So, the task was not well defined at first, and I convinced them that
Shane’s CompositePage would fit perfectly on their use cases, (with
some polishing here and there of course). As CompositePage uses mainly
the ZMI for setting up stuff out of the box, I added a feature for
rendering ‘edit’ widgets for an Archetypes-based class. And to make it
complete, I created a function that registers Archetypes-based content
for use in the ZMI (by calling registerClasses). Now, its possible
(though a bit rough) to edit an Archetype through the ZMI.

• Archetypes 1.2.5 rc4 is out, for inclusion on Plone 2.0. It fixes a
  long standing issue with disappearing metadata.
• I’m working on a new project while the Zope3-based project is
  cooking the last mile. This far I’ve got a nice extension for
  PROPFIND/PROPPATCH in Zope 2, and fixed some issues with DAV in
  Plone by side-effect.
• Nice reading: Still Life with Woodpecker, which Alan gave me as a
  gift when we found a bookstore in Frankfurt.
• Nice movie: 25th hour by Spike Lee.
• Amazing movie: Lost in Translation, recommended to me by Alan.
• Seems like Kiko is not coming for the wedding.
• I’m going paintball tomorrow with the folks from X3ng.

In Stuttgart, we decided to walk around a bit during the nite to get
used to the city, and to wait for the next morning to visit
BodyWorlds. We had another Donner, and then Alan decided to go to an
internet cafe to check the address and times for BodyWorlds. To his
(and my) surprise, he was wrong about the city. BodyWorlds was in
Frankfurt, and not in Stuttgart as he thought. So, we decided
to do it the right way this time, and plan every step beforehand. I
had my flight departing from Zurich on the Tuesday, 10pm and Alan
wanted to go Amsterdam to hangout with Lon, from Q42. We checked
all the schedules to make sure we would be able to get to our
destination at the right times, and on the next morning Alan bought
the tickets for us to Frankfurt, plus my ticket from Frankfurt to
Zurich, and his from Frankfurt to Amsterdam, as well as make the
reservation of his flight from Amsterdan back to Houston.

Time proved that planning is always the best thing to do, and
everything went as planned. We got to the BodyWorlds with enough time,
and we even had time to visit Andy Warhol’s Time Capsules on the
Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt. Actually we didn’t even knew
that it was open during these days, but accidentally found ourselves
in front of the museum during a walk (while trying to find nice gifts
for the girls at home).

From the museum, we went straight to the Haupftbanhof, where we had
left our luggage on the lockers, about 15 minutes before my
departure. Alan’s train would leave one hour later, so, time to say
goodbye.

After all, I think it was an amazing trip. If wasn’t for the fact that
we didn’t plan well after leaving the sprint location, it would had
been perfect. I’m looking forward to the next one!

I would like again to thank Jodok for his excellent planning of the
sprint, and all the sponsors who made money available for the sprint to
actually happen. I would also like to thank Alan for having paid a
good amount of my expenses after we left the sprint (I didn’t had
enough money with me, unfortunately).

Oh, and I almost forgot. There are a lot of photos I took during
the days I’ve been there, thanks to my mother, which allowed me to
borrow her brand-new digital camera.

Interesting things I’ve learnt during this trip:

• German uses a stylized ‘B’ (which reminds me of the greek ‘beta’)
  which on spoken word sounds like a double ‘s’ (ss). They even seem
  to write it as a double ‘s’ when the letter is not available (maybe
  misconfigured keyboards?). So, "Domstraße" -> "Domstrasse".
• Fanta outside Brazil is yellowish for some reason. I asked
  around and it seems it’s like that everywere, except in Brazil,
  where it’s more like bright orangish.
• Zwellings -> Twins.
• Lots of other german words that I forgot in the course of the last
  two weeks :(
• Donner Kebab is a really nice food, and it seems to be from turkish
  origin. It’s made of lamb meat. The more pepper, the better.
• Hum. Just found out about Googlism. Check out What is Plone,
  and What is Zope

What happened next is that we took the train to Praha, only to find
less than 20 minutes later the hardest way that brazilians need visa
to enter the Czech Republic. What a mess. We had to jump off the train
on the next station and take the train back to Vienna. It was really
cold outside, and getting dark. From the time we left Vienna to the
time we got back it was nearly four hours. Ugh. Alan seemed quite
pissed at me. Alan called Robert Boulanger which promptly found us a
nice hotel next to the Westbanhof. The hotel was amazing, with bathtub
and all, and it was really nice taking a shower.

Next morning, off we go to try to get a visa, but again luck wasn’t on
our side. It was sunday, and the Czech embassy was closed. Alan
quickly decided that we should turn around and go to Germany
instead. He wanted to see the BodyWorlds expo, which he was
sure was in Stuttgart. There we go, another train. We had to
change trains in a little town (which I can’t seem to remember the name, I
guess was Leinz or something), and the next train would be around two
hours later. We walked around, trying to find something to eat, but
there was only a McDonalds open. Ugh. A few more steps and I devised a
Donner place (suggestively called Food Master). It was quite some
luck, because it was Sunday, and every single shop was closed, except
for the Food Master and McDonalds. During the food, I and Alan
discussed the peculiarities of the government and the expectations for
the future of both US and Brazil. What a chat!

Time for calling home, notifying the girls of our messy situation, and
to take another train. We arrived in Stuttgart when it was already
dark, so the first thing we did was to find a hotel to stay. There
were a couple ones not too far from the Haupftbanhof, so choose one of
the first we found.

On the train from Leinz (?) to Stuttgart, Alan and
I were discussing ways to make Plone faster, so we profiled a bit and
figured that quite some time was spent on rendering templates,
specially loops and stuff like that. Some stuff was being calculated
again and again for each item in the folder_contents template, for
example, and that was quite bad. So, I decided to use a helper View
instance that would be used for doing the expensive calculations, and
would be available on the context of Page Templates. It was quite
quick to hack it, and after some profiling we had it running in with
an improvement of 8s over the unoptimized template (22s original, 14s
optimized). Then I fiddled with it a bit more to make the View use the
Ram Cache machinery, and we cut on another 3s. At this time, the
optimized template was running roughly 10s faster than the
original. Alan seemed pretty happy, given our bad luck on the trip
itinerary :)

(to be continued…)

I’ll try to make it short. Anyway, I don’t remember the exact order in
which things happened during that week. So, basically, I and Godefroid
went down the mountain once on the snowcycle, and on the second
round we found Jodok and the guys from Burning Man. Godefroid took the
easy track, while we took the ski track. Everything was reasonably
under control until the middle station, when we decided to continue on
the ski track instead of taking the elevator. Then things turned very
bad. At some point I thought about giving up on trying to ride the
snowcycle and waiting for someone to rescue me. It was getting dark. I
couldn’t see the bottom of the mountain. Godefroid convinced me to
continue and we kept going until the last few hundred meters, when I
just gave up and walked.

I think I’ve never been so tired in my whole life. My whole body
was hurting. My hands were shaking. I had to move very slowly for the
following 3 days. Not bad for the first time in snow I must say. :)

This same day Andy arrived at the sprint location, and it was
really nice meeting him, specially because I had worked with him in
the past, but we’ve never meet personally. A funny incident
happened. Andy confused me with Kapil, until I took my hat off. ;)

During the next days we made lots of progress in all fronts. There
were some short seminars during the afternoons on several topics
including i18n. I gave a short lecture on Archetypes, and demoed the
Zope3-based application I’ve been developing together with Alan.

There was some discussion about a installer tool with Andy, Kapil,
Philip (Auesperg) and me. We decided that it would be nice to have a
XML-based format for representing package dependencies and
metadata. Kapil sent me a sample file, and I need to make ArchPackage
export something like that.

I was very interested in trying CMFMetadata, so after a short
introduction by Kapil, I did some polishing to make it usable. Then,
Kapil was asking me about ways of integrating CMFMetadata and
Archetypes. I was a bit unsure at that moment, but after some sleep, I
woke with the whole picture in my mind. It wasn’t very hard to
implement it. The solution goes more or less like this:

First, I changed the Schema class of Archetypes to have a better
handling of fields, moved some methods around, used a different
structure to keep field ordering constant. Then I’ve built a
CompositeSchema class, that takes a list of Schema objects, and
joins their fields together. Basically, it acts like a normal
Schema. Then, I’ve created a FacadeMetadataSchema class, that
takes a the Id of a CMFMetadata Set on the constructor, and builds the
Archetypes fields on-the-fly from that. I also created a
FacadeMetadataStorage that is used for these on-the-fly-created
fields, and that uses the metadata tool from CMFMetadata to retrieve
and store values (which on its side, uses the annotation tool from the
Annotations product, built by Kapil for Infrae).

So, by the time I finished this, it was almost 5am on the Saturday,
and everyone was going to leave on that day. Alan had invited me to go
with him to Praha, but I hadn’t decided yet. Then, Phil, the Prince,
suggested that we go with him to Vienna, and from there go to Praha,
and I thought it would be a nice idea, because I really wanted to see
Vienna again. In a bit more than one hour we
3 were on a train to Vienna. From that minute on, I was already
regretting of my decision to go, but little could be done.

(to be continued)

The organization was amazing. Everything was perfect, and
well-planned. We had a board just on the entrance with information in
general, like where would be the dinner, what time breakfast would be
served, what we would have for dinner, what activities were planned
for the day, and so on.

Around 50 people were present at the sprint location. Not everyone
arrived at the same time. I was the first person to get there it
seems, as I arrived on the Friday 6th at 6:40am. The first thing I did
was to get my luggage in a locker and go get some food. The bus would
only arrive at 12:30, so that would mean almost 6h waiting. Got some
food, bought a magazine, called Jodok to figure out who else would
arrive and what time and flight they would be on. Turns out that four
people were arriving on that morning: me, Sasha Vinscic, Leonard
Norgaard and Matt Hammilton. I had Sasha’s mobile number, so sent him
a SMS with instructions of where to find me. Then I’ve got a seat at
the airport shopping and waited for him, reading a magazine. Around
10:30, he found me, and we chatted a little bit, then called Leonard,
which had already arrived. By that point it was just about time for
catching the bus, so we headed to the bus stop. Only one problem, we
couldn’t find Matt, and no-one had idea of how he looked like. So we
just waited until he showed up.

The bus left Zurich, heading to the sprint location. The thing that
surprised me most was the clouds, which were completely disturbed
by the flow of airplanes. It wasn’t as cold as I would expect there,
but still cold.

So, after around 1h from leaving the airport, we crossed the border
between Switzerland and Austria, heading to Bludenz. I was amazed to
see the snow, which had completely covered the mountains. More amazing
than that was the fact that the weather was completely clear, with
some occasional clouds here and there.

Another hour, and we’ve got to Bludenz, where we then took a taxi to
Schruns-Tschagguns. Another 20 minute ride, and I was at the
‘Gasteshaus Davenna’, which would be my temporary home for the
week. The house was very comfortable and warm. Perfect time for a
shower. :) The only problem I’ve found was that the house maid didn’t
knew a word in english, so I didn’t understood a single thing that she
said. On the next day I discovered that she wanted to tell me that I
was in the wrong room, and had to change. Duh.

I called Jodok again to ask him for directions to the ‘Haus des
Gastes’, which would be the sprint location. He promptly said that
would pick me up at the door, and 5 minutes later he was there. The
Haus des Gastes is very close to the place I was, just a quick walk
away.

Getting there, we tried to setup networking, and surprisingly, the
other guys didn’t have any problem setting up their wireless
networking, except for me and Leonard. For some reason, the networking
wouldn’t work on Linux, but if I rebooted in MacOS X, it would work
flawlessly. Weird. A trip to the #debian channel revealed that the
problem was the ECN (explicit congestion notification) feature of the
kernel, and disabling it made the network start working
again. Unfortunately, Leonard didn’t had the same luck, and for some
reason this didn’t work for him.

Next morning the folks started arriving, slowly, and we started
working out issues. I was working on Archetypes, applying patches and
fixing bugs, to make a 1.2.4 release.

On the third day most people had arrived, and on the monday, we got to
the top of the mountain for dinner and then for some snow
sports. Pretty much everyone went for the tobogan, and some people
went for the snowcycle, which seemed pretty cool. I’ve gone twice for
the tobogan, and the second time was obviously better, as I discovered
some tricks to make it go faster.

The next day, Godefroid Chappelle invited me to be his partner on some
ski classes. I woke up pretty late, so didn’t had much time to
think. I accepted the proposal, which was made even better by the fact
that he offered to pay part of my class as a wedding gift. There we
go, up the mountain again. We got the ski gear, which seemed very
uncomfortable to me, specially the boots. The fact that they force you
to keep your knees half bent was a pain for me. In fact, I would
consider skiing my second preferred sport if wasn’t for that.

We were not so bad into learning, and, in fact, we could do the basic
exercises without much trouble. (And hit the ground only a couple
times).

If that wasn’t enough, we decided to go down the mountain again, this
time on the snowcycle. (to be continued…)

Here’s some info, straight from README:

Publisher Inventory Product

This product was developed by RUNYAGA, LLC to serve as an Inventory
Management System (IMS) for Publishers. It has several nice features
such as:

• TTW Configurable Vocabularies
• Uses PostgreSQLStorage if available, fallback to AttributeStorage
  (specify connection string on portal creation)
• Restriction of types allowed to be created at the portal root
• Subclasses Plone Portal and registers it’s own Customization Policy
  for better branding
• Provides a ‘DynamicFTI’, which controls which types are available
  for adding into a folderish type via a module level variable.
• Filtering of searches, allowing to export search results to a .csv file
• Pluggable .csv reports, just add a Script (Python) to
  publisher_reports on portal_skins
• Uses Archetypes’s autogenerated search widgets on frontpage, as well
  as a categorized menu of ‘addable items’.

It should serve as a nice example of using advanced Archetypes
features and how to explore some CMF features as the FTI.

The product is licensed under the GPL.

Get the tarball.

This release provides the come back of the autogenerated search
widgets functionality. Thanks to Joel Burton, who took the time to
figure out how to use the feature and write some nice docs about how
to it.

In addition to the old behavior, I added another two arguments to the
function to allow passing a type and context arguments. The
type argument allows to select a single type (humm… should have made
it types), and the context attribute allows for overriding the
object which will be the context for the fake object used to render
the widgets.

Get the Tarball, and read Joel Burton’s doc on how to use the
search widgets.

WARNING: If you downloaded the tarball before Monday, Dec 15 12:30
GMT you must download it again, as there was a shallow bug that would
prevent installing.

This release features several bug fixes for some show-stopping bugs on
the 1.2.0 release.

Get the Archetypes 1.2.1 Tarball.

Please report bugs. As Kiko says:

… If you won’t do it for me, do it for the kittens

The ‘little squares’ she was referring to were unicode problems, which
appeared when I moved the site from one linux box to another. For some
reason one of the boxes had a different charset configured, and I was
never able to fix it again.

Soo… content screwed, all that left was try to migrate the site to
Plone 2.0 and Archetypes.

Hands at work, and a couple minutes later I had a new site
running, with shiny new Zope from 2_7 branch, and Python
2.3.2. Pending migrate her pink template to a new Plone skin and add
some shiny Archetypes-based content, to allow her to put up content
using Word (IIICK!).

Archetypes and the Word integration worked perfectly out of the box,
after all the beating we gave it during the beta phase. I created a
very simple type with only a TextField for body and a title. Then
configured Casey Duncan’s ExternalEditor to open Word for her domain,
and wrote a 10 step procedure for creating a new document inside
Plone. Then I realized how much this sucks for a normal user. :(

After that, I’ve started converting the skin to Plone 2.0, which
showed to be simpler than I thought. The CSS ended up being smaller
(ploneCustom.css) and changing the colors from Norwegian Blue (wink)
to shiny pink was a matter of changing two properties of the
customized base_properties.

More on the usability issue (the ten-step syndrome) on a more
appropriate time. I’m supposed to be with my gf on a saturday night,
and not in typing on a keyboard :)

~dc