I am glad to see more work is happening for using z3c.form in CMF and Plone, and Daniel Nouri updated us this week with the latest changes. I just updated my buildout to use the new packages and got plone.z3cform 0.4 and plone.app.z3cform 0.3.2.

With the small API changes that happened, you can see below that there is less to write to expose the form in the Plone site (our ContactForm example from my
previous post):

# my.example/my/example/browser.py

import datetime
from zope import schema
import zope.component
import z3c.form

import plone.app.z3cform
from plone.app.z3cform import layout

from plone.i18n.normalizer.interfaces import IIDNormalizer

from my.example import interfaces
from my.example.contact import MyContact

class ContactForm(z3c.form.form.Form):
    """ Contact Form """

    fields = z3c.form.field.Fields(interfaces.IContactData)
    message_field = z3c.form.field.Fields(schema.TextLine(__name__ = 'message',
                                                          title=u"Message",
                                                          required=False)
                                          )
    fields += message_field

    ignoreContext = True

    @z3c.form.button.buttonAndHandler(u'Send', name='send')
    def handle_send(self, action):
        data, errors = self.extractData()
        if errors:
            self.status = z3c.form.form.EditForm.formErrorsMessage
            return

        # Add the contact data, if not in yet
        id = data['firstname'] + data['lastname']
        id = zope.component.queryUtility(IIDNormalizer).normalize(id)

        if id not in self.context.objectIds():
            self._name = id
            contact = MyContact(self._name, **data)
            self.context[self._name] = contact

        # Complete the code so it sends the message to the site admin...
        message = data['message']
        print "Message from %s %s (%s):\n%s" % (data['firstname'], data['lastname'], data['email'], data['message'])

        self.request.RESPONSE.redirect(self.context.absolute_url())

# New way to provide the wrapping View
ContactFormView = layout.wrap_form(ContactForm, label="Contact Form")

The related ZCML code does not change.
By the way, on my TODO list, is moving from ZCML to grokcore.component registration

I am spending some time to update the Archetypes Developer Manual on plone.org/documentation, so I can move forward in contributing on other stuff in the Doc Team tasks list.

If you are also in the situation of updating some old AT-based product for Plone 3, this might be useful to you.

The current version of our manual, in the part discussing a sample AT product called InstantMessage, is missing:

• GenericSetup profile for setting types and subskins. This has been missing for a long time, so I decided to update it immediately.
• ZCML-based registration for things such as FS Directory Views or class permissions and factory, which the current version of CMF permits.

I started updating the “InstantMessage” package’s code in this branch.

What was needed: Mainly replacing the old ‘Extensions/Install.py’ code by the needed GenericSetup profile XML files:

• for content types:

• profiles/default/types.xml
• profiles/default/types/InstantMessage.xml
• profiles/default/factorytool.xml

• for the sub-skin: profiles/default/skins.xml

Then, you need a piece of code for loading the GenericSetup profile. You do that, nowadays, by adding a configure.zcml file at the root of the package with the following code:

<configure xmlns="http://namespaces.zope.org/zope"

       xmlns:genericsetup="http://namespaces.zope.org/genericsetup"

       i18n_domain="instantmessage" >

<genericsetup:registerProfile

       name="InstantMessage"

       title="InstantMessage"

       directory="profiles/default"

       description="Extension profile for InstantMessage sample AT content type."

       provides="Products.GenericSetup.interfaces.EXTENSION"

      />

</configure>

I think I can now update the manual to reflect the new setup code - pointing to a couple of GS-related tutorials that already exist on plone.org, and merge the updated branch of the code with the trunk so people can get this new version.

Next step: Introduce other ZCML-based registrations in the CMF/AT context. This update could wait for the “versions” feature support on plone.org so we add these details without loosing the text related to the old way of doing.