Eric Bréhault: Running a Plone product on Substance D

Why should you want to create or run a Plone product on Substance D? Because it is fun. It might be a good experience for the future of Plone.

Substance D has all the good things from Pyramid. Plus stores data in a ZODB. It is a CMS.

Rapido is the next Plomino version. Plomino started in 2006, still based on Archetypes, stores data into CMF objects. Uses extensively ZCatalog and PythonScript.

I turned it into Rapido. Plone 5. Based on dexterity.

• rapido.core, totally independent of Plone.
• Storage service: rapido.souper provides a storage service based on Souper. Souper works on Plone and Pyramid, so I chose it.
• rapido.plone, standard dexterity content types, adapts them using rapido.core, ideally uses nothing but plone.api.
• rapido.substanced, standard substanced.content classes, uses nothing but Substance D api.

[Demo of Plone part and Substance D part.]

So how is this done?

• TTW scripting is what Rapido is about. I could not use PythonScript, but I used zope.untrustedpython.
• Catalog: repozo.catalog is just fine, working on both systems.
• Content persistence: souper, created by Blue Dynamics, designed to work on both pyramid and Plone.
• settings persistence: using annotations. Very basic, but just works. Both contents can be IAttributeAnnotatable.
• Forms and widgets. Substance D has Deform, but it is not rich enough. Porting z3c.form to Substance D... maybe not. So: client side rendering with Angular Schema Form.
• Access control. Both systems have a granular ACL service. Probably possible to support them both transparently, but for now I created a custom security implementation.

My experience with Substance D. Pros:

• Fun.
• Happy to find all the good ingredients.
• Fast testing.

Cons:

• Not 100 percent ZCA ready, need to call config.hook_zca(), it works fine, no problem, I am just not comfortable with the 'hook' term here. Also, we would probably need a local registry.

Conclusions for me about Plone future:

• ZCA plus buildout plus ZODB make our identity, and we must preserve it. It sets us apart, it is something strong.
• We can find clever approaches to avoid a full rewrite. For example do more in plone.api instead of relying on what Zope does for us.
• Can we easily migrate to Substance D? No.
• Should we migrate to something else? No.

Watch the video and slides of this talk.