Setting Google Apps hosted email as your browser’s default email client for mailto protocol

Would it be nice that when you click email link (maito) in your browser you could directly send email from your organizations’s Google Apps hosted service? (Google Apps is GMail + Google Docs for corporate/organizations with own domain name).

Here are instructions how to achieve it.

Firefox

Follow instructions by Steve Novoselac.

Opera

Here are instructions for Opera 10:

• You have file webmailproviders.ini where web mail backends are lsited
• This file is located in Applications/Opera (you need to right click and choose Show package contents) and Resources/defaults/webmailproviders.ini (on OSX, for Windows Linux follow the instruction links below)
• Add the email provider description as below. Note that you need to change Google Apps domain name to your link. After saving the file you need to restart opera. You don’t need icon if you don’t have one.
• Then restart Opera, choose Preferences -> Advanced -> Programs -> mailto -> your email account.

[DOMAIN_NAME]
ID=8
URL=https://mail.google.com/hosted/DOMAIN_NAME?extsrc=mailto&url=%s
ICON=https://mail.google.com/favicon.ico

Web mailto in OperaWiki

More HTTP links to trigger email send for various email providers

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Userland templates for Plone – template engine abstraction layer for Python

I have been working with collective.easytemplate product which allows users to use template tags on various places on Plone site. Currently supporting

• Kupu
• Outgoing email actions (Content rules ones)

The users can place ${title}, ${object_url} and other template in the edit mode. These variables which are directly mapped from Archetypes fields when the content is viewed/sent. Also, one can register custom snippet generators like $list_folder_content.

I hope Easy Template to cover some more actions in the future. I have noted PloneFormGen and Singing & Dancing product authors that we could add some mixed in functionality together.

Currently Easy Template uses Cheetah template backend. Cheetah is not Zope security friendly and exposing templated actions should be allowed only to trusted members. I am not huge fan of Plone’s TAL template language which is based on XML attributes and thus suitable only be used in XML context – this language is aimed only for hardcore hackers and software designers and ordinary folk really cannot wrap their minds around it.

Because I am not sure which will be the chosen template backend in the future I chose to abstract the template engine layer away. I created collective.templateengines product. It is a bunch of Zope interfaces and utility functions to abstract away common template actions like

• Applying a template
• Adding a template context variables
• Registering custom template tags

Currently collective.templateengines supports Cheetah and Django templates.

So, dear audience, what do you think of all this? What template engine would you suggest which would be Kupu friendly – you can edit the template language in WYSIWYG editor? Do you see any other usages for collective.templateengines? Which other projects could adopt template engine abstraction layer?