Archive for the 'review' Category

Mustapha Benali (Headnet), in collaboration with Matt Hamilton (Netsight) and Roel Bruggink (Four digits), made a nice plone package called plone.app.changeownership. Since we are using plone  ‘as a service’  at our university for a lot of different sites with a lot of different users, this was something we were waiting for… so time for a small test…

What happens to content created (owned) by a certain user on a plone site when he/she leaves the organisation? Will they be able to still access the content when they are gone? even when we’ve taken away all their plone rights? Unfortunately our test showed us the answer is yes! In plone a lot of permissions are given to you because you are the owner of a piece of content. When you create a piece of contents that automatically sets you as the owner of this object. We had the situation where we had almost a whole site created by someone who then left after a year of the site being live, so we decided to just go to the plone_control_panel and take away all the rights that this user had (contributor, editor, member, reader, reviewer). To our surprise this didn’t help a bit, when that users who has no rights what so ever in the plone site, he/she can still change everything. Since we use ldap and shibboleth for authentication and authorisation it doesn’t pose a big problem when a person really leaves, since they just can’t log in anymore. But of course, when a person changes position within the organisation, the user account is still active so then it could become a serious problem.

In general, being an owner means having more permissions than the assigned roles indicate. This “priviledged” dealing with ownership is confusing and even sometimes dangerous for testing other functionalities.

So we needed a solution that would make it possible to change the ownership of all (or part of the) content on a plone site with just the click of a button basically. And from what I’ve seen plone.app.changeownership does just that.

ZMI options:

Note1: There is an option in the ZMI, tab Ownership which allows you to ‘Take ownership’ for an object and optionally all its sub-objects. The problem with this option for us is that no one (besides a couple of people from the development team) is allowed in the zmi, so we can only give ownership to the zope-admin. Also we would have to do this manually for each item of the plone site which is just way too time consuming in our setup.

Note2: Along with the ‘Take ownership’ option in zmi there is a possibility to replace the owner via Security tab -> Local roles. The major insufficiency of both options though is that they work on one object only. There is no way to change ownership recursively or in batch on a site. (Thanks Yulia)

What plone.app.ownership does?

• It adds an option to the Control Panel called ‘Change Ownership’:

• It automically shows you all available users in your site and allows you to limit your changes to a given path.
• You can do a dry run of the change in ownership which shows you what items will be adjusted:

• The results are easily visible when you use the Standard View in your site/folders.

before:

after:

Last week I came across a use case for someone wanting to use our Plone based service to make a form go to a different url, in this case just posting your name to an online testing service (UsolveIt) for a specific test.

Not having tested much with PloneFormGen, we thought this could be interesting, so we gave it a shot. We already knew it was a great package, but I’d still like to say thanks to the brilliant people at OneNorthWest for providing yet another solution for our use case without us having to ask for it or start programming. The PloneFormGen package has not just one, but several ways to override a form action.

Here I’ll just write out our specific use case, but more info on the great possibilities of this package can be found at:

• http://plone.org/products/ploneformgen
• http://onenw.org/support/plone-form-gen/plone-form-gen
  
• http://plone.org/products/ploneformgen/documentation
• http://learnplone.org/documentation/phc_search?SearchableText=ploneformgen&phc_selection=all
  

First step is to make a form with only one field. Makes ure you have full (Plone) manager rights before you start.

• Add a form folder and remove all fiels but the subject.
• Rename the subject to something like Name
• Our form then looks like this:

• Make sure you have the usolveit test already set up and have the url, including test-id ready
• Edit the form folder and go to the tab Overrides

• The full succes action should look something like:

redirect_to:python:'http://www.usolvit.be/servlet/toets.servlets.PdfRegistratie?

domein=WISK&toets=A000000A0000&naamStudent='+request.form['naam']

• When the form is finished, you can click the Start test button and the browser will open a new tab with the test:

In Plone 3.3 there’s finally a solution for redirects, or at least there is for most of our use cases

There’s an extra option available in your Site Setup – Types (/@@types-controlpanel) where you can say that when you add a Link to your site,  this will automatically redirect instead of just showing the link address.

This is also visible in the ZMI/portal_types where the default view for a link is then set to link_redirect_view instead of link_view.

If you set this option, the short name of your link can then function as a redirect.

So, for our usecase: site/index_en.php should redirect to site/english/, we just add a link named index_en.php and as a url we add the full path to the english folder. When people than surf to yoursite/index_en.php, they will automatically get redirected to the english part of the site.

Note: Remember that this only works when you are logged out. If you have rights to edit the link, of course you have to see it first so you can click Edit to change the address if needed.