In the recent weeks, I got quite a number of questions about
archgenxml and plone 3.0. In summary:
- The good news is that archgenxml-generated products still pretty
much work OK on plone 3.0. Archetypes itself didn't change that
much and the majority of what archgenxml does is to feed info to
archetypes.
- The number one problem on plone 3.0: the workflow. Archgenxml
generates them the oldfashioned way: workflow files in the
Extensions directory. That way of working has been deprecated
with plone 3.0, workflows ought to be handled with genericsetup now:
in profiles/default/workflow.xml.
- There is a workaround: install the product in plone 2.5, export the
workflow.xml there and add it by hand to your product. Urgh.
Improving archgenxml has been in the planning for some time. Since
that blog post in september 2006, progress has been slow, but in the
last 2 weeks I've again put in quite some effort and I'm again happy
coding along in good old train-driven-development commuter work :-)
The stuff is all done on the svn trunk version. Some highlights of
what's been done:
- Archgenxml is now something you install with python
setup.py.
- Archgenxml uses the zope3 component architecture internally to
handle things. At least, I've got a few interfaces, I'm using one
adapter and one utility. It already makes things clearer. The choice
for zope3 is a good one, I can tell. See one of the next blog
posts.
- One horrible hack has been done to be able to import said zope3
machinery. I posted earlier about setup.py problems. Basically
depending on zope.interface, zope.component and the rest of the
stack almost guarantees that you mess up your python's site packages
with versions that are incompatible with other zopes (like, your
running instances...) that you're running with that python. You'd
have to isolate bloody everything with workingenv to get this
working. So start up archgenxml and the hack will introduce itself
and tell you how to handle it :-)
- All the new code I wrote has doctests. And I try to add doctests for
existing code that I copy/paste to new files. So hopefully this
means that the quality will slowly rise.
- A completely empty genericsetup profile is generated and installed
by the quickinstaller. Anything you put in there is in mortal danger
as it'll probably get plowed under once I start adding genericsetup
files with archgenxml.
Well, there's the current status! Ongoing work.
