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Searching arbitary HTML snippets on Plone content pages

Here is an example how to crawl through Plone content to search HTML snippets. This can be done by rendering every content object and check whether certain substrings exists the output HTML This snippet can be executed through-the-web in Zope Management Interface.

This kind of scripting is especially useful if you need to find old links or migrate some text / HTML snippets in the content itself. There might be artifacts which only appear on the resulting pages (portlets, footer texts, etc.) and thus they are invisible to the normal full text search.

# Find arbitary HTML snippets on Plone content pages 

# Collect script output as text/html, so that you can
# call this script conveniently by just typing its URL to a web browser
buffer = ""

# We need to walk through all the content, as the
# links might not be indexed in any search catalog
for brain in context.portal_catalog(): # This queries cataloged brain of every content object
       try:
         obj = brain.getObject()
         # Call to the content object will render its default view and return it as text
         # Note: this will be slow - it equals to load every page from your Plone site
         rendered = obj()
         if "yourtextmatch" in rendered:
               # found old link in the rendered output
               buffer += "Found old links on <a href='%s'>%s</a><br>\n" % (obj.absolute_url(), obj.Title())
       except:
         pass # Something may fail here if the content object is broken

return buffer

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Plone Developer Manual, take #0.1

The first public version of  Plone developer manual is available here.

It is still very much draft, but I assure you will find it useful. You will find it even more useful after you put in the answers for your own problems.

In my previous Plone developer documentation rant my flow of though was little abstract and I couldn’t clearly explain how I want the community to maintain this crucial piece of documentation.  This time I made a comic.

* How to get support

** How to update Plone Developer Manual

Putting views, like sitemap, into Plone content tree using Easy Template add-on

Plone has two kind of pages

  • Content pages which have a path and will appear in the navigation and in the sitemap. These are stored in the database.
  • View based pages and template based pages which usually present an action  (accessibility, sitemap, contact info form). They do not appear in the navigation. They are stored as source code on the file system. You cannot navigate to view based pages and just click edit. To change them you need to use various customization methods (add-on product, Zope management interface) to modify the code.

Sometimes it is desirable, for the sake of uniformness, to put view based pages (accessibility, sitemap) into the content tree. For example, one could want to have the sitemap link appearing only in the navigation tree under the site section “About this site”.

Plone add-on product Easy Template provides an easy method to show any Plone view(s) on a normal page. Easy Template uses Django like template syntax (Jinja 2 engine). It gives you great power to drop dynamic content easily on pages. Easy Template also has some security awarness ensuring the members using it cannot escape from their sandbox.

Easy Template works in WYSIWYG and non-WYSIWYG modes

  • You can directly mix templates into text in Visual Editor (Kupu). This is mostly useful for non-HTML aware content editors, who use WYSIWYG editor and can use snippets from a reference card prepared by a developer. Note: Visual Editor has some limitations or undesired behavior. Sometimes it tries to put arbitary HTML tags into text (&nbsp; which breaks the template code).
  • You can write templatized HTML source code in “raw” mode. You can write source code on “Template” schemata in Edit view.

Example how to show a sitemap on an arbitary Plone page

  1. Install Easy Template (if you are a developer I suggest you to try trunk version)
  2. Create a Templated document content
  3. Write some arbitary text in Kupu
  4. Put in the code snippet {{ view(“sitemap”, “createSiteMap”) }} which triggers the sitemap view rendering
  5. Save and view the document in View mode

Picture 1

It turns out to be:

Picture 3

There is no such thing as a “views reference” for Plone. View names and functions can be figured out by searching and reading through ZCML and Python files in Plone source tree. Some developer insight is needed. For example. for sitemap we can do the grep search:

grep -Ri --include="*.zcml" sitemap *

Then read Products/CMFPlone/browser/configure.zcml and Products/CMFPlone/browser/sitemap.py.

The same thing works in portlets. Use Templated Portlet portlet type. See Easy Template PyPi homepage for the full reference of the product’s potential.

About the author Mikko Ohtamaa

XHTML mobile profile transformer and cleaner for Python

Mobile phones, and especially mobile site validators, are very picky about the validy of XHTML. It must not be any XHTML, but special mobile profile XHTML. Also, search engines like Google, will punish you in the mobile search results if your site fails to conform to mobile profile.

This is especially troublesome if you display external content (RSS feeds, ATOM feeds) on your mobile site. Incoming HTML cannot be guaranteed to follow any specification.

To solve this problem, we have created gomobile.xhtmlmp Python library which helps you to transform any HTML to content to valid XHTML MP. The library is piloted on plonecommunity.mobi site which  uses aggregated content from varying sources. The library is based on lxml.html.Cleaner. The library is part of GoMobile project which aims to create world class Python mobile web development tools.

Highlights

  • Turn any incoming HTML/XHTML to mobile profile compatible
  • Enforce ALT text on images – especially useful for external tracking images (feedburner tracker). ALT texts are required by XHTML MP.
  • Protect against Cross-Site Scripting Attacks (XSS) and other nastiness, as provided by lxml.xhtml.clean
  • Unicode compliant – eats funky characters

As an example we integrated gomobile.xhtmlmp  to Feedfeeder Plone add-on product.

Enjoy.