splee.blog

Ok, so I’m bored. I don’t mean bored in an idle, can’t-think-of-anything-to-do way. I mean terminally bored. I have plenty to do. There are PC’s to upgrade and install their OS’s and applications, there’s coding for at least two of the companies projects, there’s goofing off round the corner chatting to others… the list goes on.

The problem I have is I can’t focus on anything. It’s like some kind of mental block that’s given me an attention span a goldfish would snigger at.

Oh well… I think I’ll try and sort out the navigation for the site and plan what else I’m going to put here. I want to figure out how to plug Zope into MySQL for starters. If I can get that working it’ll be sweet.

So, I looked around on the internet at various blogs. I’ve sped my way around various different rings and looked at so many different sites about so many different things.

And now it’s getting late and I feel that I haven’t even scratched the surface.

I’ve read so many insightful, well written, funny, sad, inspiring and, above all, downright funky looking sites today that it makes me see this… thing I’ve created here in a different light.

So many people use their blog as a window into at least a single facet of themselves, if not their whole self - warts and all.

And to think that I’m using this site to learn about Zope… talk about a tool misused.

Then again, maybe not. While I may not think that my views are blog-worthy there may be someone who surfs past (if I actually get the site running properly) who thinks that my technical gems that I may or may not post here adhere to some of the above properties of the blogs I’ve been reading.

However, I somehow doubt that this will be the case. Especially as I’m shutting down my second computer (on which this site is hosted) for the night.

It’s possible that people will wait until the morning to read. It’s really that good.

So, my mate Wedge is running a little competition from his blog.

I don’t know about you but, as soon as he gets his comments fixed, I’m going to enter. It’s just too spectacularly spectacular to miss. Honest…

So after much buggering around, scraping the internet for tiny morsels of information and generally breaking things I managed to get my blog to show up as the root of the site.

What a joke! Here’s what I did to make it work.

1) Created a new DTML Method called blogroot in the zope root folder

2) Entered the following code into the method:

<dtml-unless "1+(.string.find(PATHINFO, manage))">

<dtml-if "1+(.string.find(PATHINFO, manage))">

<!– this shouldn’t appear –>

<dtml-elif "1+(.string.find(PATHINFO, blog))">

<!– path was blog –>

<dtml-else>

<dtml-call "REQUEST.path.append(blog)">

</dtml-if>

</dtml-unless>

3) Created a Site Access Rule using the blogroot DTML method.

Seems easy eh? Well, thankfully I managed not to nuke the zope /manage area and could undo some of my changes before I found the solution. It only took me an hour and a half. :/

I realise now that to access any other folders within this zope instance the folder either has to be within the blog folder rather than the Zope instance’s root folder or added to the dtml-elif statements to make sure the path doesn’t have blog added to it.

Having not delved into the depths of redesigning the default skin of COREBlog I can’t speak for the degree of Standards Compliance yet. I’m not sure I want to find out either. These kind folks have made some modifications to COREBlog to make it truely standards compliant and completely seperate content from layout (ah the beauty of CSS ;-). However, since they don’t say what version of COREBlog the modifications were made for I’m not going to install it. I’ll just toil away with the default stuff. I’m sure I’ll be delving into the code to make it output the html so it will work properly with my CSS. :D

Something else I’d like to know: How the hell do you make the blog the default page in your Zope instance? I’ve tried everything I can think of but can’t grasp it due to lack of decent, legible documentation that doesn’t require a PhD in Computer Science to comprehend. In fact, I almost gave up when I nuked my Zope instance.

Note… do not use a SiteRoot unless you know what it is for. It breaks things. Unfortunately I still don’t know what it’s for.

Ok… lets try this again.

Blogging. It’s a fad. It’ll wear off very very soon, I swear. It’ll be like those little Tamagochi things. One minute you can’t move for the buggers, the next they’re quietly draining their batteries in the nearest landfill site.

But, nevertheless, here I am. Blogging away because… well, because I can.

Zope is good. I like it a lot. Mainly because it’s written in Python, my new favourite programming language. It’s got a very steep learning curve though, not helped by sparse documentation. I’ve got a few Plone books on my wishlist at amazon. Feel free to purchase one for me ;) I will add some Zope ones on there too. I feel the platform has potential.