[Cmfcollectorng-develop] running on Plone2.0: fixes and improvements

[Balazs R. <re...@re...>]

Hello,

Recently I attempted to set up a plone2.0 site with CollectorNG. (I am
using CVS version of plone from the 2.0 branch). My first interest was
to get hands on a good issue collector that I can use for tracking my
own projects, on plone sites, with internationalized content.

When trying to setup the CVS HEAD version, I run into a few (minor)
problems that I solved. Later I started to work a little bit more on it;
I wanted the email notification work in a multilingual environment. Then
there were a few little things that I preferred to play with (let's say,
for fun), and I did them, too.

I have chosen to share the patches on this list in the hope that it
might be useful for the development of the collector. No idea what other
work is being done on this area of CollectorNG/Plone2 and how this would
fit in. However this is a bunch of patches that needs to be reviewed and
sorted out first; some of them solve bugs and others represent slight
enhancements.

As a result of this I've got a setup working fine with plone2.0 - I did
not do extensive testing in real usage.

Here are the issues that I worked on:

1. The Install.py seems to be inadequate for Plone as it only installs
under CMF. I made a quick hack that makes installation possible in plone
and occasionally it also adds the collectorng_plone skin. Yet the
workflow needs to be added and set manually. (This should be added too
but as I am not very experienced with the plone installation process, I
could not figure that out easily.)
Also the installation should be handled separately on CMF or Plone,
because with by patch the plone-less installation would be broken.

2. Looking at all the three skins, the collectorng_plone skin looked the
most useful, so I only focused on that.
I fixed one usability error: at the issue view the comments are
displayed too wide, attempted to put "pre: {width: auto;}" to the css. 
(Other issue: in this skin it would be good to widen the description
field in the issue view, but it is not important and I don't know how to
do that.)

3. Also, "css is not found" because it references it as
collectorng_stylesheet, without the .css extension - but in the skin it
is with the extension. Workaround: "customize" the stylesheet manually
into portal_skins/custom, and rename it to extension-less. Why is this,
is beyond my knowledge.

4. fixed add issue template to also fetch name into the data sheet of
the new issue automatically, not only the email.

5. About the email notification.
Date header must be added. 
Also, I think all the content encoding of the email notifications sent
out should be in UTF-8 as it best matches the overall policy of plone
(and it works.) Should not be a problem nowadays with modern mailers but
a must in a non-English environment.
But again, I don't know how this would affect or break plain CMF usage
where I guess the content encoding is not always UTF.
(Or maybe the mail encoding could be parametrized - and of course the
best would be if it could figure out a minimal charset by itself - like
the evoluton mailer does it, for example - try ASCII first, then a
one-byte codepage, then UTF as fallback. But for this a general-purpose
python package would be handy which I have not heard of.)

4. Modified a bit the incoming email processing, too; so that I can
specify location on a per collector basis (configurable by the
abbreviation of the collector), and are not tied to put all the
collectors of a site into one folder. Maybe the setup for this has to be
done in a little fuzzy way, sigh.

5. Other issues with email submission:

    - charset handling at new issues and followups,

    - trim the automatically attached signature from the end, as I
thought about a better possibility in the following:

    - anonymous mail source: I made mail name and address stored with
each transcript, and displayed instead of the username which is in this
case insignificant. So instead, something like 'Email submission from
"John Doe" fo...@ba...' is displayed. (Another possibily for improvement
would be to identify the plone user based on email address, but this can
be used only for info, as addresses can be easily faked / or even
authenticate users based on PGP-signature, but I doubt anyone really
would want to use this.)

---

So beware: at least the installer and possibly the email encoding stuff
might break plone-less (plain CMF) behaviour

Patches included. Please feel free to comment.

-- 
Bala'zs REE'