ParTecs Weblog

Don’t miss this very interesting Telematics Discussion on TFF’s blog (telematics Freedom Foundation). It really worths a reading.

I am happy to announce that our major GPL Plone Widgets will be now maintained and released on SourceForge.net.

• PloneSkype [download] [stats] [join the devel mailing list]
• PloneInvite [download] [stats] [join the devel mailing list]
• PloneCaptcha [download] [stats] [join the devel mailing list]

We thank everybody helping on these projects. Our other widgets are still available from our website and if interest grows we’ll be happy to maintain another sf.net project page.

We invite all developers willing to help making PloneSkype, PloneInvite and PloneCaptcha really useful products for the community to join efforts. So, if you have the will, don’t hesitate in joining the mailing lists linked above and start getting your hands dirty with python.

We got a new release, with community contributed code 🙂 Thanks indyone, Tristan and Doc Walker.

• Prevent your site from getting spammed;
• Change captcha.net username and password from the ZMI;
• Listen to the captcha code with the audio link…
• more on the way…

We now have a SourceForge Project Page and a Mailing List.

Download and Join us today.

Note: A portuguese (brazil) release is here: www.softwarelivre.org

Let us say that you have an application that includes an e-mail notification system. Essentially when certain application specific events happen, certain users are automatically notified by e-mail about these events. We have such an application and wanted to include the e-mail verification as part of the accepance test-suite.

TestableEmailer is a product that grew out of this need. It is a thin wrapper around MailHost that allows for a “test mode”. When this mode is turned on, rather than sending the mail through the Mail Host the product stores all the information in the email. This can be retrieved later and assertions made against what is expected from that e-mail.

TestableEmailer has been built using Five interfaces and views. It has been tested on Zope 2.8.6.

Get the product here.

We are happy to announce that the PloneSkype-1.0.2 version is released. This is a bug fix version where it doesn’t crash the site if anonymous user creates document(page)( if site allows anonymous users to create the document.)

Download now!.

Bug Description :
If the document is cretaed by anonymous user(If annonymous users have permissions to add document), then it crashes the site as plone doesn’t create member data for anonymous users.

How to patch:

1. Click here to Get the patch file .
2. Just un tar it and put PloneSkypeTool.py into PloneSkype folder.

Thanks to Tomasz for submitting the bug.

So we got the new and improved version of our website up, announcing all our new initiatives with lot of new content and even a bright new Contact us form. The site includes Geoff’s CacheFu with all its recent enhancements (did you know 1.0 is in beta now) making it fast and responsive, all the flash animations we did looks great (OK, kinda great…), the content looks sharp and concise, and I should be feeling relieved and at peace, but instead I am tossing and turnin with this nagging feeling that wont let me go to sleep…

Its the darn Contact us form. See, we have been doing a whole lot of of automated web testing using frameworks like mechanize, twill and zope.testbrowser and I know how easy it would be for some kook to write a script that will submit those Contact forms dozens to the minute creating a whole bunch of spam and bringing our server to its knees. In fact I met a couple of those kooks at the last beer party I went to.

If only I could add one of those squiggly text images and a word verification text box to our Plone site and thus ensure that only a real live human being (or an extremely well trained chimp) would be filling out our Plone Training request forms…

So I dig around. As it turns out this mechanism is called a Captcha. Short for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”. Invented by Carnegie Mellon University after they decided to do something useful for furthering Computer Science. And there is a whole site http://captchas.net that provides the service straight from their site. For free! All we need is to do a little bit of tailoring of our forms. Darn easy to make it work. What’s even better is that it looks like a slated feature for Plone 3.0. Of course only if the Accessibility freaks (you know who you are 😉 ) let it get there!

You know the rest of the story. I throw together the PloneCaptcha product. And with one stroke of metal you can have your own squiggly text image on your pages, thus ensuring that only a really well trained chimp could sign up for that Plone training of yours.

PS; The stroke of metal you need:

< div metal:use-macro=”here/captcha/macros/edit” />

And Get your PloneCatcha here!

DateBox 1.0.2 was using toPortal time method in its page templates. This method has been deprecated. Now we are using toLocalizedTime instead of toPortalTime. Download the latest version from from ParTecs downloads

Thanks to Paul Roe for sending us the patch.

Ever wondered how cool it would be to have GMAIL kind of invitation system for your Plone site? Well I am going to talk about an PloneInvite product that we developed some time ago which does just that.

A webmaster would want to use invitation based registration for his site, if he wants to control who registers with the portal. An invite based registration system has a strong advantage when it comes to building online communities. The biggest advantage is, since only an existing member can send invites to the potential members, screening of the new members becomes and automatic process, this directly results in to an enriched online community.

Let me explain how PloneInvite works.

Once you install the product in your Plone portal(which like installing any other plone product.) it basically adds two actions to the site. One for the portal admin and another for the normal member.

1. PloneInvite has invite quota for every member. Portal admin can only assign every member no of invitations, he can invite any one to join the website.
2. Portal admin can also set an expiry date on all these invitations. He can also choose to enforce the email address (i.e.. Register a user with the same email id as mentioned by the invitee.).
3. He can view status of the each and every invite he has allocated to the members.

A Member on the other hand can

1. invite potential members if (s)he has been assigned invites by the portal admin.
2. Member can choose to enforce the email address if portal admin has not already enforced it.
3. Member can send invite to any email address along with his own message. After sending an invitation member can see the status of his invitation.
4. An invitation has to be used within its validity period after that invited person will not be able use the same invitation to register with the site.

Well we had fun while developing this particular module. Watch this space for the release.

DateBox is a Plone Archetype Field using JavaScript, DHTML and advanced Date parsing to generate the date based on the grammar passed. The purpose of DateBox is to simplify the date entering process using grammatical terms we are all familiar with.

In simpler terms, that means, with DateBox installed on your site, users can enter dates like

• Today
• Tomorrow
• next friday
• 6 april
• 7th may 2006

and the datebox widget will convert that into proper date formats (eg: YYYY-MM-DD).

Download: Get it here
DateBox is also available on Plone.org under the Products section
Usage:

1. Install as usual in your Products folder
2. Install in your Plone Site with the Quickinstaller tool
3. In your custom Archetype, add :
from Products.DateBox import DateBoxField
from Products.DateBox import DateBoxWidget
4. Use like a regular field/widget in your Type’s Schema. There is an included example.

Full usage example::
DateBoxField(‘test_datebox’,
required = True,
widget = DateBoxWidget(lable = ‘Test DateBox’,
description = ‘Test DateBox Field’,
label = ‘Test Datebox’,
i18n_domain = ‘plone’)
)

A demo type is included. Set INSTALL_DEMO_TYPES = False in config.py to disable it.