Pragmatic projects - getting things done with Plone (Andreas Jung)
Andreas Jung talks about best practises.
There are always budget, human resources and time constraints. Therefore it’s almost impossible to find the “perfect” solution. You have to do things within a reasonable time frame, stay within budget and can only use the human resources available.
You usually need to customise something in third party packages you use. In old days this was easier with skin folders.
Maintainers of packages love bug reports, bug fixes and contributions. If a project is on GitHub it’s easy to contribute: fork the code and create a pull request. If the package is in Subversion you have to get permission to commit, create a branch and merge code back. Either way: please contribute back and do not maintain a fork yourself. (Unless it will not be useful for others. But in that case, keep the fork for yourself.)
Monkey patching (dynamically modifying a class or module at run time) is in general bad style. Monkey patching can have side-effects and can cause problems when updating a package.
A simple example of a monkey patch to change the bar method of Foo:
def my_bar(self):
print 'Patched!'
from foo import Foo
Foo.bar = my_bar
If you have to monkey patch, have a look at collective.monkeypatcher and collective.monkeypatcherpanel.
You might also be able to use an overrides.zcml to override
configuration settings in your own package. There is also
z3c.jbot. This package allows
you to override resources of other packages inside your own (policy)
package. If you want to unregister something, use
z3c.unconfigure.
Reusing old content types can be made easier with archetypes.schemaextender. With Dexterity there are “behaviours”. You can use them to change the behaviour of existing content types.
Andreas' project had a view which allowed the designer to generate demo content by calling a URL. This way, the designer could automatically create samples to style. This view installed a skeleton site structure with example content for each content type, content listings, et cetera. They used lorempixel for images. You can also use collective.loremipsum.
Good hints:
- Never perform customisations local in an existing third party package directly.
- Customisations always belong in your own policy package.
- Local customisations will be lost with the next version of the customised package.