breathing code

The view from the Tahoe Sprint 2010

The Tahoe Sprint 2010 is sadly over, but it was a great success! The team is already looking forward to next year’s sprint.

We have made significant progress on several Dexterity related fronts:

David Glick has done some cleanup and refactoring of the Dexterity code, in addition to providing invaluable assistance to the other sprinters.

Ross Patterson has implemented user entered single selection choice vocabularies and multi-choice vocabularies for through the web schema editing of content types. Ross has also made progress in his effort to make it easier to access the api docs of the zope component architecture from a running Zope 2 instance.

Alex Limi has implemented drag and drop reordering of items in the web based schema editor, in addition to other schema editor UI tweaks.

Joel Burton has written over 20 pages of integrator documentation for Dexterity.

The team has had some interesting and fruitful discussions regarding the future of Plone and Dexterity, in addition to discussions regarding the implementation details of the Dexterity back  end and user interface.

archetypes.z3crelationfield

With Ross Patterson’s patient assistance, I have successfully implemented an Archetypes field that can be used to relate Archetypes objects to Dexterity objects called archetypes.z3crelationfield. You can find the code for archetypes.z3crelationfield on bitbucket here.

archetypes.z3crelationfield uses the infrastructure provided by zc.relation and z3c.relationfield to allow relationships to be created from Archetypes content types to Dexterity types using an extension of the standard reference widget that ships with Archetypes. archetypes.z3crelationfield includes a demo profile that installs a custom AT content type that uses this extended reference field and widget.

Creating relationships from existing Archetypes objects to Dexterity objects will allow folks to get started with Dexterity without throwing out all of their existing Archetypes based content types, a huge win for both content type frameworks and for Plone as well.
This initial implementation is meant to be a reference for future functionality that we would like to see merged into Archetypes itself, but it can be used today as a standalone package.

Future plans for archetypes.z3crelationfield include:

1. An archetypes.referencebrowserwidget implementation
2. A content migrator to migrate existing AT content and references to use zc.relation style relationships.
3. An alternate install profile that runs the migration scripts for existing content to use the new relations and monkeypatches Archetypes using archetypes.schemaextender to use the new archetypes.z3crelationfield instead of the default AT reference field.
4. A release to pypi and plone.org

Stay tuned for further developments.