Month: January 2006

I’m a couple of days into the Plone snow sprint 2006. Before we arrived at the sprint location, the netsight contingent took a couple of days snowboarding. After half a day of falling on my backside, I just about have basic control of the board now, at least I can carve down the slope quite comfortably if the run is wide enough – there were a few hairy moments on a narrow forest road where I couldn’t quite make the turns quick enough and wiped out at least one skier (luckily I don’t speak enough German to understand what they were shouting at me!). I’d definitely like to snowboard again, though it is an expensive hobby.

We then attended the opening party for the newly formed lovely systems in Dornbirn. Free bar, Live band, games involving hammers, ’nuff said.

I’ll be working on a few plone multimedia projects during the sprint. Myself and Tom Lazaar will be trying to sort out some kind of solution for blogging in plone. Currently we are examining the available options to see whether we are better off cherrypicking the best features from each and putting the together into something new, to “finish” one the existing ones off, or whether to work on a set of adapters (xml-rpc, trackback) and products to enable plone itself to be used as a blog application (using, say, news items instead of blog entries, and having a customisation policy to set a plone instance up as a blog).

I will also hopefully be working (or at least shadowing someone else working on) a flash media player (a bit like google video thing), including server-side video transcoding. This should be useful for the online skate zine i’m working on!

Hopefully I can also finish off what I started for ATAudio, tidying up the templates ready for a release, using so called “five views”.

One of the common hurdles I always encounter is that the title field is not suitable to be used for the sort_on criteria in a portal catalog search. This is because it is a textindex. To get round this you can use another index called sortable_title instead (at least in plone 2.1 you can, not sure about older versions…)

example: python:context.REQUEST.get(‘myvar,”)

this can be use in zpt e.g. tal:define=”mypagevar python:context.REQUEST.get(‘myvar,”)”

I had some trouble working out how to configure this – by default the configuration refers to the editor and visitor skins that are installed when you install the CMFUrlSkinSwitcher product. I couldn’t work out whether I was supposed to substitute the name of my skins (in this case ‘SkateItall” for visitors and ‘Plone Default’ for admin).

This is probably the case, but wasn’t sure so in the end I went to portal_skins – > properties and copied the layers from my skate it all skin to the visitor skin.

all I did then was substitute the ‘edit’ stuff in the mappings for the start of my own admin url.