For the last month or so, I've been working at home for a change.  So my laptop has been on vacation for a while.  I decided today that I had better fire it up and get it online before the queue of pending updates from Microsoft became any longer.  I booted to the Win XP partition and as expected there were about 12 or so critical updates from Microsoft's latest monthly "Patch Tuesday" waiting to have their way with my laptop.  So, I once again let the Microsoft updater run amok and fix all those things it thought was broken.  Once the "Patch-O-Rama" completed, I figured I had better boot up the laptop's alter ego (Ubuntu) to make sure the Linux partition was not too upset from the lack of attention I had been giving it these past few weeks...

Unbuntu loaded and all was well.  I checked a couple of web sites I had recently made some cosmetic changes to in order to make sure they displayed as expected with Linux and Firefox.  And I noticed the "updates available" icon was trying to get my attention.  I checked the updates and to my surprise there were 44 updates available, 22 of which were security updates!

Is this an anomaly or is Ubuntu on a mission to take the world record for patches per month away from Microsoft? ;-)

This is the first in a series of articles about my "Adventures with Plone.  The are written from a newbie perspective since that's what I am when it comes to Plone.  Althoiugh I have a bit of experience with PHP-based CMS's, this is my first venture into the world of Plone, Zope and Python.

I'd heard about the Plone CMS before, but never paid much attention to it until I saw this post at
OpenSourceCommunity.org.  After reading the post, I decided take a look at Plone and and learn a bit more about it.   So I downloaded Plone 3.0 and installed it on my desktop PC....

Plone installs in a Win XP environment like most other applications...into the C:\Program Files directory.  Once the installation is completed, you end up with a C:\Program Files\Plone 3\ directory structure that contains:

• \Data – configuration data, variables, logs, Plone and Zope functions
• \Python – the programming language bytecode generation and execution
• \XController – Win 32 utility for starting and stopping Plone
• \Zope – the application server, which includes the Zope Object Database (ZODB) manager and an http server
• LICENSE.txt – copyright and license information (it's GPLV2 or later)
• plone.ico – the standard Plone favicon
• postinstall.log – the installation log
• unins000.dat – for Win XP uninstall
• unins000.exe – for Win XP uninstall.

Once the install is completed, you start Plone by going to All Programs > Plone > Plone.  This brings up the Plone Control Panel.  The installer assigns ports 8085 and 8080 as the defaults for Plone and Zope respectively...which is a good thing if you are already running another web server such as Apache that uses the default http port (port 80).  For production sites, Zope can be configured to use Apache as a proxy server so that port 80 can be used for both Plone and other applications you may have that use Apache.  But for a test environment on a Win XP machine, it's much less complicated to use the default ports.  for example:

• To access Plone, the URL would be http://localhost:8085/
• To access applications using Apache, the URL would be http://localhost/ or some variation thereof.

The Control Panel is used to start and stop Plone, and to gain access to the Plone and Zope management functions.
Zope gets installed as a Win XP service, i.e., Zope runs in the background (like a Linux Daemon) waiting for Plone to request its services.

Disclaimer: Since I am a neophyte when it comes to Plone, please excuse any any errors in what I said above.  The official Plone documentation is the authoritative source.

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One is hearing more and more hype these days about utility computing, cloud computing, on demand computing, and software as a service (SaaS).  Depending on what a particular entity is trying to sell, one may hear arguments that each of these terms define subtle differences in the services being offered.  Well, in my black and white world, they can all be summed up by one term that says it all....

Time-Sharing!

While it is indeed true that advances in hardware, software and networking technology have resulted in an end user experience that makes the original mainframe-based time-sharing look tired and ancient, it's stll time-sharing.  All we've done is tarted up the pig with shiny lipstick and more fashionable clothing.  And increased its oink rate over the years.  

I've always had an interest in Genealogy, and have a web site about my family's roots.  Until about six months ago, I updated this information locally on my PC using one of the popular commercial genealogy software packages and then uploaded the output of a subset of the available reports to my web site via FTP.  However, I always thought it would be a lot more useful to both me and the folks who visited my site if I could have the ability to generate a more comprehensive set of reports dynamically via a web browser interface.

So I went looking for something that could do this.  And found an open source software package called PhpGEDView.  And it was exactly what I was lookling for.  It uses GEDCOM files and generates the full complement of standard genealogy reports.  And also allows on-line editing of the GEDCOM file.

PhpGEDVIEW has ben around since 2002 and is more or less the "gold standard" of open source genealogy software.  Guess it's my own dumb fault it took me so long to find it!

Well, it all starts with a style sheet that Drupal loads during the installation process.  There's a mandatory core module called "system" that gets installed, along with some related CSS files called admin.css, default,css and system.css.  these files get quietly buried on the modules/system directory structure and live happily ever after.  That is, until someone such as myself decides to muck with the menu styling!

Now a reasonable person who is having trouble with the menu styling would probably take a look at the modules/system/default.css file to see if there is anything in there that is being inherited by the themes's style sheet.  And when they do, nothing is found that pertains to the default menu styling.  So it must be a theme issue.  Well, not really.  The modules/system/system.css file is the keeper of the default menu-related CSS classes:

/*
** Menus
*/
ul.menu {
  list-style: none;
  border: none;
  text-align:left;
}
ul.menu li {
  margin: 0 0 0 0.5em;
}
li.expanded {
  list-style-type: circle;
  list-style-image: url(../../misc/menu-expanded.png);
  padding: 0.2em 0.5em 0 0;
  margin: 0;
}
li.collapsed {
  list-style-type: disc;
  list-style-image: url(../../misc/menu-collapsed.png);
  padding: 0.2em 0.5em 0 0;
  margin: 0;
}
li.leaf {
  list-style-type: square;
  list-style-image: url(../../misc/menu-leaf.png);
  padding: 0.2em 0.5em 0 0;
  margin: 0;
}

I finally realized that IE does not seem to always recognize the overrides present in the theme's style.css file and/or treats inheritance differently than FF.  Although the modules/system/system.css file is typically loaded before the theme's style sheet, it appears that IE gets confused about what takes precedence in defining the values for margins and padding.

So how does one fix this?  I take the easy way out.  I comment out all the menu-related CSS in the modules/system/system.css file and start with a "blank slate."  That way I know that whatever is in the theme's stye.css file is the final authority.  A non-elegant solution I know...but it works!