ITauthor

A couple of years ago the ITauthor web site was a combination of Plone (for articles), MovableType (for blog entries), WordPress/Loudblog (for podcasts) and various Perl-based pages or static HTML pages.

Last year, when I finally gave up on Plone and decided to simplify everything by just using WordPress.

I took snapshot HTML files of my Plone site, which you can access here:

http://plonesite2005.itauthor.com/

Typically, for me, I then forgot I'd done this until this evening when I stumbled upon it while browsing around the command line of my web server.

Note: Although it looks like a Plone site, and most (but not all) of the links work like they should, it's actually not using Plone/Zope at all. It's just a collection of static HTML pages. Because of this, it doesn't perform as nicely as Plone and clicking through it feels very clunky compared to how it worked when the pages were really being served up from the Zope database. However, it gives you an idea of what I had on there and how it looked.

I just added a "Podcasts" tab to ITauthor.com, but initially it wasn't displaying as selected. The <li> element should get class="selected" when it's selected, but it resolutely stayed class="plain" and so it didn't come to the front when clicked. After a lot of digging I discovered the solution in: http://plone.org/documentation/how-to/changing-tabs The trick is that you have to make sure that the ID for the tab is the same value as the short name you give the page you are linking to.

When you first install Plone/Zope on Linux, you stop and start the Zope server by going to the zope/bin directory and running the zopectl script: ./zopectl start or ./zopectl stop This is all right to begin with, but what you really want is for Zope to start up automatically when the machine boots up. One way to do this is to edit the /etc/rc.local file and add a line such as: su <zopeuser> -c "<path>/zope/bin/zopectl start" For example: su joe -c "/usr/local/zope/bin/zopectl start" The su command switches to the specified user (in the above example joe). This is the user that zope is configured to run as. Typically, you will run the Zope server as a non-root user. su <user> -c <command> means run the following single command as the specified user.

Browsing around looking for information about Plone and WebDAV, I came across Enfold Systems and their Plone Desktop, which sounds very promising (and the demo works well) but I assumed that it was Open Source and was disappointed to find out that it wasn't. I am concerned about the security aspects of this system, the lack of documentation on Enfold's web site, and most of all by the inability to buy it - the listed UK reseller had nothing about Plone Desktop on their web site. I couldn't even find anything in a search. So I dropped any thoughts I had of using that. However, the Enfold site mentions a slide show product for Plone, which uses something called S5, developed by none other than Eric Meyer. At the mention of this name my interest was well and truly pricked and I enjoyed browsing over to meyerweb for the first time in a while to check out S5. S5 is: "S5 is a slide show format based entirely on XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript. With one file, you can run a complete slide show and have a printer-friendly version as well." Judging by the demo, the slide shows look like they have to be kept pretty simple, without all the bells and whistles of PowerPoint, but that's a good thing! I may try this out at some point in the coming months. Incidentally, I notice that Eric is using WordPress. WordPress is something that's bubbled to the surface of my attention pool with several mentions recently. My colleague Cary gave me a demo and it looks very nice, with a huge number of skins to choose from. I just wonder if WordPress is taking over from Blogger and Radio and MovableType as the preferred blog tool. But I think I'll stick with MovableType, at least for now. It may be horribly complicated to customize and has an interface that may look okay but is clunky* and unintuitive to use - however, it works for me, and I've got enough other stuff to do right now without thinking about migrating to a new blog system. * e.g. having to scroll way down the page to save this entry! 8-(

I've been looking for ways of getting content from other sites and inserting it into my site (properly credited, of course). Doing this with RSS feeds is easy - that's what they're made for - but doing it with any old web page that may not be made of well-formed XHTML, and may even be very badly formed HTML, is much more tricky. I wanted to do something I could use in Plone, so that pretty much meant Python - and I know very little about Python and have never written any Python, before this evening. A big help came in the form of the weirdly named Beautiful Soup (see www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/examples.html), although it's almost wholy undocumented, which means working out for yourself how to use it from the few examples out there. Another big help was urllib (http://docs.python.org/lib/module-urllib.html) and urllib2 (http://python.active-venture.com/lib/module-urllib2.html), which you can see in the code below. So I wrote a test script (my first Python script) called grabber.py. What this script does is it calls a URL which runs a search of my Movable Type weblog, returning summaries of *all* the entries in the blog. The URL includes parameters, which are generated in the "params = urllib.urlencode(...)" line of code. The script then feeds this large chunk of HTML through Beautiful Soup, which uses the map function - "map(lambda x: x.first('a'), soup('h3'))" - to parse out just the <a>...</a> elements within <h3>...</h3> elements. These anchor elements get put in an array called anchorelement, and I then iterate through the first 5 anchors, assigning them to a variable called newHTML, which I finally write out to a file called notesgrab.html. You can view this file here: www.itauthor.com/notes/notesgrab.html Read the rest of this entry »