I've seen that I can do pretty much the same with them about creating and editing groups: but when I change a group title (not id) programatically, the title I changed is only shown on prefs_groups_overview (and at /Plone/acl_users/source_groups/manage_workspace) when I use ZODBGroupManager.updateGroup to change it: using portal_groups.editGroup it changes the title, but isn't reflected on those two urls I provided.
Which should I use? Are there any problems using portal_groups to add groups and ZODBGroupManager to edit it's titles since ZODBGroupManager is the only one that changes the titles in the urls above? Will I have problems using both of them?
(I'm using Plone 3.3.5. This bug has been fixed on 4.X. (prefs_groups_overview), but I would like to know if there are problems using ZODBGroupManager since I'm stuck with 3.3.5.)
One is a PAS plugin (ZODBGroupManager) that ships with PAS (the Pluggable Auth service). The other is a portal tool (portal_groups) that ships with PlonePAS (a collection of code and PAS plugins that are Plone-specific.)
You can think of portal_groups as "higher up" and ZODBGroupManager as "lower down" (in the software stack) if that helps (because the former is a portal tool that has a UI representation in Plone, whereas the latter does not).
Via that "high/low" logic, you could say portal_groups is "better" because it's managed by Plone. But I would personally use either/or however you see fit, and not worry too much about problems.
Related
Just started using Drupal and tried to understand the core concepts. I have a developer background but I would like to use Drupal as a site builder and not digging into the code.
I'm trying to build a website which lists various vendors. One could be a Restaurant, another can be Photographer and other possible services (I have like 15 different ones).
They all have some things in common like Title, a Location (used Taxonomy/Vocabulary for that), description, image gallery, address, website, office hours and so on.
But they also have some custom fields. Restaurants can have fields like Facility options:Parking, Smoking area, etc or Capacity; Photographers can have others.
So there are lots of fields which are common for each vendor and some are are unique per each vendor.
What's the best way to implement this kind of structure as a Site builder?
I tried using Entities via ECK (Entity Construction Kit) and defining Entity types (as Vendor) and Bundles (as specific Vendors) but then I'm really limited in defining the common fields on Entity type level since Properties does not seem to be flexible in this regard, meaning that I cannot define them as normal fields and can't associate to them various widgets but only as a text input. Not sure if this a limitation of ECK or of Drupal 7 itself?
On the other hand I see the option of creating normal Content types for each kind of vendor which seems like alot of repetitive work, not sure if this is the right way (that's my only option at the moment)?
Maybe I should start learning more of Drupal and do some coding to create specific entity types? - but this means being more than a site builder. Since it will be a big project will this save me of some trouble later on or you see that I can accomplish the task easily without this extra effort?
Also by coding I'm not sure if there are easy ways of defining fields/widgets for Entity type Properties.
I would later on want to use faceting as well for filtering which will be based both on the fields which are common and unique for each vendor type, not sure if this is an important factor when creating the structure.
Any feedback is appreciated!
I want to make charts and i tried google chart api module,highchart and others but it seems that is not stable enough.
I am asking if there is a way or a module to make graphs and chart ( like the drupal site for example) and to generate some reports by the easy way .
Thank you ..
Do you mean the new Sparklines in the sidebar of the projects page?
For example http://drupal.org/project/google_plusone
They were made with library flot: http://www.flotcharts.org/
http://joeloughton.com/blog/web-applications/sparklines-using-flot/
And the the Statistics charts, also were made with flot.
For example:
http://drupal.org/project/usage/google_plusone
If you google "flot drupal.org" you will find different modules (integration with Views, etc) and tutorials
Refer to the Comparison of Charting Modules for (lots of) options to pick from. The 2 most commonly used (= reported installs) modules are either the Chart module, or the Charts module". To get you going with either module, you may want to checkout the (recently created) community documentation of either the Chart module, or the Charts module.
The license that comes with the related charting library (engine) in each of these modules, should be considered also. It is one of the (important?) selection criteria for deciding on the module to go for. 'Possible privacy concerns' or 'Yes or no support for saving charts in PDFs' is another typical item to consider.
Disclosure: I'm the author of the comparison and charting modules mentioned above, I hope this does not violate the site's policy on self-promotion.
At the company I work for, we have an intranet that provides employees with access to a wide variety of documents. These documents fall into several categories and subcategories, and each of these categories have their own web page. Below is one such page (each of the links shown will link to a similar view for that category):
http://img16.imageshack.us/img16/9800/dmss.jpg
We currently store each document as a file on the web server and hand-code links to these documents whenever we need to add a new document. This is tedious and error-prone, and it also means we lack any sort of security for accessing these documents. I began looking into document management systems (like KnowledgeTree and OpenKM), however, none of these systems seem to provide a categorized view like in the preview above.
My question is ... does anyone know of any Document Management System that allow for the type of flexibility we currently have with hand-coding links to our documents into various webpages (major and minor , while also providing security, ease of use, and (less important) version control? Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?
If you are trying to categorize the files or folders in the document management system, That's not a difficult task. You only need to access to admin panel to maintain the folders or categorize the folders
In Laserfiche, You can easily categorize your folders regarding the departments and can also be subcategorized them
You should look into Alfresco. It's extremely extensible and provides a lot of ways of accessing the repository.
Note: click the "Developers" tab for the community edition.
My question is ... does anyone know of
any Document Management System that
allow for the type of flexibility we
currently have with hand-coding links
to our documents into various webpages
(major and minor , while also
providing security, ease of use, and
(less important) version control?
Or do you think I'd be better off developing such a system from scratch?
Well there are companies that make a living selling doc management software. Anything you can get off the shelf is going to be a huge time saver, and its going to be better than anything you could reasonably develop by hand.
I've used a few systems:
Sharepoint: although I hear some people don't like it, I didn't either ;)
HyperOffice worked really well for my company of around 150 employees and has all the features you describe.
Current company uses Confluence, I like it :) But its probably one of those tools whose pricetag isn't worth it, especially if you're only using a subset of its features like doc management.
I haven't used it, but one guy I know raves about Alfresco, a free and open source doc management system. I looked at its website, seems simple enough to use.
We also faced a similar problem. However version control was more on our priority and we did look into many solutions in and around. We found Globodox extremely easy to install and use and more important the support team was absolutely fantastic
Try Mayan EDMS, it's Django based, and open source, used it as a base and build the custom features you wish on top of it.
Code location: https://gitlab.com/mayan-edms/mayan-edms
Homepage at: http://www.mayan-edms.com
The project is also available via PyPI at: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/mayan-edms/
How should I store (and present) the text on a website intended for worldwide use, with several languages? The content is mostly in the form of 500+ word articles, although I will need to translate tiny snippets of text on each page too (such as "print this article" or "back to menu").
I know there are several CMS packages that handle multiple languages, but I have to integrate with our existing ASP systems too, so I am ignoring such solutions.
One concern I have is that Google should be able to find the pages, even for foreign users. I am less concerned about issues with processing dates and currencies.
I worry that, left to my own devices, I will invent a way of doing this which work, but eventually lead to disaster! I want to know what professional solutions you have actually used on real projects, not untried ideas! Thanks very much.
I looked at RESX files, but felt they were unsuitable for all but the most trivial translation solutions (I will elaborate if anyone wants to know).
Google will help me with translating the text, but not storing/presenting it.
Has anyone worked on a multi-language project that relied on their own code for presentation?
Any thoughts on serving up content in the following ways, and which is best?
http://www.website.com/text/view.asp?id=12345&lang=fr
http://www.website.com/text/12345/bonjour_mes_amis.htm
http://fr.website.com/text/12345
(these are not real URLs, i was just showing examples)
Firstly put all code for all languages under one domain - it will help your google-rank.
We have a fully multi-lingual system, with localisations stored in a database but cached with the web application.
Wherever we want a localisation to appear we use:
<%$ Resources: LanguageProvider, Path/To/Localisation %>
Then in our web.config:
<globalization resourceProviderFactoryType="FactoryClassName, AssemblyName"/>
FactoryClassName then implements ResourceProviderFactory to provide the actual dynamic functionality. Localisations are stored in the DB with a string key "Path/To/Localisation"
It is important to cache the localised values - you don't want to have lots of DB lookups on each page, and we cache thousands of localised strings with no performance issues.
Use the user's current browser localisation to choose what language to serve up.
You might want to check GNU Gettext project out - at least something to start with.
Edited to add info about projects:
I've worked on several multilingual projects using Gettext technology in different technologies, including C++/MFC and J2EE/JSP, and it worked all fine. However, you need to write/find your own code to display the localized data of course.
If you are using .Net, I would recommend going with one or more resource files (.resx). There is plenty of documentation on this on MSDN.
As with most general programming questions, it depends on your needs.
For static text, I would use RESX files. For me, as .Net programmer, they are easy to use and the .Net Framework has good support for them.
For any dynamic text, I tend to store such information in the database, especially if the site maintainer is going to be a non-developer. In the past I've used two approaches, adding a language column and creating different entries for the different languages or creating a separate table to store the language specific text.
The table for the first approach might look something like this:
Article Id | Language Id | Language Specific Article Text | Created By | Created Date
This works for situations where you can create different entries for a given article and you don't need to keep any data associated with these different entries in sync (such as an Updated timestamp).
The other approach is to have two separate tables, one for non-language specific text (id, created date, created user, updated date, etc) and another table containing the language specific text. So the tables might look something like this:
First Table: Article Id | Created By | Created Date | Updated By | Updated Date
Second Table: Article Id | Language Id | Language Specific Article Text
For me, the question comes down to updating the non-language dependent data. If you are updating that data then I would lean towards the second approach, otherwise I would go with the first approach as I view that as simpler (can't forget the KISS principle).
If you're just worried about the article content being translated, and do not need a fully integrated option, I have used google translation in the past and it works great on a smaller scale.
Wonderful question.
I solved this problem for the website I made (link in my profile) with a homemade Python 3 script that translates the general template on the fly and inserts a specific content page from a language requested (or guessed by Apache from Accept-Language).
It was fun since I got to learn Python and write my own mini-library for creating content pages. One downside was that our hosting didn't have Python 3, but I made my script generate static HTML (the original one was examining User-agent) and then upload it to server. That works so far and making a new language version of the site is now a breeze :)
The biggest downside of this method is that it is time-consuming to write things from scratch. So if you want, drop me line and I'll help you use my script :)
As for the URL format, I use site.com/content/example.fr since this allows Apache to perform language negotiation in case somebody asks for /content/example and has a browser tell that it likes French language. When you do this Apache also adds .html or whatever as a bonus.
So when a request is for example and I have files
example.fr
example.en
example.vi
Apache will automatically proceed with example.vi for a person with Vietnamese-configured browser or example.en for a person with German-configured browser. Pretty useful.
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Visual studio is pretty good but doesn't create stored procedures automatically. Iron Speed designer does supposedly. But is it any good?
I have used Ironspeed extensively for the past two years for most of our ASP.NET forms over data projects.
It works. Does several things well: stored procs, fast layout of table browse and CRUD screens, fast layout of single record CRUD screens. It manages the round-trip (or half-round trip) process decently, detecting changes in your back end db schema and updating its data access layer, then making the changed columns available for you to alter your UI (in record or table control panels). ISD (as they call it) does an excellent job in making security management for your app pretty painless, even down to the control level (if you use ISD's subclassed versions of asp.net controls). Final plus, not a small one, is the CSS-based theme control (easy to change to a variety of themes, easy to customize a particular theme, and not even too bad to build your own theme variant by forking an existing one you like). Depending upon whether you let ISD create your stored procs in the code base or the database, changing DB's at run time can be a piece of cake.
Fairly active forum with a core group of helpful contributors. You can probably avoid the paid tech support through the forum.
Okay, the down sides. Creates fairly large code conglomerations, being a three tiered architecture. As Galwegian says, like any framework, you've got the velvet handcuffs (get your mind out of the gutter if you are thinking about anything other than code limitations and conventions!). The velvet handcuffs are the page and control model, the data layer, lack of a business object/class capability per se, the postback model, and the temptation to make your user GUI look like THEIR user GUI that comes out of the box because it is so darned easy and convenient.
ISD builds a basic page by combining an HTML template (in to which you place ISD specific code generation tags and any other tags, etc., you which using the ISD GUI or by hand). The page model relies upon a code behind page created from a piece of code template. The base classes are almost completely overridable, so that you can override all of the default functions, regenerate the application and not lose your overrides. The database controls live in the page container, but have their own class definitions (i.e., their code-behind) in specific /app_code files. Again, each control type has its own base class with pretty completely overridable methods. A single record control (showing a single db record) is pretty simple. A table, showing several records, has a table class and a table row class. The ISD website (www.ironspeed.com/support) has good documentation of the ISD model as a whole.
So, where are the problems in this model?
1. Easy and tempting to live with their out of the box GUI. Point ISD at your database, pick the tables you want to have it turn in to pages, tell it the kinds of pages, give it a thematic style and five minutes later you're viewing the application. Cool. But, it is very easy to forget that their user GUI is probably not what your user wants to see. So, be prepared to think for yourself and tinker with the GUI thus created. Not hard to do, and you can use VS 2005 to help you.
Business objects. You could put together your own business objects, but it would be difficult and you would get no help from ISD. ISD does a LOT of building of simple validation and checking (appropriate look up values, ranges, lengths, etc.) ISD lets you build custom queries, but these are read-only. It is smart enough (and you can override the write from a page in any case) to let you take a one to many view and write it back to the database (you'd probably override the default base method, but it isn't that hard to do). However, when you get in to serious dependency checking, ISD is still really about tables and not business objects. So, you're going to write some code.
If you are smart, you'll write it once store it in app_code somewhere and use it by calling it from an overridden method in your table or record controls. If you are like most of us, you'll first spaghetti it in to one of the code-behind classes above, and then forget you did so, or have a copy in each of the 10 pages that manipulates customer data. In my world, that has usually meant 5 identical functions and 5 that are all different (even though they are all supposed to be the same). ISD makes it tempting to order marinara, because the model lends itself to spaghetti code. Of course, you can completely prevent this, but you gotta learn the ISD model to determine the best way to do it on your project.
Page state and postbacks. Although ISD is quite open about this problem and tells users not to just take the defaults of returning the whole asp.net page state in the postback stream (cache on the server instead), the default is to return the whole page. Can make for some BIG pages. Which makes users think S L O W. As I said, you can manipulate this. But, what newbie is going to get this when it is SO tempting to just point, click, and boom - instant application. Your manager is now off your back because her product inventory table is "on the web" with a cool search and edit GUI (of 400kb state pages if you've gone a bit nuts and have just taken the default behaviors of ISD). Great in-house, but the customers in the real world....
Again, knowledge is the key. You can fix this, but you need to know you SHOULD.
Database read/write postbacks. No big problem here, but you also need to know that the model is to fetch only the data used at the moment. If your table shows 1000 records in 50 record increments, when you go from records 1 to 50 to 51 through 100, you will postback and hit the database again. This keeps data current, but increases server traffic.
Overall: Try the demo version. Point it at something simple that you really want to turn in to an asp.net application. Build maybe three tables. Then dissect it using the above as a guide. See what YOU think and post back to this question.
I have used it for convenience for a very small project. It did what I wanted and saved me a couple of days work.
The main problem I found was when it came to customising or extending the generated project. You have to spend quite a bit of time trying to understand Ironspeed's way of doing things which, I'll admit, is not my way.
I'd use it again for a small project if I knew in advance I wouldn't have to customise it much after.
If stored procedure generation is all you are after, CodeSmith is a decent option at a fraction of the cost of IronSpeed. There are several sproc templates available, and you can create your own or tweak an existing if that is what you need. You can also gen .Net code to your hearts content with CodeSmith. Tons of business class templates already exist for this.
IronSpeed's value is not in the sproc generation, but in the RAD features. I agree with #Galwegian... IronSpeed is OK for mock ups or very simple apps, not so good at all if you need to do any customization.
You may want to check out Evolutility CRUD framework. It provides some of the same features (limited to CRUD) and is open source.
IronSpeed has been great (out-of-the-box) at helping me develop data-driven corporate Intranet applications. While the code model takes a little getting used to, it is effective at maintaining a nice three-tier app. While the page templates can appear garish compared to 2010's web-design, it gets the job done, when you need function over form.
Iron Speed Designer is great for simple CRUD type web applications. You can find some useful information on our web site http://www.dotnetarchitect.co.uk/