Products.Gloworm Package Readme
Overview
A theming introspection tool for Plone.
Credits
Author: Eric Steele "ericsteele47@gmail.com":mailto:ericsteele47@gmail.com
Requirements
- Requires plone.app.customerize 1.1.2 (included in Plone 3.1.3) or higher
- archetypes.kss 1.4.2 (included in Plone 3.1.5) or higher
Confirmed to work in:
- Firefox 3, 4
- Internet Explorer 7
- Safari 3.1, 4, 5
- Opera 9
Words of warning
Both GloWorm and CacheSetup operate through monkeypatches to PageTemplate.pt_render(). Installing both on the same instance may cause unexpected behavior. GloWorm is intended as a development tool and is best left on your development machine.
Using GloWorm
Starting the GloWorm inspector requires three things:
1 The Products.Gloworm package should be installed through the Add/Remove Products page.
- 2 Zope debug mode must be enabled, either by turning debug mode on in your
zope.conf file or by running Zope in foreground mode. Note that Zope debug mode is not the same as Plone's CSS debug mode. For more information see http://plone.org/documentation/manual/theme-reference/tools/debug#toc2.
3 Log in as a site manager.
Once those conditions have been met, an "inspect this page" link will appear in the Object Actions section of content objects on your site. In a typical Plone installation, this is at the bottom of the page content. Clicking this link will open up a new view of the content object which includes the GloWorm inspection panel. You may also reach this view by appending '@@inspect' to the current page's URL. Please note that the HTML content of the GloWorm inspector view is drastically different than that of the actual page view, it is recommended that you do not use the contents of the inspector view for styling purposes.
The inspector panel may be resized by dragging the panel's header up or down. The navigation tree may also be resized by dragging left or right.
In the the inspector view, clicking on any element of the current page will bring up a list of information about that page element, including TAL statements (tal:attributes, tal:condition, tal:content, tal:replace) and the name of the viewlet or portlet in which it is contained.
Click the viewlet name to learn more about that viewlet. Viewlet inspection includes the name of the viewlet manager containing the viewlet, the ability to show and hide the viewlet, and to the ability customize the template.
GloWorm's template customization feature utilizes Plone's portal_view_customizations utility to manage viewlet templates. To find your customized templates in the Zope Management Interface, go to "portal_view_customizations" within your Plone site and select the "contents" tab.
In the viewlet inspection view, click the viewlet manager name to inspect that viewlet manager and the viewlets it contains. A green check mark next to a viewlet name indicates that the viewlet is visible, while a red "X" indicates that it is hidden. Clicking these icons will toggle the visibility of the viewlet accordingly. Clicking the up and down arrows performs viewlet reordering. Clicking the name of a viewlet will take you to the viewlet inspection view for that viewlet.
The navigation tree at the right of the inspector panel provides a tree-structured view of the inspected content object's viewlet managers and viewlets. Note that the navigation tree will display viewlet managers and viewlets that are not within the page's <body> tag (ie. "plone.htmlhead"). These may be inspected, but will not be highlighted in the page content panel.
Click the red "close" icon in the upper-right corner of the GloWorm panel to return to normal site browsing.
Support
Contact WebLion at "support@weblion.psu.edu":mailto:support@weblion.psu.edu, or visit our IRC channel: #weblion on freenode.net.
Till glowworms light owl-watchmen's flight Through our green metropolis. - William Allingham, Greenwood Tree