mercredi 28 septembre 2005

The magic Firefox extension documentation Making a note here so I can find it later. Firefox 1.5 has an overhauled approach to making extensions. At the castle sprint, Calvin and I worked on a Firefox extension for building content types and lost a bit of time on this topic. Basically, during development, you don't want to make JAR files and restart on each change. Firefox can handle non-JAR installs, meaning, subdirectories. However it has always been tough to find the right chants, particularly since the damn thing keeps changing on how to do it. So, this is this official way to do it for 1.5. Once you created the files described above and put them in the appropriate folder structure, registering them in the Extension Manager is trivial. Just create a "pointer" file with the same name as your extension's ID in profile folder/extensions/, edit it so that it contains the path to your folder containing install.rdf and chrome.manifest files, and restart Firefox. 1:29:26 PM   comment []

Thanks BlueDynamics for Plone Conf 2005 Last week we had a wonderful conference in Vienna. 250 people from around the world. A lineup of talks with good speakers covering topics from Zope 3 and CMF 2.0 to cities using Plone. The conference was organized again this year by BlueDynamics, a long-time Zope and Plone leader in Europe. Between conferences, sprints, and participation on the Plone Foundation board, BlueDynamics is one of the reasons this community is so tightly-knit. This year BlueDynamics had Emilia Stanaszek to handle all the conference organization, which she did superbly. Each time I needed to interact with her, I knew that the matter would be handled perfectly without any needed followup. However, there's one person in particular to call attention to. Sure, the Zope/CMF/Plone stack is nice software. Sure, we had a big group of enthusiastic people putting the power into the conference. But this conference in particular gave a special tone to that power, and that tone comes from Robert Boulanger, head of BlueDynamics. Immediately upon walking into the conference venue (more photos) I knew I was walking into Robert's cathedral. He worked so hard over the year to get a special place for a special conference. Robert has an unbelievably extensive network of contacts. (For my wife's birthday 3 years ago he took us to the Emperor's butterfly room, now a restaurant, and the manager made a special cake for us.) This venue was where the sets for Mozart's Magic Flute were assembled, hence the tall open atrium, where the backdrops were hung. Not content with simply providing an inspirational, historic, jaw-dropping space, Robert also provided catering. Again through friends. Quality sit-down food plus, of course for Austria, an open tap for beer. I think for some attendees, the conference lunch was the best meal they had each day. And finally, not content to smash all other conference experiences with the venue and catering, Robert provided...you guessed it, through friends...a private concert by a world-class pianist and violinist. You don't see that everyday. Even for this Robert had a curveball...the artists performed a comedy sketch riffing on classical music, classical musicians, popular culture, and even mobile phone ringtones. I can't express how freaking hilarious this evening turned out. I literally got cramps from laughing. This performance was a special gift given to us attendees. The people, the speakers, the organization, the venue, and the tone all added up to a really special experience. This conference had a tangible, gratifying vibe that seemed to put a sublime smile on everybody's face. We all owe BlueDynamics a debt, and Robert in particular. If you were there, and you appreciate the experience, send a quick thanks to robert at bluedynamics dot com. 10:17:08 AM   comment []

Brief overview of XML in Firefox 1.5 Sometimes, when you haven't blogged for a long time and feel guilty, you need a simple post to trick yourself into getting caught up. This article at developerWorks provides a pretty simple overview of the XML support in the upcoming 1.5 release of Firefox. (Note: the XForms XPI isn't bundled.) 9:38:07 AM   comment []