ParTecs Weblog

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.

This is a bug fix version that addresses some problems related to persistence. This tool itself has been well tested from the automated acceptance test suite of our soon to be released PloneConsensus.

Get the latest version here

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.

Of late we have been using Skype more and more to communicate (both one-on-one and multiway conferencing) and have been quite happy with it. Something we are even happier with is our company intranet which is based on Plone and which we use heavily for asynchronous communication. So we thought it was pretty natural to have a product that would integrate Skype with Plone. Now we all know how the Plone world is littered with custom Products that solve pretty much any problem you can think of (and with some of them, you wonder who would ever need something like that?) So we went out to plone.org and began our hunt for such a product expecting to find about a dozen versions all covering the essential functions but differing in their UI and implementation details. And what do you think we found?

Zilch. Zipp. Nada. 3 degrees below…

Absolutely nothing whatsoever that resembled anything which even remotely addressed this need. It appears that Plone and Skype are two parallel worlds without any cross border terrorism 🙂
So we set out to write this product. And PloneSkype was conceived!

What did we want from such a product:

1. For starters, a portlet that would show all the members who were logged into Skype at that time and the ability to start a conversation with any of them

2. The ability to tie together a skype icon that will be displayed along the by-line which already appears on pages created by members

3. To be able to set your own skype id on your preferences page

4. Administrator to update skype id of members

5. Display if member is online on Member search page

This seems to be a good set of starting requirements. Se we started implementing these requirements and as it turns out, Skype provides a nice enough API to make much of this quiet easy to implement.And PloneSkype was born! The end product is available for download and install here.

Of course, with design and implementation the devil is in the proverbial details. Along the way we were confronted with issues for which we had to make a few trade-offs. Stay tuned for future installments here to find out and appreciate these design decisions.

Update: Plone Skype available for download 

Some time ago I need to undo more that 20 transactions in one go. The zope interface displayed only 20 transactions per page. I did the unthinkable and tried to undo the transactions by opening the Zope database on the interpreter. There is a much simpler solution that skipped my mind. All one needed to do was manipulate the URL like so.

http://localhost:8080/manage_UndoForm ?first_transaction:int=20&last_transaction:int=100& PrincipiaUndoBatchSize:int=80

This might seem really obvious but it skipped my mind. And if you were still wondering how one would go about viewing the undo log of the Zope database. I have a small code snippet that will help you get started.

>>> from ZODB import FileStorage, DB
>>> storage = FileStorage.FileStorage('Data.fs')
>>> root=DB(storage).open().root()
>>> print storage.undoLog(0, 10)