PeriodEnding26January2001

State of the PTK, 2001/01/26

As Shane notes in his status update this has been an exciting week for the PTK:

• The "CookieCrumbler?", which maps authentication cookies onto the REQUEST just as though the browser had sent basic auth, makes a custom user folder type unnecessary in most cases. In combination with the "transparent membership" provided by the portal_membership and portal_memberdata tools, you can now reuse a single user folder (e.g., in the root of your Zope) across multiple portal instances, each of which can track its own "member data" for that user, without interference.
• The new portal_skins and portal_types tools completely obviate any need for the old, awful "copy DTML blindly into the portal instance" strategy; we no longer even need to have the DemoPortal class installed! Please read Shane's writeup and experiment with one of the Portal (new) objects -- you'll like it, we promise! ("Can you spell I18N'? Sure you can!")
• We have replaced the "Wizards" folder with a new tool, portal_types, which serves as a registry of the content types which are addable within a particular portal instance. The basic idea is that the tool contains a set of "local factories"< which have enough information about a type to create a "default" (empty) instance; we create it, using nothing more than the id, and then redirect to it for you to edit it.

  This tool has the potential to interact nicely with other portal features: for instance, it will likely be the locus of the mapping between MIME-types / filenames / &c and the "hookable PUT" implementation. It may also serve as a place to store various "creation policies" (where in a portal each type can be constructed, for instance).

• One of the key elements to the "skinned portal" is that we are freed from having to distribute essential code as ZClass? products; ZClasses? are excellent tools for building an application for your own site; they are miserably inadequate for distribution of a framework to myriad other developers. My motto for the week has been, "DemoPortal delenda est!", and it has, in fact, become obsolete! We still need to work out the transition mechanism for moving an existing, DemoPortal-based instance over to the skinned portal; the good news here is that this is a problem for us, as well as y'all, so we are unlikely to let it slip through the cracks.

For those who would like to play, here is a much simplified installation recipe:

1. Get the latest CVS version of the PTK:

        $ cvs -d :pserver:[email protected]:/cvs-repository login
           (supply 'anonymous' as your password).
   
        $ cvs -d :pserver:[email protected]:/cvs-repository co ZopePTK
           (creates a ZopePTK subdirectory).
   

2. Copy or link the PTKDemo and PTKBase product directories from the newly-extracted ZopePTK directory to the Products directory of your Zope's INSTANCE_HOME or SOFTWARE_HOME (you really should switch to using INSTANCE_HOME, if you haven't already; see Evan Simpson's execllent INSTANCE_HOME writeup).
3. Restart Zope, and select the Portal (New) item from the add list; supply an ID, click Add, and you're there! Be sure to visit the "Portal configuration" screen and set the appropriate properties on your new portal: one important one, at least for playing around, is switching the option to allow newly-joining members to set their own passwords (otherwise you'll have to sign up and wait for mail).

Shane wrote:

  > If you'd like to assist with the PTK, writing documentation is a good
  > idea now.  But make sure you base your documentation on the ZClassless
  > version.

I'd like to second Shane's plea here: we really need help getting this stuff written up; if you brave the waters, please write up your experience (the index_html of your member folder would be a reasonable place to start :) and share. We are planning to launch a new "dogbowl" site (think "living in the fishbowl" crossed with "eat your own dogfood') Real Soon Now (TM), which will be a good place to share such knowledge.

We have actually completed almost all of the "Must have for 1.0" items on my PTK 1.0 roadmap. I am hopeful of releasing a "1.0b1" by the end of next week, with a target release somewhere in mid-February. Remaining:

• Topic integration (Ken Mannheimer and Jeffrey Shell are working on this -- expect great things!)
• UI cleanup (including Ethan's "table-less" layout stuff)
• Finalize PUT handling for text/html documents:
  • Rip title and meta tags for Dublin Core
  • Decapitate body
  • Maybe rip only the content within a pair of "well-known" div tags (e.g., to make tools like Amaya work naturally).

Keep those cards-n-letters coming! (And please record problems in the Tracker),

Tres.