Subject: [Tools-team] Thoughts on Plone

From: Bill Fenner <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 16:59:43 -0700

I'm still in the honeymoon, perhaps, but I'm still liking using
plone as a CMS for rtg.ietf.org .  I just gave my first WG chair
access to his own directory today, and he easily added the ietf60
proceedings at http://rtg.ietf.org/wg/bfd/ .  

I've had to do some customizations, and I've found them very easy.
For example, I wrote a 10-line python script that handles legacy
URLs from phpnuke.  phpnuke used URLs such as
http://rtg.ietf.org/modules.php?module=Content&pa=showpage&pid=7 .
The python script is installed as modules.php/index_html, and
sends a redirect based on the incoming URL and some metadata
stored as "link" content in the CMS - so it uses the normal
CMS management interface to handle where these legacy links redirect
to.

I find the ftp interface fairly reasonable.  If you upload a text
file, then download it again, it comes back with a header prepended,
which allows setting of much of the metadata.  You modify the header
and then re-upload.  The WEBDAV interface is much the same; the
advantage is that MacOS has a r/w WEBDAV filesystem implementation,
so you can simply mount the web site and cd around and vi the
content.

I haven't yet explored the permissions issue that Alex raised:
can I give the WG chairs permission to put other users into the
"can-manage-this-wg's-content" group?

I hope to implement something like Henrik's mip4 draft status
tracker in the Zope/Plone style (which seperates data collection
from presentation much more than pyht), using the Zope object
database (ZODB) to manage the document status.  The ZODB makes
itself available via the web and ftp/DAV interfaces, so this
gives users flexibility in how they want to manage content.
Each chair can use the tool in a different way.

Anyway, I'll try to keep the group updated on my progress.
I should probably try to learn some python other than by
osmosis (although that's worked well enough so far).

  Bill

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From: Henrik Levkowetz <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 18 Sep 2004 02:32:30 +0200

> proceedings at http://rtg.ietf.org/wg/bfd/ .  

Nice :-)

> so you can simply mount the web site and cd around and vi the

!! Both nice and something I didn't know about :-)

> Each chair can use the tool in a different way.

Interesting.  I'd really enjoy providing something like that
for the complete community...

pyth is really most appropriate for small applications where 
the same person is handling design and programming.  And today
you should rather use mod_python 3.x with apache 2.x , which
gives you the possibility of working in the same style, but
standardised on an apache module rather than a freestanding
interpreter.

Nice to be able to use plone's access management to provide
controlled access to the chairs, for managing draft info.

> osmosis (although that's worked well enough so far).

I'd strongly recommending simply following the Python tutorial
included in the distribution and also available on 
http://www.python.org/ for a start.  It is better written and 
more concise than most books I've come across - one of the
better language intros I know of, come to think of it.

	Henrik