new to python/zope - installation woes

[Geraint Edwards]

Hi,

I have a customer that wants to run their website on Plone,
They've delivered me a *.zexp file and a products.zip file.  I
just want to throw it on my 4_RELENG server - and forget about
it.

I installed Plone (and hence Zope and python!) from ports (you
will soon deduce, if you haven't already, that I am new to all
three!).  What follows is some feedback (meant as constructive
criticism) from a someone who has acquired a big headache.

Firstly, if you install the www/plone port, it installs
www/zope, and the "critical" instructions for
	make instance [...]
are scrolled into the ether and their importance is missed, and
thus began my headache.  Your install might not scroll them off,
but my ports database is full of bsdpan-* crud that fills my
screen up with junk, so I don't necessarily realise that zope is
installed (hey, plone is what I wanted, right?).

Anyway, I scrolled back and found the zope instructions and ran
	make instance INSTANCENAME="foo"
and	make instance INSTANCENAME="bar"
because I want to test this in 'bar' before making things
"production" in 'foo'.  I made the zope.conf files, too, setup
rc.conf with:
	zope_enable="YES"
	zope_instances="/usr/local/www/Zope/foo /usr/local/www/Zope/bar"
and ran "zope.sh start" - so far so good.

However, 'bar' never gets any logs - it all seems to go to
	.../foo/log/...
and the logs don't get anything interesting in them when things
go horribly wrong (see later).

After *much* playing with Apache to get it to proxy for zope,
I was getting bitten by the annoying
	<base href="http://localhost:8080/
I eventually found the *right* page to get it to work (there seem
to be so many wrong pages with similar but partial information):
	http://www.zope.org/Members/4am/SiteAccess2/info
Phew.

I still don't understand how I seem to be able to access (and
hence "manage") the top-level of zope, logged in as the 'bar'
user (shouldn't 'bar's user only be able to manage *that
instance*?).  Anyway...

I popped the foo.zexp into the .../bar/import directory and
http://.../manage didn't find it, so I moved it into the main
.../import directory and it found it - I don't understand that at
all - why have an instance import directory that doesn't find the
files.  Anyway... I got this error:

======================================================================
Site Error

An error was encountered while publishing this resource.

Error Type: ImportError
Error Value: No module named CMFUserTrackTool.UserTrackTool

Troubleshooting Suggestions

    * The URL may be incorrect.
    * The parameters passed to this resource may be incorrect.
    * A resource that this resource relies on may be encountering an error.

For more detailed information about the error, please refer to the error log.

If the error persists please contact the site maintainer. Thank you for your patience.
======================================================================

So, either I'd missing this product, or something is broken - or
both.  The hunt for the CMFUserTrackTool began, which I
eventually found (why are all the zope websites so poor at
conveying useful information?  e.g. how to load product X, where
to find product X) and extracted into the Products directory -
restarted, and now my instance dies - with nothing in the logs.

The readme.txt in that directory says I need UserTrack first, but
I cannot find it anywhere.  Either I've lost the ability to
search the web, or there is some special zope-fu for getting the
stuff you need.  It is apparent that I do not have zope-fu.

More long-winded reading/searching, and I discover that FreeBSD
recommends setting the large stack size for Python, so I
reinstall (make config) python, but that doesn't fix anything -
that instance still dies - nothing in the logs.  I up the logging
level to ALL, and still nothing more in the logs.

I think I'll go to bed for an hour, and let my head rest.

Am I alone in thinking that this is a lot harder than it should
be?  That, or please (dear $deity!), tell me what I am missing?

Any help appreciated.

-- 
Geraint A. Edwards (aka "Gedge")
gedge at yadn.org