Dexterity is a content type framework for CMF applications, with particular emphasis on Plone. It can be viewed as an alternative to Archetypes that is more light-weight and modular.
Project description
Introduction
Dexterity wants to make some things really easy. These are:
Create a “real” content type entirely through-the-web without having to know programming.
As a business user, create a schema using visual or through-the-web tools, and augment it with adapters, event handlers, and other Python code written on the filesystem by a Python programmer.
Create content types in filesystem code quickly and easily, without losing the ability to customise any aspect of the type and its operation later if required.
Support general “behaviours” that can be enabled on a custom type in a declarative fashion. Behaviours can be things like title-to-id naming, support for locking or versioning, or sets of standard metadata with associated UI elements.
Easily package up and distribute content types defined through-the-web, on the filesystem, or using a combination of the two.
Philosophy
Dexterity is designed with a specific philosophy in mind. This can be summarised as follows:
- Reuse over reinvention
As far as possible, Dexterity should reuse components and technologies that already exist. More importantly, however, Dexterity should reuse concepts that exist elsewhere. It should be easy to learn Dexterity by analogy, and to work with Dexterity types using familiar APIs and techniques.
- Small over big
Mega-frameworks be damned. Dexterity consists of a number of specialised packages, each of which is independently tested and reusable. Furthermore, packages should has as few dependencies as possible, and should declare their dependencies explicitly. This helps keep the design clean and the code manageable.
- Natural interaction over excessive generality
The Dexterity design was driven by several use cases that express the way in which we want people to work with Dexterity. The end goal is to make it easy to get started, but also easy to progress from an initial prototype to a complex set of types and associated behaviours through step-wise learning and natural interaction patterns. Dexterity aims to consider its users - be they business analysts, light integrators or Python developers, and be they new or experienced - and cater to them explicitly with obvious, well-documented, natural interaction patterns.
- Real code over generated code
Generated code is difficult to understand and difficult to debug when it doesn’t work as expected. There is rarely, if ever, any reason to scribble methods or ‘exec’ strings of Python code.
- Zope 3 over Zope 2
Although Dexterity does not pretend to work with non-CMF systems, as many components as possible should work with plain Zope 3, and even where there are dependencies on Zope 2, CMF or Plone, they should - as far as is practical - follow Zope 3 techniques and best practices. Many operations (e.g. managing objects in a folder, creating new objects or manipulating objects through a defined schema) are better designed in Zope 3 than they were in Zope 2.
- Zope concepts over new paradigms
We want Dexterity to be “Zope-ish”. Zope is a mature, well-designed (well, mostly) and battle tested platform. We do not want to invent brand new paradigms and techniques if we can help it.
- Automated testing over wishful thinking
“Everything” should be covered by automated tests. Dexterity necessarily has a lot of moving parts. Untested moving parts tend to come loose and fall on people’s heads. Nobody likes that.
Getting started
Please read the installation guide to get Dexterity up and running.
Then log in to Plone, go to Site Setup, and go to the Dexterity Types control panel to get started creating content types through the web.
Or read the Dexterity developer manual to get started developing Dexterity content types on the filesystem.
This release of Dexterity is compatible with Plone 3, 4, and 4.1.
Upgrading
If you are upgrading from a previous release of Dexterity, you need to:
Update your buildout with the new versions (or extend the updated KGS), and re-run it.
Restart Zope.
Go to the Add-ons control panel in Plone Site Setup, and run the upgrade steps for “Dexterity Content Types” if there are any available.
Documentation
Various documentation is available:
The following documents are not Dexterity-specific, but will likely be useful to users of Dexterity:
Mailing list
The dexterity-development group provides a place to discuss development and use of Dexterity.
Issue tracker
Please report issues in our Google Code issue tracker.
Contributed Packages
The Dexterity known good set (KGS) of version pins includes a number of contributed packages that are not installed by default:
- plone.app.referenceablebehavior
Adds support for the Archetypes reference engine to Dexterity content, so that Dexterity items can be referenced from Archetypes items. Requires Plone 4.1.
- plone.app.stagingbehavior
Adds support for staging Dexterity content, based on plone.app.iterate. Requires Plone 4.1.
- plone.app.versioningbehavior
Adds support for storing historic versions of Dexterity content, based on Products.CMFEditions. Requires Plone 4.0 or greater.
- collective.z3cform.datagridfield
A z3c.form widget for editing lists of subobjects via a tabular UI.
Contributing
Most Dexterity code is owned by the Plone Foundation and maintained in the Plone svn repository. We’re happy to share commit access so that you can share code with us, but first you must sign the Plone contributor agreement.
Dexterity wouldn’t be possible without the hard work of a lot of people, including:
Martin Aspeli
Jian Aijun
Wichert Akkerman
Jonas Baumann
David Brenneman
Joel Burton
Vincent Fretin
Rok Garbas
Anthony Gerrard
Nathan van Gheem
David Glick
Craig Haynal
Wouter Vanden Hove
Jean-Michel Francois
Jim Fulton
Jamie Lentin
Alex Limi
Steve McMahon
Jason Mehring
Alec Mitchell
Daniel Nouri
Ross Patterson
Maurits van Rees
Lennart Regebro
Laurence Rowe
Israel Saeta Perez
Hanno Schlichting
Christian Schneider
Carsten Senger
Jon Stahl
Eric Steele
Gaudenz Steinlin
Dorneles Tremea
Sean Upton
Sylvain Viollon
Matthew Wilkes
Matt Yoder
Andi Zeidler
(Please add your name if we have neglected to.)
Release Notes
This release is compatible with Plone 3, 4, and 4.1, as long as you use the correct set of version pins from good-py (see the installation guide).
Changes
The following packages have been updated since Dexterity 1.0:
plone.app.dexterity 1.0.1
Deprecated the IRelatedItems behavior in this package. It moved to plone.app.relationfield. [davisagli]
Add no-op “grok” and “relations” extras for forward-compatibility with Dexterity 2.0. [davisagli]
plone.schemaeditor 1.0.2 & 1.0.3
Fix test. [davisagli]
Make FieldFactory do a deep copy of its arguments to avoid problems with mutable defaults getting shared between field instances. This fixes http://code.google.com/p/dexterity/issues/detail?id=133 [davisagli]
Remove dependency on zope.app.schema. [davisagli]
plone.app.z3cform 0.5.5 & 0.5.6
Make sure group errors get styled like field errors. [davisagli]
Include group and field descriptions as structure. [davisagli]
Make it possible to add a custom CSS class to a form by setting its css_class attribute. [davisagli]
Match plone.z3cform’s template in including the form description as structure. [davisagli]
plone.z3cform 0.7.7
Avoid rendering a wrapped form if a redirect has already occurred after updating it. [davisagli]
Remove <a name=””/> elements from inside the CRUD table TBODY element they were otherwise unused (and illegal in that location of the HTML content model). [mj]
plone.app.relationfield 1.1
Make sure the content tree widget profile is installed. [davisagli]
Moved the ‘related items’ behavior here from plone.app.dexterity. [davisagli]
plone.formwidget.autocomplete 1.2.1
Use full widget name in ++widget++ path, don’t try and remove form prefix (which will not behave correctly if widget is part of a subform). [lentinj]
plone.formwidget.contenttree 1.0.2
Fix regression that broke the browsing with JQuery < 1.4. [davisagli]
collective.z3cform.datetimewidget 1.0.5
Change more $ to jQuery. [danjacka]
Fix month selection issue with the date input widget. Previously, due to the leading zero, months < 10 weren’t being selected when picking a date on the calendar widget. [davidjb]
Fix date offset issue for default dates on the jQuery date input widget. Providing the default value as a JavaScript Date(yyyy, mm, dd) required months to be in the range of 0 to 11 but outputting as Date(“yyyy/mm/dd”) works as expected. [davidjb]
Fix issue with jQuery date input widget not being displayed when an incomplete date was entered. [davidjb]
Avoid error fetching widget values when no year or day was entered. [davisagli]
Made js for dateinput popup check for jQuery().dateinput before invoking it. Changed from $ to jQuery. [smcmahon]
removed trailing comma in JavaScript dict (which broke Internet Explorer) [Brainix]
Changelog for plone.app.dexterity
1.0.1 - 2011-07-02
Deprecated the IRelatedItems behavior in this package. It moved to plone.app.relationfield. [davisagli]
Add no-op “grok” and “relations” extras for forward-compatibility with Dexterity 2.0. [davisagli]
1.0 - 2011-05-20
Fix publishing dates DateTime/datetime conversions so as not to drift by the timezone delta every save. [elro]
Make sure cloned types get a new factory. [davisagli]
Don’t override overlay CSS in Plone 4. [davisagli]
Fixed cloning of types with a period (.) in their short name. [davisagli]
Allow specifying a type’s short name when adding a type. [davisagli]
Make sure the Basic metadata adapter accesses the content’s title attribute directly so it doesn’t get encoded. Also make sure encoded data can’t be set via this adapter. [davisagli]
1.0rc1 - 2011-04-30
Added upgrade step to install new javascript from plone.formwidget.autocomplete [davisagli]
Added basic support for making TTW changes to schemas defined in filesystem models and code. (Note: This feature will not actually work until some further changes are completed in plone.dexterity.)
In order to support this change, the event handling to serialize schema changes was revised. We now register a single event handler for the SchemaModifiedEvent raised for the schema context. This allows us to keep track of the FTI that changes need to be serialized to on the schema context. The serializeSchemaOnFieldEvent and serializeSchemaOnSchemaEvent handlers were removed from the serialize module and replaced by serializeSchemaContext. The serializeSchema helper remains but is deprecated. [davisagli]
Add MANIFEST.in. [WouterVH]
Add “export” button to types editor. Exports GS-style zip archive of type info for selected types. [stevem]
Fix old jquery alias in types_listing.pt. This closes http://code.google.com/p/dexterity/issues/detail?id=159 [davisagli]
Make display templates fill content-core on Plone 4. [elro]
Add ids to the group fieldsets on display forms. [elro]
Exclude from navigation behavior should be restricted to IDexterityContent. [elro]
1.0b4 - 2011-03-15
Add a “Name from file name” behavior. [elro]
Remove the NameFromTitle behavior factory, it is not necessary. [elro]
Add “Next previous navigation” and “Next previous navigation toggle” behaviors. [elro]
Add an “Exclude from navigation” behavior. [lentinj]
Put the folder listing within a fieldset. [lentinj]
1.0b3 - 2011-02-11
Add a navigation root behavior. [elro]
Fix decoding error when an encoded description is stored in the FTI. [davisagli]
Avoid empty <div class=”field”> tag for title and description in item.pt and container.pt. [gaudenzius]
Add locales structure for translations with cs , de, es, eu, fr, ja, nl, pt_BR [toutpt]
Update french translation [toutpt]
1.0b2 - 2010-08-05
Fix several XML errors in templates. Needed for Chameleon compatibility. [wichert]
cloning a type through the dexterity UI in the control panel did not work if the type had a hyphen in it’s name. This fixes http://code.google.com/p/dexterity/issues/detail?id=126 [vangheem]
1.0b1 - 2010-04-20
Require plone.app.jquerytools for the schema editor UI, and make sure it is installed when upgrading. [davisagli]
Remove unused schemaeditor.css. [davisagli]
Omit the metadata fields except on edit and add forms. [davisagli]
Enable the “Name from title” behavior for new types, by default. [davisagli]
Include plone.formwidget.namedfile so that File upload and Image fields are available out of the box. You must explicitly include z3c.blobfile in your environment if you want blob-based files. [davisagli]
Added a DexterityLayer that can be used in tests. [davisagli]
Fix issue with the BehaviorsForm accidentally polluting the title of the z3c.form EditForm ‘Apply’ button. [davisagli]
Add upgrades folder and make sure plone.app.z3cform profile gets installed on upgrades from previous versions of Dexterity. [davisagli]
Depend on the plone.app.z3cform profile, to make sure the Plone browser layer for z3c.form gets installed. [davisagli]
Avoid relying on acquisition to get the portal_url for links in the type listing table. [davisagli]
1.0a7 - 2010-01-08
Make sure the Dublin Core fieldsets appear in the same order as they do in AT content. [davisagli]
Make sure the current user is loaded as the default creator for the IOwnership schema in an add form. [davisagli]
Include behavior descriptions on the behavior edit tab. [davisagli]
IBasic behavior: set missing_value of description-field to u’’ . The description should never be None (live_search would not work any more). [jbaumann]
Fix issue where traversing to a nonexistent type name in the types control panel did not raise NotFound. [davisagli]
Make it possible to view the fields of non-editable schemata. [davisagli]
Tweaks to the tabbed_forms template used for the types control panel. [davisagli]
1.0a6 - 2009-10-12
Add plone.app.textfield as a dependency. We don’t use it directly in this package, but users of Dexterity should have it installed and available. [optilude]
Use some default icons for new types. [davisagli]
Show type icons in type listing if available. [davisagli]
Removed ‘container’ field from the types listing in the control panel (it wasn’t working). [davisagli]
Add message factories to titles and descriptions of metadata schema fields. Fixes http://code.google.com/p/dexterity/issues/detail?id=75. [optilude]
Patch listActionInfos() instead of listActions() in order to get the folder/add category into the actions list. This avoids a problem with the ‘actions.xml’ export handler exporting the folder/add category incorrectly. Fixes http://code.google.com/p/dexterity/issues/detail?id=78 [optilude]
1.0a5 - 2009-07-26
Explicitly include overrides.zcml from plone.app.z3cform. [optilude]
1.0a4 - 2009-07-12
Changed API methods and arguments to mixedCase to be more consistent with the rest of Zope. This is a non-backwards-compatible change. Our profuse apologies, but it’s now or never. :-/
If you find that you get import errors or unknown keyword arguments in your code, please change names from foo_bar too fooBar, e.g. serialize_schema() becomes serializeSchema(). [optilude]
1.0a3 - 2009-06-07
Updated use of <plone:behavior /> directive to match plone.behavior 1.0b4. [optilude]
1.0a2 - 2009-06-01
Remove superfluous <includeOverrides /> in configure.zcml which would cause a problem when the package is loaded via z3c.autoinclude.plugin [optilude]
1.0a1 - 2009-05-27
Initial release
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