new to python/zope - installation woes

[George Donnelly]

Geraint Edwards wrote:
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.

zope and plone are medium-level maintenance, so you might find them 
difficult to forget about. ;)

> 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.

FreeBSD rocks, but Zope/Plone from ports is not optimal. You should 
install those from source for a production environment

> 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?).

at the end of the install process, if you give the command as "make 
install clean", it will show you all the affected ports.

Try setting your scrollback buffer higher in your terminal app.

> 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.

use rewrite rules.

> 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:

hm, you might have something misconfigured there.

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

The zexp includes an object that depends on the UserTrackTool, you can 
get CMFMessage from the Plone collective, download and install that into 
your Products directory to fix that.

> restarted, and now my instance dies - with nothing in the logs.

is the instance in debug mode? try turning that to off in 
instance_home/etc/zope.conf

> 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.

UserTrack comes with CMFMessage and/or CMFUserTrack.

> 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?

Zope/Plone has its complexities, but installing them from source should 
make things slightly easier.

good luck.


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