Rick Hurst Web Developer in Bristol, UK

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Month: August 2008

Dexterity

“Dexterity is a system to create content types in Plone based on Zope 3 schema interfaces and simple content classes, with z3c.form add/edit forms. It aims to explicitly supports both through-the-web type creation with a well-defined path to filesystem code (and back).”

I’m excited about this, cant wait to see it arrive in Plone.
http://martinaspeli.net/articles/dexterity-meet-grok
http://www.openplans.org/projects/plone-conference-2008-dc/dexterity

archived comments

I’m glad you’re excited. 🙂

Will you be in DC? We’ll hopefully be working on getting a Dexterity beta out at the sprint.

Martin

Martin Aspeli 2008-08-28 20:15:21

I would love to be going to DC, but you’ve scheduled Plone conf to clash with my son’s birthday again 😉

Looking forward to trying the beta – happy to do testing and anything else I can contribute

Rick 2008-08-29 08:23:19

now running on a low energy intel atom powered server

I recently upgraded my bytemark VM to one of their low energy intel atom powered dedicated servers. Because of an AJAX based mapping tool on one of the sites I host, my VM struggled with only 400mb of RAM (mainly because of lots of simultaneous mysql connections under heavy use), but CPU bottlenecks were never an issue. The 2GB of RAM as well as dedicated RAID1 disks (therefore not competing with other servers for disk I/O like with a VM) has made the site perform much better under “pressure”. I’m saying this cautiously as the site hasn’t exactly been slashdotted yet, and I don’t want people to see it as a challenge!

IE6 gotcha – transparent pngs as links – only the non-transparent bits clickable

IE6 doesn’t display transparent png images properley – by default the parts that are supposed to be transparent display as grey instead. Fortunately an excellent workaround exists in the form of PNGFix by Twin Helix. However this doesn’t completely solve the problem: if you are using transparent PNG’s as links – only the non-transparent parts of the image are clickable, which can be a significant usability issue. So far I haven’t found an elegant workaround for this, but would be interested to hear of any.

archived comments

Had exactly the same problem on a site build last week.

To the best of my knowledge there is no work around 🙁

My work around was less than elegant – but I resorted to using the PNG’s in FF, but then slicing out the alternative GIFs from a screenshot taken from the working Firefox version.

Clunky and annoying but it did work reasonably well visually…

Another thing that may help in some circumstances – look into PNG8 alpha transparencies. Which degrade quite well in IE…

Steve Kirtley 2008-08-19 16:04:53

Posted in css

drupal permissions – remember input format

After banging my head against the desk for a while this morning, I worked out that the reason I could edit a page as the admin user, but not a “editor” user I had set up, was that I hadn’t allowed my editor user to use the “full HTML” input format, which had been used when the page was created (by the admin user). Enabling this input format for all users opened up the content to be editable how I needed it.

overriding the title attribute in an archetypes schema

Something I always forget to do when I override the title attribute in an archetypes schema (plone) is to specify accessor=Title (with a capital T). Omitting this leads to odd results, such as the ID of the plone objects created from the schema not being created from the title field, but something else (hmm.. the parent object’s title maybe?).

apologies for the timewarp…

I’ve now moved my site away from the cheap shared hosting it was on, and onto one of my own servers – hopefully there should be less downtime now, and apologies to anyone who found themselves reading some of my posts from february 2006!