Portal efforts (Plone saga)

We are in the process of setting up a portal site for AFIS (Advanced Fire Information System). Basically, three groups within the CSIR are involved in this project, they are ICT4EO, Remote Sensing, and the Satellite Applications Center (SAC).  There is an operational system up and running, providing fire alerts reliably to interested parties, and there is a whole lot of research around the application going on. ICT4EO, my group, has been trying to build an open-source, open-standards-compliant version of the application – our research is mainly focussed around Senosor Web Enablement middleware. Remote Sensing works on information products coming out of the remotely sensed data  - they are working on, for example, fire hazard predictions. SAC run the operational system.  So there are all these “products” within the CSIR that are called AFIS, and no real clarity on what it is, where it’s going.  To solve this, we are putting up an AFIS portal, to aggregate all the info about the system, including current and future research directions. It will be cool.

We decided to use plone as our basis for building the site. We need some sort of content management because different stakeholders must update different areas of the site, and we have worked with plone before. We needed plone 2.5.+ because we want to integrate Open Layers into the site. Ultimately, this site will be deployed on a windows machine, but while we’re developing it, it is sitting on the gentoo server run by ICT4EO.

I emerged zope and plone separately (possibly a mistake?), using zope 2.9.3, and plone 2.5.2. I used zope-config to install plone in my zope instance, and happily started it:
/etc/init.d/zope-afis start

All looked fine - but nothing was actually running. Checking the status produced:

* status: started
* Status of Zope in /var/lib/zope/zope-afis …
daemon manager not running

I tried all sorts of things, and then ran from the bin directory of my zope instance (/var/lib/zope/zope-afis/bin), using

./runzope

Which gave me a happy little error message to the effect that there was already something running on port 8080*. So I editted  the zope instance config file (/var/lib/zope/zope-afis/bin) to change the http-server port and voila! A working instance.

Except not quite - major site errors. Turns out plone 2.5.2 doesn’t like zope to be less than 2.9.6. It works beautifully now.

Summary:

1) If it doesn’t start - check that you don’t have anything else running on port 8080 before trawling the net for hours :).

2) Use at least zope 2.9.6. with plone 2.5.2.  (In fact, I came upon a newsgroup post suggesting that using zope 2.10.x wasn’t working with this plone version either – but I didn’t check that.

*Which I should have known, as it’s Tomcat, and I installed it! Doh!