Buildout Builder

All,

   It’s been a while since my last update but here goes!

 Edit Interface 

 I spent this weekend getting rather familiar with grok and KSS. I have to say I really enjoy working in Grok, and not having to write any Javascript to use AJAX is a huge benefit. I’ve nearly finished working on the basic edit interface for buildouts; it should be flexible enough for generic buildouts. I’m also hoping to be able to code in some nice drag and drop capabilities to make editing very smooth.

 Pre-Configured buildouts

The earlier model for distributing buildouts only allowed one buildout per solution, which is fine for a simple buildout. Recently I’ve noticed that solutions like plone4artists use a number of hierarchal buildouts, which would be impossible to distribute with the previous model. Therefore I’ve modified the buildoutbuilder source code to read compressed tarballs containing all of the buildouts/files pertaining to a particular solution. The users are able to view all of the buildouts in the tarball, as well as download it. This is a very easy model for presentation and distribution.

 Subversion thread

I’ve been thinking of writing a background thread that runs once a day or so, to automatically check listed repositories for the latest revs of common buildouts (like p4a), download them, and compress them for distribution/viewing. This should save us a lot of time, and work to keep the site concurrent without the need for human interference.

 Git

I’ve migrated my source control to git after becoming completely frustrated with subversion. (I got really tired of typing “cd trunk”, you can read more about that here: http://xkenneth.blogspot.com/2008/06/goodbye-svn-hello-git.html)

The git repository is located here:  

http://github.com/xkenneth/buildoutbuilder/tree/master

More to come!

Regards,

Ken