Daniel Nouri's Old Blog

Goal

You want to create a pure Zope instance, in which you can use tools like easy_install and yolk to manage Python packages and install Products the usual way.

Recipe

Use this command:

ploneenv $INSTANCE_HOME -m $MKZO --no-requirements

What this does

Calling ploneenv with --no-requirements will create a blank Zope instance that's also a workingenv. This method of installation is perfectly compatible with Plone 2.5 or other Products!

To install packages from the Cheese Shop, you must first activate the environment and then use easy_install, like this:

source $INSTANCE_HOME/bin/activate
easy_install yolk

This will install yolk, a tool that provides a lot of useful functions for querying the metadata of installed setuptools packages and querying the Cheese Shop. For example, if you want a list of all packages that are installed in your Zope instance, run:

yolk -l

Goal

You want to try out Plone's latest development version straight from Subversion.

Recipe

Follow the steps from Create a pristine Zope instance and then, after having activated the instance's environment via source $INSTANCE_HOME/bin/activate, do:

easy_install Plone==dev

What this does

This will download and install Plone's current development version. This way you can experience the latest and greatest (and potentially most unstable) Plone.

Goal

You want to create a Zope instance with the latest Plone 3 release in it.

Recipe

Use this command:

ploneenv $INSTANCE_HOME -m $MKZO

What this does

This will install the latest Plone version from the Cheese Shop. Right now this is 3.0-r12165, an experimental and arbitrary snapshot of Plone 3 dating back to the 4th of February. Note that it's not related to the real Plone 3.0a2 release, which is the latest official release of Plone 3 and what you normally want to use.

Goal

You want to develop a package for Plone 3.0. We'll call this package mypackage.

Recipe

Follow the steps in Create an instance with Plone 3 from Subversion in it.

Install ZopeSkel and create your package if you haven't one already:

easy_install ZopeSkel
paster create -t plone mypackage

Activate your instance's environment if you haven't yet and install your package in development mode:

source $INSTANCE_HOME/bin/activate
cd mypackage
python setup.py develop

What this does

You are encouraged to create your new Plone 3 modules outside of the Products directory/package. ZopeSkel helps you with quickly setting up a distribution.

Invoking python setup.py develop inside of your newly created project will install your package in development mode.

There are good reasons to still use Products. When you develop a Product, just link it into your instance's Products directory as usual.

Note that you can override Products or packages that come with Plone this way, which enables you to develop parts of Plone itself.