  You probably want to pay
   special attention to the stylesheets (in the 'Styles' folder) and
   to 'standard_html_header' and 'standard_html_footer'.  If your layout
   needs to be substantially different (not just different
colors/fonts/text,
   but a different organization) then you will have to put in more
effort.

> My conclusion was that the PTK isn't quite there yet for the project
> I had in mind, and I should probably wait until version 1.0. It is
> however, frustratingly close in functionality to what I need. Bear in
> mind when I came to this conclusion I had a choice of doing
> pdword.org in the PTK or another project, so when it looked like the
> PTK wasn't going to fall out of bed easily I did the other project.
> The Zope-based pdnews.org will be launched in a week, so I did get to
> have some productive fun over the holidays :-)

Cool!
>
> I hope this real world feedback from a hope-to-be PTK user is
> helpful. I pass it on because I suspect my experience may be shared
> by other people who want to use the PTK for a project but can't get
> involved in the detail. If anyone wants more info about my
> experiences, please ask.
> 
> I'll give the PTK another go in a month or so's time.....


I'm delighted you shared your troubles with the community.  I hope
we can be of more help next time.

Tres.
-- 
===============================================================
Tres Seaver                                tseaver@digicool.com
Digital Creations     "Zope Dealers"       http://www.zope.org