Rick Hurst Web Developer in Bristol, UK

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Month: October 2010

plone conference 2010 day 2

Plone conf day 2

Some notes and thoughts from day of plone conference 2010. These are mostly in note form, but wanted to get these online anyway, while they are fresh in my mind.

fixing the ungoogleable by Elizabeth Leddy

What happens when something breaks, and a simple google search doesn’t offer any results?

First, warn people (so they don’t bother you while you fix it, and they don’t panic).

Work out how quickly can you access your backups? I think this is very important – personally for smaller sites i’m doing individual site backups as packages mainly to make it convenient to restore them in a local dev environment, but I know some people are relying on whole server backups on tape. This would be laborious to restore in an emergency.

Isolation by elimination -> network, hardware, software, data
map out your system!

Eliminate things by switching them off – write your code so that it can handle dependencies being switched off.

Set up a system so that you have an isolated instance (so you can look at logs of only your own activity, rather than mixed with everyone elses)

Create a dashboard (maintenance page)

Monitoring

Write Test case’s to diagnose faults

Start writing a “help” email, but don’t send it. This is apparently known as “rubber ducking”. I do this all the time, I often spot my mistake when I past in a traceback to an email message to send to someone!

“horizon of intervention” – At what point do you need external help?

Get to know people with specialisms and buy them a beer! Participate in the plone community (I really need to do more of that).

Create tickets and close them as you go

Document your processes.

The state of plone caching by Ricardo Newbery

cachefu – useful tool, but as far as “internet time” goes, this is a little long in the tooth now (started 2006). End of life – critical bugfixes only

plone.app.caching – will be in future plone releases, but available now

load testing with funkload (not accurate regarding CSS/ image discovery)

load testing with multi-mechanize

BrowserMob – not free

Building a custom app with plone with minimal development by Eric BREHAULT

This was extremely interesting – Eric is the project manage for Plomino – a plone add-on that provides application development toolkit for creating database applications within plone – i.e. the types of database applications that non-technical people might create on there own machines with Lotus Domino, Filemaker or Access. The data is still stored in the ZODB, but models and forms can views can be created through the web. Formulas are done in python.

I can see this being really useful – all too often I end up building custom applications based on complex access database or excel spreadsheets i’ve been provided, but if I can persuade clients to use Plomino, then not only will it help get that data in a format suiteble for building a web application, but data can be collaborated on across teams, rather then emailing around (and inevitably forking spreadsheets and databases). There were some nice examples of data visualisation – a great quote “almost useless, but very nice”” – you need these to impress your boss.

Themeing with XDV (Diazo) Laurence Rowe

I wrote some notes on this yesterday, connected to Nates Deliverance talk, so won’t go into this here, other than to quote Laurence: “we write XSLT, so you don’t have to”

collective.amberjack: chapter one. The interactive age. Massimo Azzolini

Amberjack is a Javascript library for creating a site tour/ tutorial. Collective amberjack wraps this up as an add-on for plone. Interactive tutrials can be created.

An example was given using the windmill testing framework (windmill in itself looks nice alternative to selenium).

The Art of Integrating Plone with Webservices with David Glick

Most of this was over my head, but one important note I made from this is about urlib (which I use in a django screen scraper app i’m developing) can have two possible error responses – URLError and HTTPError – two possible error responses.

external ecommerce and plone playing along with Sasha Vincic

There seems to be a bit of a theme going here – an acknowledgement that Plone works out best long term if you use it as a “black box” CMS, and don’t try to do everything with it. The upgrade path is easier if you don’t add on your own customisations – “clean plone”. The current plone ecommerce offerings are not as good as external systems, so it is better to integrate with an external system, which is also then kept clean to allow easier upgrades.

In the python world there are some Django Ecommerce stores LFS and Satchmo, but the store doesn’t have to be Python – other proven systems such as magento can also be integrated with Plone.

To integrate with plone you need to integrate search, linking, thumbnailing. Valentine achieved search compatibility by creating objects in plone via an RSS import – see valentine.rssobjects. A latecomer to the talk asked “but which plone ecommerce product would you use if you had to?”. Answer “we wouldn’t”.

collective.transcode.star (lightning talk)

manage online transcoding
http://plone.org/products/collective.transcode.star – looks interesting, and may bring plone back into the picture for a project i’m doing.

BlueDynamics bda.plone.finder

osx style finder widget for navigating/ organising content in plone – looks great!

Plone Conference 2010 Day 1

quality schwag from Plone Conference 2010

Just back home after day one of Plone Conference 2010, with my mind buzzing so thought it would be a good time to write up some of my thoughts and notes. It was really difficult to choose between the talks on offer on the three different different tracks, but here are some thoughts on the ones I attended.

Keynote by Alexander Limi and Alan Runyan

Two main themes here – ubiquity/availaibility and designer friendliness.

To make Plone more mainstream it needs to be available to non-technical end users through the same means that other systems are already available – namely being able to deploy easily on cheap hosting, specifically the one-click installers on shared hosting in cPanel and similar. This would allow users to easily evaluate Plone for their needs in the same ay that they can already with wordpress, drupal and joomla – apparently there is a new joomla instance created about every two minutes. I must stop Alan Runyan and see if he has thought about microsoft web platform installer – nowadays this includes the option to install wordpress, drupal, modX, and load of other systems, including downloading and installing dependencies. It would be great if Plone was in that list.

One of the aims of Plone 5 is to make it more designer friendly. I think this is really important – even though since the release of plone 4 i’ve started using plone again for intranets and extranets (mainly straight out of the box with a few minor cosmetic tweaks), I currently still use something like wordpress, or a home-rolled CMS for website builds. That is now going to change – the theming story is being completely re-written by the introduction of Deliverance/XDV/Diazo (already available – more on that later), and Deco (TTW layout and content editing). The aim is to make Plone appeal to designers as something that helps, not hinders them.

Quote of the talk has to be from Limi – “Plone doesn’t suck, because the developers don’t hate the core technology” (or something like that) – in reference to the revelation that many drupal/wordpress/joomla developers admit they actually hate PHP, whereas Plone developers love python.

Deco: new editing interface for plone 5

The next talk I attended was Rob Gietema’s demo of Deco. This is looking really good, although i’m a little bit skeptical of drag and drop and in-place editing (I like front-end based editing, but prefer lightboxed modal editing to in-place), mainly because i’ve seem layouts explode and page elements disappear, or refuse to drop in the correct place on similar systems in the past. However, I haven’t actually tried this one yet, maybe i’m just clumsy! I think in general designers and content editors are going to love it.

LDAP and Active Directory integration

I attended Clayton Parker’s talk on LDAP and active directory integration – can’t say I absorbed much, but i’m sure i’ll be asked to do this one day, so it’s good to know that this is tried and tested and the tools are already there.

Easier and faster Plone theming with Deliverance and xdv

Nate Aune gave us an overview of Deliverance. I’ve known about Deliverance for ages, but the penny dropped for me today about how useful this is. The basic principle is this – deliverance acts as a proxy to transparently take HTML output from a website and merge it with HTML from a theme, according to a simple set of rules. In the case of plone, this means you can create a theme in static HTML and have content from a default theme Plone site displayed wrapped up in the static HTML. Simple rules can be applied e.g. “take the news portlet from the plone site, drop the header and footer and all the images and display in the element with and id of “recent-news” from my HTML theme. magic!

Nate quoted one example where the HTML theme is stored in a dropbox folder which the client has access to to make tweaks and changes. I can see front end developers and designers loving this.

There was much discussion at the end over which technology should be used for this – XDV is a fork of an earlier version of Deliverance, which has slightly different functionality. XDV, which is to be renamed Diazo, will be the theming engine for Plone 5. With that in mind, i’ll concentrate my efforts on Diazo. I’m excited by this for non-plone reasons – a majority of my works seems to involve integrating technologies that don’t belong together – this will really help.

Design and development with Dexterity and convention-over-configuration

Martin Aspelli gave a talk on dexterity – the (eventual) replacement for archetypes. This is already available, but not mature yet. The talk was mainly conceptual rather than code-led, focussing on best practice for designing your site or application – when it is suitable to create a content type, and when you might be better off creating a form, or using a relational database. Best quote “code is like a plastic bag” (reduce, reuse, recycle). Write less code.

Laying Pipe with Transmogrifier

Another talk from Clayton Parker – transmogrifier is a system to package up migrations of content from other systems. My thoughts on this were that it looked like hard work for a one off import (usually i’d write a one-off python script for something like this), but creating packages would benefit the plone community e.g. if there were packages available covering migrations from a standard wordpress, drupal or joomla, this would benefit plone. I suppose this could also be used to import content from older instances of Plone, where the upgrade path is broken.

Multilingual sites – caveats and tips

Sasha Vincic talkd about strategies and gotchas for multilingual site builds. Even though Plone has tools for this, there are common scenarios, such as the “missing page” scenario where a translation of a site may not have the same number of pages as the base translation. He also covered common issues such as escaped HTML being translated by third parties and being delivered content where HTML attributes have been translated, therefore breaking the HTML.

Guest Keynote: Challenging Business

This was an inspirational treat for the end of day one – Richard Noble is a fantastic speaker, and after a day of CMS talk it was great to hear his story of the challenges of his past world land speed record record achievements, and the current one – the Bloodhound SSC project. As well as building insane rocket powered cars (the current one has an F1 engine onboard just to drive the fuel pump!), his goal is to inspire children and young people to become engineers, as there is an impending massive shortage of engineers in training. I was also interest to hear that there will be no patents on the technology developed for the new car – the advancements will be made avaiolable for anyone in the engineering industry to build on – sound familiar?

archived comments

Thanks for the roundup Rick! Looking forward to the rest.

Mike 2010-10-27 21:29:18

Good, clear writeup. I could not make it to the conference this year. It’s nice to be able to follow it a bit this way. Thanks, Rick!

Maurits van Rees 2010-10-27 21:42:13

Thanks for the comments guys – videos for all the talks will eventually be online, so hopefully everyone who couldn’t make it won’t miss out 🙂

Rick 2010-10-27 21:58:26

Thanks for the post!

I agree with you re: transmogrifier which is (partially) why I wrote http://pypi.python.org/pypi/parse2plone

Keep the blogs coming 🙂

Alex Clark 2010-10-28 00:50:01

New macbook air got me all excited – the ultimate ultraportable workstation?


macbook air

I’m having to write this blog post as a brain dump – those annoying boffins at apple have got my brain in a recursive loop because they’ve released an 11 inch macbook air. I’ve always loved the idea of a very portable workstation, i’m happy to compromise on a bit of power for something small and light that I can work on anywhere.

By work, I mean web development – switching between highly visual work on the appearance of web sites, including using the very bloated and power hungry photoshop, to writing code and administrating databases. Although most of the time I work at a desk, with my laptop attached to an external full size monitor and keyboard, I also often work on site for design agencies, with or without an external monitor and I like to work from cafe’s or wherever I happen to be.Therefore my brain is looping around like this:-

I used to have a 12 inch powerbook, it was great – it was small, looked good, had decent battery life (for 5 years ago) but was a little bit underpowered and if I was to do a full days work on it without an external monitor to hook it up to it got tedious, as it only had a resolution of 1024 x 768

When I replaced it with a 2006 plastic macbook, that little bit of extra screen estate was enough to make it a viable machine to work on all day if I couldn’t hook up to a monitor. I bought another one a couple of years later – the original one would only take 2GB’s of RAM, so struggled with Virtual Machines, I got the second one second-hand and I now therefore have a spare, which is mostly used by my wife. They have been great and i’ll hopefully get another year or two out of them.

I have bought two netbooks in the past – a 9 inch acer aspire (which I sold to a friend while drunk), and then just before my road trip this year I bought a ten inch dell inspiron. Although capable, neither of them are pleasant to work on at all. They make good “emergency” machines, but the keyboard feels cramped, and the trackpads have both been virtually unusable. The vertical screen estate is just too small, so using forms on websites and web applications is fiddly, so even blogging with wordpress isn’t pleasant. The dell has really good battery life however, and it is small and it was less that 200 quid, so it still makes a great second emergency laptop.

Whatever I buy needs to be able to run my full development toolkit- apache webserver, mysql and postgres databases, photoshop, code editor, virtual machines. That rules out an iPad, which doesn’t run osx (or windows/linux for that matter).

So onto the macbook air – the first thing is that it looks gorgeous – like a slimmed down 12 inch powerbook – ridiculously thin and light. It seems very futuristic, but functional. at £849 in VAT for the base model it is therefore the cheapest macbook available – same price as the base model plastic macbook. I said cheapest not “cheap”, by the way!

The 11 inch macbook air has a full size keyboard and a decent trackpad, therefore it should be ok to type on, and navigate intricate interfaces. It has a native resolution of 1366 by 768 so it has more horizontal pixels than my macbook, but slightly less vertical pixels. Only slightly though – I guess i’ll be going to the apple store to see how that feels in use.

It has “up to five hours” of battery life – I think this will mean a couple of hours in reality, with the type of work I do – not brilliant. I think the efficiency and lower capacity battery means that I might have more success charging or powering it with my solar/ battery gadgets though.

The base model only has a 64GB “disk” – that would be pretty easy to fill, even if I have my music/ videos/ vm’s on an external disk. I guess an external disk would be key to this – it couldn’t be my “main machine”, but I would want it to be the machine I pick up and take with me most of the time, so i’d need to adopt a way of working that means I could quickly pick up where I leave off when I switch machines. The price starts to creep up if I choose the upgraded options – more ram, higher capacity disk etc.

By the way, i’ve only mentioned the 11 inch version. There is also a 13 inch version which is higher spec, but also higher price and if I wasn’t going to have the really small one, i’d rather get a high spec 13 inch macbook pro, for that budget. At least i’ve managed to rule that one out.. I think.

So the conclusion is that it would be a stupidly expensive indulgence for something that couldn’t be my main machine. I should be ashamed of myself – i’m not an apple fanboy (honest!). I’ve never queued inside an apple store for anything, let alone outside. I just don’t need one. It would be stupid to spend my hard earned cash on something so unnecessary.

I tell myself all of this each time I get to this point of the thought loop… but then I look at the pictures and video, tell myself that £849 minus VAT (I can reclaim through my limited company) isn’t *that* much for such an amazing gadget.. and i’m back to the start. I wonder if it’s possible to put a restraining order on myself preventing myself from going within 200 metres of the apple store…

Tate Movie Project



Earlier on this year I was fortunate enough to be asked to help the Aardman Digital team out on the companion website for the Tate Movie Project . This was one of the most fun and technically challenging website builds i’ve worked on. Working as part of the team, along with several other Bristol freelancers, I helped integrate the cakePHP site with wordpress and vanilla Forums. This was also one of the largest site builds i’ve worked on – multiple flash developers, PHP developers, designers, animators, front end developers and producers, all coordinated by subversion, unfuddle and the biggest wall of printed out screen grabs i’ve ever seen!