Kategorie: Open Source

I installed the current alpha release of Plone 6 (a2) using buildout. I created a Python 3.9 virtual environment and used it to build a Plone 6.0a2 instance. I could start this instance in forground mode with ‘instance fg’ and it was available at port 8080 on localhost.

This shows me a site where I could add a new Plone site to the instance. I used the advance button and could add the ‘plone.volto’ add-on to it. This makes it more easy to use the new Volto frontend later (see screenshot below).

Once I finished the first steps with a new Plone 6.0-a2 buildout I made some further steps and added one of my Plone add-ons to the buildout script. I ran the buildout again and was able to include my add-on, named ‘collective.addons’.

But once I started the instance in forground mode I got a traceback which points me to a line in the configure.zcml of the add-on. I had to comment out the line with ‘IncludeDependencies’ in this file and everything went fine. I could install the add-on in the Plone site and also use its content types. It was able to view the content types within the Plone classic frontend. But there is currently no complete view of the content types within the new Volto frontend available. I’ll work on this during the next weeks.

I activated the blocks feature on the Dexterity page type of Plone 6 with Volto and I get a new experience with the Volto frontend. Everything on the page are now similar to the work in a current WordPress site. I could move aroud this blocks very easily. And I found out that I could insert a blog for an image. I could set the size of this blog to small and align the image to the left side. I move this image block to the top and the first text block adapted its wide to the image block. You could see this behavior on the screenshot below.

I created an instance from the development branch of Plone 6. The source code of this branch could be cloned from the Github repository of the Open Source project: https://github.com/plone/buildout.coredev

I also cloned the Volto repository from Github: https://github.com/plone/volto and started with building the backend. Then run ‘yarn start’ and fixed the missing dependencies, especially ‘razzle’ (yarn add razzle). Once this was done yarn build the Volto client and server. I could get the Volto interface at ‘localhost:3000’ yet. But it is missing a Plone instance, because it had not been up.

I fixed this by running the instance of my Plone 6 buildout, created a new Plone site with the default name ‘Plone’. This site could be reached in the (old) classic Plone interface at ‘localhost:8080/Plone’.

I had to install the ‘plone.restapi’ inside the new Plone site (within the settings site under ‘add-ons’). The Volto interface at ‘localhost:3000’ could connect to the Plone instance yet.

I made a first test with the new Volto interface and created a new Page inside the Plone instance (inside a folder) to test its functionality. I copied a text from a popular Open Source projects website for this test. I could paste it directly into the new page. Then I tried to insert a grafic into the page. But this functionality wasn’t available in my Volto interface yet. I could integrate this grafic within the edit feature of the classic Plone interface and display it also on the Volto interface. The screenshot at the top shows the result of my short test.

It’s always an issue to protect forms (especially contact or support forms) against robots and spammer.Usual technologies of protection are the use of question and answers (e.g. a calculation task) or a captcha. But this way of protection has an impact on the usability and user friendliness of the site and especially of the forms. The user get bothered by the necessity to always look an click on small pictures. And if you use the service recaptcha for the protection task you may get in addition into a privacy issue too. The picture below shows the HCaptcha protected form.

And once the user activated the checkbox to submit that she/he is no robot, the user get the captcha showed in the screenshot below.

But there is a new solution for the protection task. This technology works with a honeypot technology. Plone community members created a new add-on, which build on this technology: collective.honeypot. They published releases on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/collective.honeypot/. The current release is version 2.0.

I used this honeypot add-on and its technology for new versions of Plone add-ons, which I already created and published some months ago. This add-ons contain mail forms to get in contact with the author of a product or a project owner. This forms previously used the captcha technology, and especially the recaptcha service. Thus I decided to move away from recaptcha. First I created a new version of the add-on, which uses the hcaptcha service. I created a new Plone add-on for this purpose: plone.formwidget.hcaptcha (https://github.com/plone/plone.formwidget.hcaptcha). This add-on is available on PyPI: https://pypi.org/project/plone.formwidget.hcaptcha/. It’s current version is 1.0.

Once I finished the move to hcaptcha I worked on a further version of the Plone add-ons which uses the honeypot technology instead of hcaptcha. The honeypot technology makes it possible that the protection of the form works without the need of user interaction. The human user will not notice anything about this protection technology. The form has no visible extras, like e.g. a captcha (see screenshot above). Thus it is more user friendly. You can download the two Plone add-ons with the honeypot technology from PyPI:
https://pypi.org/project/collective.templates/3.0/
https://pypi.org/project/collective.addons/3.1/

I got the current version of Plone with the new frontend ‘Volto’ today. I cloned the repository ‘https://github.com/plone/volto.git, installed ‘docker-composer’ on my machine, activated ‘docker’ and run ‘docker-composer up’ inside the new local git repository.

I got an error with a version conflict during the first run of the docker-composer command. I had to stop the command with ctrl + c. But the second run works without issues and the demo-site was up on ‘http://localhost:3000’. It uses the usual login for Plone development sites.

Once you’re logged in you’ll get a menu bar with tools to edit existing content and create new content on the left side (see screenshot below, logged in as admin user). (This is the only user after creating the new site, but it is possible to create new users with different, fine grained rights of access).