As I slowly make my way through the Professional Plone Development book, I find there are some things that I pick up on quickly, some take me a little longer to figure out.  In particular though, the book has gotten me excited about Plone3.  It seems much "lighter"  or faster than Plone2 and it's got openid support.

But the whole portlet thing is giving me heartache, most likely because being a cut and paster it is so easy to copy a portlet into portal_skins/custom and make the necessary minor changes for a new portlet.  The new way, the proper way anyway, is much more cumbersome.  Again, for a cut and paster. 

The great thing about the book though is it very clearly helps me get my head around the new way.

The book uses a hypothetical case study of the Optilux Cinemas, and goes through the various requirements showing you how to build features, functions, themes that meet the hypothetical customer requirements.  I particularly liked that approach since I'm a tad bit slow when it comes to generic discussions.  The concrete examples helped me focus on what it was that was being done, with the why, and I seem to learn plone 3 without "learning plone 3".

What I didn't like was that the case study had a prototype layout for the customer.  The layout had portlets representing applications, etc. and where they are located on the top page.  One of the new things for me was the "viewlets" section.  A page in plone three consists of viewlets.  The book goes through how to add your own viewlets and viewlet managers, and how to order them.  However, the book didn't actually go through the process adding the portlets in the prototype design, which was neither in the typical plone left or right columns but under the main content body.  It would have been nice if they actually walked through that process.

For example, the book shows you how to show the order of the viewlets.  But the portlets in the left and right columns are not actually contained in viewlets. 

I am not really complaining though, as Martin Aspeli has done a fabulous job of laying the basic foundation.  So I am getting ready to try it myself.  It will take me a while, but I'm pretty sure that I'll get it.  Particularly since Plone 3 comes with the nuplone theme which is tableless and recently released Plone Tableless should also be a nice resource to look at.

As I build my test sites, I've been trying out a couple of products.  Feedmixer by Jarn is great.  It gives you a real simple way to add a rss/atom portlet for publishing feeds from other sites.  It works similarly to CMFSin, but in fact is easier to use in that it's done in the plone interface as opposed to the ZMI.  I don't know about how it scales, but it seems great so far.  Via the portlet manager it's easy to create multiple portlets with different feeds or topics.  Clicking on "more" gives you a planet like page.  This I will use assuming it scales well.  And according to this post by Jon Stahl, it is designed to work with caching tools.

However, I agree with Jon on the url for the planet-like page:

http://localhost:8084/plone/++contextportlets++plone.leftcolumn/feeds/full_feed

That's ugly, dead ugly. I don't know if this is a limitation of plone 3 or just the implementation of Feedmixer.  Wichert Akkerman's comment there seems to indicate it's a plone problem.  I'd be sad if that were true.

The folks whom are developing CalendarX recently asked for some donations to help upgrade it to be compatible with plone 3.  I don't know if they got the financing or not, but I saw that there was a development version with plone 3 compatibility.  Unfortunately, it's only available in the collective subversion repository so I couldn't just add the product download to my buildout.cfg.  At least not the way I understand it.

I tried to use a svn checkout of it to create my own egg for use in the buildout configuration.  While it seems to build, calendar x does not become available and doesn't seem to be installed.  I am sure that I'll figure it out, but I haven't yet.   So I'll move on for now.  But I'd like to see if I could get it working, even if it's just for testing purposes.

I think I'm just about at the stage where I'll be able to migrate this site and JANO to plone 3.