There are some areas that Plone really does well such as the content type handling and content workflow. But lack of documentation in other areas has left me pulling my hair out at times, such as ldap user and group integration with openldap and active directory, debugging modules and some new gotcha each time something is updated in a buildout.

Liferay has also had a steep learning curve, but I found it no where as bad as Plone. No messing in the ZMI for setting up ldap auth, changing database backends or setting portal defaults. Just one config file. I have found the speed surprising compared to Plone on the same hardware too. With java webapps I have tried in the past I have been left with the impression of them being bloated, memory hungry and slow. But I am slowly coming around thanks to Alfresco and Liferay.

It took a long time to get the liferay-portal-5.2.2.war running in the ubuntu jaunty tomcat6 environment and it still had a couple of issues so I just went back to running the liferay-timcat6 bundle which does run well without issue. I guess that is the price I pay for avoiding java for so long.

To make it suitable for my needs the interface needed to be cleaned up and I decided to just create a fresh theme which can be seen in the screenshot below. The theme is called Winter Sky and is adapted from MMOZINE, and is available from the Liferay community plugin section.

Other additions over the classic liferay theme are multiple level navigation menus and print styling css targets. Which were just a couple of extras that made things much more usable for my victims…. oh.. target users.

There are still a few visual glitches to fix, but everything seems usable and I will post the link to the Liferay project page once it is approved.

Solution:

Use a separate user with it’s own install of python2.4 and any libraries needed for plone.

These are not complete instructions on how to get plone running again. But more or less just notes to point most people in the right path.

Command history:

echo 'export PATH=$HOME/python/2.4/bin:$PATH' | tee -a ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc
mkdir -p ~/python/2.4
mkdir python-build
cd python-build
wget http://python.org/ftp/python/2.4.6/Python-2.4.6.tar.bz2 http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/s/setuptools/setuptools-0.6c9.tar.gz http://effbot.org/media/downloads/Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz
sudo apt-get install build-essential zlib1g-dev libjpeg62-dev libfreetype6-dev
tar -xvf Python-2.4.6.tar.bz2
cd Python-2.4.6/
./configure --prefix=$HOME/python/2.4
make
make install
python -V
cd ..
tar -xvf setuptools-0.6c9.tar.gz
cd setuptools-0.6c9/
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
cd ..
tar -xvf Imaging-1.1.6.tar.gz
cd Imaging-1.1.6
python setup.py build
python setup.py install
python -c "import PIL"
sudo apt-get install libldap2-dev libsasl2-dev libssl-dev

Notes:

Remove all old eggs.

Add the python install path to ~/.bashrc or the current shell.

install python, easy_install and PIL.

PIL needed to be install manually with `python setup.py install` as easy_install was not installing the PIL.pth files correctly.

Install python-ldap requirements if needed in plone are the last apt-get line.

Rerun bootstrap and buildouts in plone.