Plone Products respectively Python Eggs
Status: I will not finish this page; see Update below.
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Last changed: Monday 2010-03-01 [12:22 UTC]
Abstract:
Integration is a huge issue in any enterprise that has a large number of other systems already in place. Because Plone is an open-source project, it has a lot of products, add-ons, skins, and tools that provide extra functionality for free. A product is a module to install into Plone that provides more functionality to Plone. Although the name product implies a cost, that is not the case -- most products are free and open source. The term product actually describes some additional piece of software that can be plugged into core Plone and thus provide enhanced functionality to core Plone. Python eggs on the other hand are a more generic and flexible alternative to products. Eggs are not specific to Zope, and Zope has only recently been made egg-aware. In addition to code, eggs contain metadata such as version, dependencies, and license information. Egg management tools can use this information to manage concurrent versions or automatically fetch dependencies, for example. With this page, I will not just show how to acquire and handle (install/configure) Plone Products but also provide some pointers and hints on how to create them from scratch.
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Table of Contents
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Update: I now (May 2009) stopped working with/on Plone in favor of
Dolmen simply because working with Plone is no fun anymore. Plone has
become way to fat and confusing to work with over the years — I need
something that works with me, not against me.
Products
Introduction
We can extend Zope respectively Plone by creating our own types of
objects that are customized to our applications needs. New kinds of
objects are installed in Zope by so-called Products. Products are
extensions to Zope that Zope Corporation and many other third-party
developers create. There are hundreds of different Products and many
serve very specific purposes.
Zope Products extend the Zope core by adding new object types and
custom facilities written in Python. Zope allows site managers to add
new object types to Zope by installing Product files on their Zope
server's file system .
Installing Plone Products
A product is a module to install into Plone that provides more
functionality to Plone. Although the name product implies a cost, that
is not the case — most products are free and open source. The term
product actually describes something written on the file system and
distributed for other Plone sites to use. Installing a product
generally involves the following two steps:
- Installing it so that it is registered inside Zope
- Installing it into each Plone instance that wants to use it
The large variety of add-ons available means that it is pretty hard to
give any hard and fast rules about what exactly needs to be done to
install them. One should always read the product's installation files,
which will usually explain how to install the product.
Finding Products
Finding the right products is probably the hardest part about
integration. The Zope.org website contains many products created and
uploaded by users. One can find these products primarily at
http://www.zope.org/Products Some of these products are Plone related,
and others are Zope, Content Management Framework (CMF), or Python
related. The other main area to find products is at the Plone site
itself (http://plone.org/products).
Python Eggs
If you do not know what a Python egg is, it is simply a way of
distributing Python packages, similar to Debian packages. There is
also an easy method of installing them, using easy_install.
easy_install is bundled with a package called setuptools which also
contains other utilities that ease working with eggs a lot.
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