greg haygood

Started playing with Plone3, to see if the Reflecto product might address a client's desire to maintain the "Windows Way" of working with a shared file repository (as opposed to something like Enfold Desktop). More on that later, but in the meantime, I had to build TextIndexNG3 again since Zopyx has a different version for Plone3.

Plone (both v2 & 3) do not currently support indexing of the new Office 2007 file formats: docx, xlsx, and pptx. Even TextIndexNG3 3.1.6 doesn't understand them (I assume TNG 3.2.x, which is only for Plone3, also doesn't work).

Turns out I forgot to mention a couple extra steps to get TextIndexNG3 compiled and working on Windows.

The Plone installers for Windows don't bundle the cool TextIndexNG3 fulltext search add-on. To enable it, you need to compile the C extension module that comes with it. There's an older binary version available, but it's expecting Python 2.3, not the 2.4.4 that comes with the bundle.

The plone site is filled with documentation for authenticating against LDAP/AD with LDAPUserFolder. But Plone 2.5 has a new Pluggable Authentication Service ala PAM, but strangely no updating docs. Glad I found this post to save me the time!

When accessing a Plone site with IE6/7, the browser pops up the following message at the top of the page:This website wants to run the following add-on: ‘MSXML 5.0′ from ‘Microsoft Corporation’. If you trust the website and addon and want to allow it to run, click here…

Plone's security mechanisms are pretty good: very granular and flexible, so you can tailor the site however neded. Strangely, though, if you mark a folder Private, by default the contents within are still visible. Plone's default workflows allow have to be modified to correct this counter-intuitive initial setting.It is posted as a how-to, but rather than searching for it everytime, here's the link. Maybe in a future release this will be fixed in the shipped product.

I landed a contract to setup an intranet for a local company. They had looked at Microsoft's SharePoint, but decided it was way too complex for their needs. So they asked me to help them find something better. I originally planned to go with Drupal, due to its great taxonomy model.