What I write about on my blog apparently, originally uploaded by reynard.
I generated this from Wordle.net — a tag cloud of what I write about on my blog apparently. As you can see, my vocabulary is impressive and varied, with words such as “things” and “good” appearing prominently.
Look out though, because “possibly, Norman’s took mobile”.
Last week I got hold of Designing Web Interfaces by Bill Scott and Theresa Neil. They’ve published all their examples on Flickr which is a handy reference.
On Tuesday I checked out some of the buzz from the SXSW interactive awards. Lost Zombies was terrific fun — a project to build a Zombie documentary / drama via a community (what’s with Zombies at the moment? People love them — check out Survive the Outbreak too). Anyway, this is a really interesting idea, although one I imagine which might end up looking a bit like the film in Son of Rambow when the entire school starts to get involved if the producers aren’t too careful.
We Tell Stories, another winner from SXSW is a digital fiction site produced by Penguin. I love the idea of things like this, although there is a tendency for any kind of hypertext fiction to go down the “Fighting Fantasy” books route. If you’re too young to know what I’m talking about or were too busy talking to girls in the mid-Eighties, these books were adventures in which you got to make a choice of what you wanted to do at key points in the story (if you decide the kill the evil witch of Swqkssx then go to page 100 etc.).
On Wednesday I learned why the Japanese don’t like the iPhone (too basic for very sophisticated mobile users apparently, well, amongst other reasons). Moving forward to Friday I got back into serious Web Development land and started enjoying the wonders of CSS border radius (Firefox and Webkit only, naturally). You might notice a couple of rounded borders on this site, although I tried not to go too mad, difficult though it was. Also, I checked out a couple more typography and grid layouts site. Because you can never have too much of that kind of thing can you?
Saturday’s link was a only child and came courtesy of Twitter in response to me pimping my post about useful usability sites I’ve been looking at recently: Johnny Holland: it’s all about usability. A site “exploring the interactions of experience design” no less. All articles are written in the voice of the eponymous Johnny, so there you go. One I will be dipping into I should imagine.
So that’s it for this week. As always, these links are brought to you via the Internet and my Delicious bookmarks.
Portlets.xml
One of the great things about generic setup is that you can configure your site through the web and then export your settings as a series of xml files to your filesystem theme product. However, configuring my portlets and then exporting the resulting portlets.xml file caused some problems when re-installing the product.
I’d customised my navigation following the steps outlined in the article Customising navigation in Plone 3. This was fine. But when I re-installed my theme product containing an exported portlets.xml file I got a “ConstraintNotSatisfied” error. I didn’t get very far with finding a solution to this on Google, but by trial and error found out that this disappeared if I removed the following from the <assignment name=”navigation” …/> directive:
Secondly, default portlets (login, news, recent etc.) I’d removed via “manage portlets” weren’t reflected in my portlets.xml file so I had to enter this manually into my portlets.xml file:
CSS Registry
To ensure that the order of CSS files in the CSS Registry was honoured I had to enable the auto grouping property (which didn’t exist in Plone 2.5.3). In the cssregistry.xml you can set this via:
<object name=”portal_css” meta_type=”Stylesheets Registry” autogroup=”True”> … </object>
The order seemed to go a bit haywire again if I enabled debug mode in the CSS Registry.
More positive things
It’s pretty straightforward to override viewlets for different content types. For instance, I didn’t want the breadcrumb trail to appear on my home page. In my browser/configure.zcml I simply added this directive:
In the “for” attribute I specify the interface of the content type I want this to apply to. The template, “nopath_bar.pt” is simply an empty template in my browser directory.
Lastly, Gloworm came in really handy as did plone.reload (although I found this a little unpredictable at times).