Prerequisites¶

Description

A few things you need before we can get started.

Before we can create a buildout to manage Zope and Plone, there are a few prerequisites to take care of.

As of Plone 3.2, all of the Plone installers are buildout based. You can get the latest installer and run it to have a working buildout without having to follow these steps. However, these steps are still valid if you want to create the buildout manually with ZopeSkel.

First, you will need an appropriate Python interpreter, if you do not have one already:

Install Python 2.4 for your platform, and add it to your system PATH. It is easiest if Python 2.4 is what you get when you type python -V on a command line. Make sure you're using Python 2.4 and not 2.5, since Plone 3.x doesn't support Python 2.5 or later. You might need to type python2.4 instead of just python when running some of the following commands.
If you installed Python using an operating system package (e.g. an RPM), make sure you get the development package (e.g. python-devel) as well. This includes Python header files that we will use later to compile Zope. If you installed from source, or used the Python Windows installer, you should already have these.
Install PIL, the Python Imaging Library into this Python interpreter.
Install setuptools. If you're using Linux and your distribution doesn't provide a package for setuptools, download ez_setup.py and run it with:
```
$ python ez_setup.py
```
This will download and install setuptools and the easy_install script. Watch the console output to understand where easy_install is installed. If this is not in your system PATH, you should add this directory to the path as well.

Finally, use easy_install to get ZopeSkel, a collection of skeleton templates for Zope and Plone development:

$ easy_install -U ZopeSkel

This will get Paste Script and various other dependencies.

Linux note: If you're installing setuptools and ZopeSkel system-wide, you will probably need to become superuser or use sudo, if you're not using virtualenv or similar. But please note that bin/buildout (introduced later) should never be run as root. If you really can't avoid running this script as root, don't forget to change the owner of created files (chown -R) so the unprivileged user that runs the zope instance will be able to read those files.

If you added the Python console scripts directory (where easy_install was placed) to your system path, you should now be able to run the paster command. You can test it with:

                      $ paster create --list-templates
Available templates:
  archetype:                A Plone project that uses Archetypes content types
  basic_namespace:          A basic Python project with a namespace package
  basic_package:            A basic setuptools-enabled package
  basic_zope:               A Zope project
  kss_plugin:               A project for a KSS plugin
  nested_namespace:         A basic Python project with a nested namespace (2 dots in name)
  paste_deploy:             A web application deployed through paste.deploy
  plone:                    A project for Plone products
  plone2.5_buildout:        A buildout for Plone 2.5 projects
  plone2.5_theme:           A theme for Plone 2.5
  plone2_theme:             A theme for Plone 2.1
  plone3_buildout:          A buildout for Plone 3 installation
  plone3_portlet:           A Plone 3 portlet
  plone3_theme:             A theme for Plone 3
  plone4_buildout:          A buildout for Plone 4 developer installation
  plone_app:                A project for Plone products with a nested namespace (2 dots in name)
  plone_hosting:            Plone hosting: buildout with ZEO and Plone versions below 3.2
  plone_pas:                A project for a Plone PAS plugin
  recipe:                   A recipe project for zc.buildout
  silva_buildout:           A buildout for Silva projects

                    

Your output may differ slightly, but make sure you have the plone3_buildout and plone templates at least.

Additional installation steps for Windows¶

If you are using Windows, there are a few more things you need to do.

First, get and install the Python Win32 extensions for Python 2.4.

If you intend to compile Zope yourself, rather than using a binary installer, or if you ever need to compile an egg with C extensions, you will need the mingw32 compiler. Make sure you choose the "base" and "make" modules at a minimum when the installer asks. By default, this installs into C:\MingW32. Inside the installation directory, there will be a bin directory, e.g. C:\MingW32\bin. Add this to your system PATH.

Finally, you need to configure Python's distutils package to use the mingw32 compiler. Create a file called distutils.cfg in the directory C:\Python24\Lib\distutils (presuming Python was installed in C:\Python24, as is the default). Edit this with Notepad, and add the TRUNCATED! Please download pandoc if you want to convert large files.