Archive | November, 2006

Negotiating the Plone security maze

By on November 22, 2006 in plone

If, like me, you have been trying to resolve permission problems by checking and unchecking boxes in the ZMI Security tab in a trial-and-error fashion, there is in fact an easier way (I never doubted Plone for an instant :) )

  • Before going to the Security tab, you should first find the Actions tab for the process you want to control permissions for. By default, things like the top navigation tabs and the buttons at the bottom of the folder listing are controlled in the Actions tab of portal_actions.
  • Things like the edit, properties and sharing tabs are defined seperately for each item type in portal_types: i.e to access the actions for an image, one would go to portal_types->image and click on the Actions tab. (The Content tab is defined globally in portal_actions).
  • Scroll down to see the action you want to change the permissions for, and you will see the permission you need to change (there are cases where you might want to change this permission: for example, to stop object owners from accessing the properties tab, you would have to change the permission from ‘modify portal content’ to something like ‘manage properties’ and restrict that permission).
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Plone Screencasts

By on November 17, 2006 in plone

Plone have some screencasts which are an excellent introduction to Plone and how it works

Plone Videos

Includes Screencast Editing with Plone

"How to use the Plone content management system to edit both images and text in a site. Demonstrates Plone’s built-in image manipulation and rescaling, as well as its rich text editing capabilities." 12 mins

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4 Second Rule for Websites

By on November 17, 2006 in general

Users abandon sites that take longer than 4 seconds to load

Shoppers are likely to abandon a website if it takes longer than four seconds to load, a survey suggests.

The research by Akamai revealed users’ dwindling patience with websites that take time to show up.

It found 75% of the 1,058 people asked would not return to websites that took longer than four seconds to load.

More at BBC

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CMFLinkChecker

By on November 16, 2006 in 3rd-party-products

This promises to be a very useful tool for webmasters of large sites or sites with many users. Sure, one could always check broken links using server states, but by having a link checking mechanism in the UI you can let each user in a multi-user site be responsible for keeping their own section 404-free.

The CMFlinkchecker program comes in two parts; the user interface (CMFLinkchecker) and the bit that actually crawls the site (LMS). These are distributed as two seperate programs. You can however, just install CMFLinkChecker and then go to ‘link management’ in plone preferences panel and register your website to access LMS on a server kindly provided by the authors somewhere over in Germany. After a couple of goes (the server might have benn down) I eventually got through and was given an id and password via email to enter in the ‘link monitoring server fields’ in the aforementioned ‘link management’ page. After that, I srolled down to the bottom of the page, hit ‘crawl my site for all links’, and got the ball rolling….

For a small site (around 200 links), about 20% of the links were evalusted straight away, the rest were queued up on the server and were ready the next time I logged in. The process probably goes a lot faster if you have LMS installed on your own server.

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Looking at LinguaPlone

By on November 14, 2006 in 3rd-party-products

LinguaPlone is the standard multilingual translation solution for Plone, and is used to generate translations of websites like Oxfam .

Upon first hearing of LinguaPlone, I was expecting a scenario where the whole page – page body, tabs, portlets, the lot – would obediently translate given the necessary words and a couple of clicks of the mouse. Then again, the open source community was not made for demanding types like me who expects everything without putting in some spadework himself (I am only making my first forays into Python now…:) )

What LinguaPlone offers (so far) is a very easy way to translate the page body. Simply choose what languages you are going to have your site in in Preferences (they are pretty much all there), do up a page in your default language, and access the ‘translate’ tab at the top of the document to translate into the language of your choice. In addition, uninstalling Linguaplone doesn’t affect this translated content, it only removes the links between the different translations, which can be restored by reinstalling the product.

All the same, it’s a little hard to know if LinguaPlone offers all that much more convenience and functionality over manually creating new content for each language yourself. I’m sure it does, else it would not be so widely used, but the lack of decent documentation doesnt help much to illumine me. For example, a cool thing would be if LinguaPlone used the IP address of your computer to automatically serve you up the content in your own language – its a rather intuitive thing and one might reasonably expect a multilingual solution to have this facility. It’s not an easy thing to test (unless you have access to a private plane), and so I dont really know if it does this…..

(If my interest in Linguaplone persists over the next couple of months, I promise I will document answers as I find them here)

One thing that would really enhance LinguaPlone, in my view, is if translated objects could inherit the properties of the original object. Perhaps I want to use a couple of portlets in left_slots: in current LinguaPlone, I put the portlets in for a page, but they are not there for their translated counterpart. Not everyone will want this of course, but it would be nice if it were included as an option, along with an option to automatically update translation properties if the default properties are changed. Perhaps all the contents of the ZMI properties tab could even be displayed in the 2-column ‘translate’ page, and the user could pick which ones he wants to keep.

The top navigation bar tabs are a known issue with Plone multilingual sites, but if property inheritance were allowed the subsite feature of our vsCore product could then be enabled for those sites whose tabs bear the names of the content they point to.

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