I got round it with a bit of old-fashioned browser detection. Basically, Opera’s quite happy to have the content-disposition header left alone, so I needed a direct path to the Flash file for Opera and a path that took in my header setting script for everyone else:

if (navigator.userAgent.indexOf('Opera')>-1) {
   swfurl = '&dtml-portal_url;/path/to/flash/myflash.swf' }  else {
   swfurl = '&dtml-portal_url;/path/to/flash/showflash?flashvid=myflash.swf'
}
swfobject.embedSWF(swfurl, "my-dom-id", "435", "290", "9.0.115");

Not sure why Opera should behave differently to other browsers here.

I recently updated the source download for Hamnavoe which explains the discrepancy between Egg and source downloads for that theme, but in general it seems that the Eggs are the clear winners, which is due, I assume, to the themes being installed via buildout rather than direct download and installation via setup.py. Simplicity doesn’t even include a source download. I think this was to due to the fact that this was the first product I’d uploaded to PyPi and was having problems uploading it via setup.py from my Windows laptop, so I did the upload manually via the PyPi website.

I’m glad to see they’re being downloaded at all, and particularly pleased to see Hamnavoe on top as it’s my own design As far as I know I can’t get these kind of stats for downloads via plone.org.

The lovely folks at SWFObject helped to identify why this was happening — nothing to do with SWFObject at all but the fact that Flash Player 10 implements some new security “features”. I managed to isolate it to the fact that Plone serves up ATFiles with the header, “Content-Disposition: attachment”. Flash Player 10 ignores files served up with this header, so you need to override this and set it to “Content-Disposition: inline;”.

I came up with this solution which may not be overly elegant but at least it works. I created a skin-level Python script that sets response headers before returning the file:

showflash.py

request = container.REQUEST
RESPONSE =  request.RESPONSE
flashvid = request['flashvid']
cd = ‘inline; filename=%s’ %(context.id)
RESPONSE.setHeader(’Content-Disposition’, cd)
return context[flashvid]

Then, when I embed the video with SWFObject I call it thus,

<script type="text/javascript">
   swfobject.embedSWF("&dtml-portal_url;/path/to/flash/showflash?flashvid=myflash.swf", "my-dom-id", "435", "290", "9.0.115");
</script>

This may be better handled by a product like Plone4Artists Video but it certainly works as a fix for us.

The result is a new Plone theme: Andreas02, an open source web design by Andreas Viklund. It’s a nice simple two-column design. I’ve checked it into PyPi for testing and have already noticed a couple of small things that need changing. Once I’ve done that, I’ll add some info to the Plone themes section of this site, check it into the Collective  and create a new project on plone.org.

Looks like some good work came out of the sprint, including some pretty good designs.

Err, anyway, there’s lots of useful stuff in there, although I’m still not really any the wiser about how it works in practice.

“And it’s up to us to find solutions to the problems—like the Henry Ford maxim that I mentioned in my talk today [at Web Directions South] : “If I had asked my customers, they would have told me they wanted a faster horse.” Anticipate beyond what our users can imagine. Having the feel to make that logical jump to the next level. That’s where the real genius is.”

• Download Hamnavoe 1.0.1 from plone.org

With lots of study on the horizon I may not have a huge amount of time for more Plone theming escapades, but hopefully I’ll get one or two more out there. I’ve volunteered to participate remotely for the Plone theming sprint as part of this year’s conference but am not totally sure how that’s going to work in terms of time zones as yet, seeing as the conference is in Washington and I’m in London.