This week I got sick of my mother complaining about the ‘little
squares’ on her site, and took some time to fix it and migrate all
together to Plone 2.0.

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