The Netsight Blog

by Matt Hamilton on Feb 10, 2009

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OK, so I'm going to let you into a little secret here... this new blog, for one of the UK's longest established Plone development companies, isn't actually written in Plone. Shock! Horror! How can this be? Well our own website was actually designed and built before Plone even really existed. Before Plone, we did all our development in old-skool Zope 2. I guess it's a testament to our designers that even since the last time we re-designed our website nearly 7 years ago our website still gets a lot of praise for its design.

For several years now we've been saying 'we need to get a blog sorted out', but just never got around to it. We've developed countless blogs for clients, but never had time to do our own. In case you are wondering then why this new blog already has a history of articles, that is because for the past year we've had a mailbox setup at work that we've been emailing blog posts to ready for when we got the blog sorted... which of course was only meant to be temporary... (yeah, right!).

So what is this blog running on then, if it isn't Plone? Its running Zine a python based 'clone' of Wordpress. This was partly an experiment and no doubt will change a few times over the life of this blog. So why Zine then? Well, we have been starting to use a technology called Deliverance that allows you to apply a look and feel (theme) to a website without actually touching the site itself.

This was originally created for Plone to allow designers to create themes for Plone without having to know all the guts of Plone and get their hands dirty with python code and viewlets and the likes. It also allows you to apply the same theme to multiple sites and make them look coherent. The upcoming new plone.org website (which Netsight did the visual design for) is going to be using Deliverance to theme both Plone itself and also Trac, the issue tracking tool that the Plone project uses. In our case we use Deliverance to theme both Zine and our own Zope website.

In fact though, Deliverance doesn't theme our website, but uses our website as the theme. Yes that's right, you can specify a URL for the theme file for deliverance, so this could be a local file, or another site somewhere. So we had great fun playing around with this, theming our blog with various other public sites, Ikea, Disney etc etc. And the fantastic thing about it all was that we needed to touch neither the theme source (ie Disney's site) or the content source (Zine). This meant I could setup Zine nice and quickly without needing to get to grips with its (frankly, weird - a separate rant) way of handling theming and customisation.

For those interested in the technical details I'll be writing a subsequent post with technical details of the setup of our site and blog and how we are combining zope, zine, wsgi, deliverance (xdv) all together as one. I'm also hoping to write a bit about the cool project we are working on using the concepts in Deliverance to theme an existing large legacy portal for an organisation.

Filed under: deliverance, plone, wsgi, zope

Christopher Johnson says:

Feb 10, 2009 08:01 PM

Hey Matt - Great to see the blog integrated with the site like this! Congrats on getting them working smoothly together. Do you have this all in a buildout? Look forward to the technical details.

Also, what do you think of Zine? You feel safe? Easy to use features? Anything you miss from WordPress or Quills (if you used either)?

Matt Hamilton says:

Feb 10, 2009 08:32 PM

Yes I have this in a buildout, it'll be with tech details in next post :) I actually managed to combine both xdv and zine in the same WSGI stack process.

As for Zine... actually no, I don't like it to be honest. I don't feel safe. Take a look at the code. Maybe I'm just not used to the markup syntax (jinga) they use, but it just seems so dirty. They have written their own event handler (why?!) and the HTML templates are littered with emit_event calls so that things can hook in at relevant points. I wrote a module to add gravatar support and it required quite a bit of messing to get it to work. I'd love to have the time to re-write it in something like Grok, would be about 1/4 of the LoC I think. There are a few features I want to add, and layouts I want to do, but I'm starting to think of ditching it and writing my own blog in Grok.

As for comparisons to Wordpress, well I've not used Wordpress, but I hear its code is even nastier. That said there are zillions of modules for Wordpress to do whatever you want. e.g. Zine doesn't even allow images or file to be attached at the moment, which is pretty restricting. In comparison wordpress has whole image library plugins.

Christopher Johnson says:

Feb 18, 2009 06:23 PM

Wow, no images!? That's pretty lousy...the image adding in wordpress is very slick. You can upload it or point to the image online very quickly (makes me wish Plone had the second one of those!!).

I'm not a code monkey, so looking won't help me much :). My concern is really the security of the system though. Don't know how vulnerable it will be to the ever-so-creative and persistent spambots/spammers. At least with wordpress there is a huge community and a lot of real world road testing. There's been problems, but a lot of people to find and fix them quickly. I get the sense that zine doesn't have much of a community yet.

Matt Hamilton says:

Feb 18, 2009 07:38 PM

Yeah, there are very few plugins right now :( I am forever deleting spam comments from this blog. I noticed there is an akismet plugin, so I might give that a try. My other thought it to move the comments away to a centralised system like disqus.com or intensedebate.com

-Matt

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