Dear future ReactJS using self, thanks to IE11, you will need to know about babel-pollyfil

Hello future self. This is a quick note on how to use the babel-polyfill.
Perhaps it is so far enough into the future that all browsers now support all of ES6 or better natively. Just in case you're still needing to support the few stubborn Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) users then you'll find this helpful.

It is November 2016 and we now use polyfills to make browsers support futures that they otherwise would not.  Here's how to use the babel-polyfill to help to make your project IE11 compatible.

In my case the specific issue was that my production code was shipping with calls to Object.assign(). Unfortunately IE11 has no idea what .assign() is. In the meantime Chrome just worked, this is how I used the polyfill approach with babel-polyfill to trick IE11 into doing Object.assign().

1. Install it with npm

This command is run in the directly that contains the package.json file:

npm i babel-polyfill --save-dev

2. Edit your webpack.config.js file to make use of it

The snippet below shows how the babel-polyfill is added to the entry array.

module.exports = {
  ...,
  entry: [
    'webpack-hot-middleware/client',
    'babel-polyfill',
    './app/client.js'
  ],

3. Import it into your project

Here's what importing babel-polyfill looks like in my project file which is located at app/client.js:

import 'react-toolbox/lib/commons.scss';
import React from 'react';
import ReactDOM from 'react-dom';
import 'babel-polyfill';
import App from './App.js';

There you go future self, if you found this helpful, you're welcome. I still need to check if this fixes IE10 compatibility issues.

Install Plone 5 Release Candidate on Cloud9 IDE

These are quick instructions for installing Plone 5 RC1 RC2 RC3 on Cloud9 IDE. This walks you through the process of installing Plone on Cloud9 IDE. We assume you have already signed up with Cloud9 IDE.

Step 1 - Create a new Workspace

On the Cloud9 IDE dashboard select Create a new workspace

Use the default settings as a Starting Point

Then click Create workspace.

Step 2 - Enter the installer command in the terminal

in the terminal type the following:

wget -qO- goo.gl/HBzmFw | bash

You will see output similar to this:

Step 3 - Launching Plone 5

After successful installation (takes about 5 minutes) run the following command:

cd zinstance
bin/instance fg

Once it has started successfully you'll see the following message on the terminal:

INFO Zope Ready to handle requests

At that point select Preview > View Running Application.

IMPORTANT: You'll need to get the adminPassword, it is located under the 'zinstance' folder see the screenshot below.

Once it's running, click on the "pop out" button

This will lead you to the Plone installer (it will look a little weird, because of an issue with proxying the site via https). Click on Create a new Plone site and following the instructions.

Once you're successful you'll see a running Plone 5 site:

Things to Know

Here are a few things to know about Plone.

1. Plone runs on an application server called Zope 
2. You can actually run multiple copies of Plone on one Zope application server

Next Steps

This quick cloud based installation is a great way to try out some of the new things in Plone 5. Plone 5 is still being polished so it will have rough edges. Try changing the look of your site by following these notes from Asko Soukka on customizing Plone 5's default theme.

If you get this working, please leave a comment. If you try and have issues leave a comment.

Removing rogue members from your Plone site

I recently had one of my Plone sites get hit by a "join form attack". Basically a spam bot which started adding new members to my site (we don't use a captcha at the moment). I ended up with far more members in the site than members of the organization. I started deleting them manually using the Zope Management Interface > acl_users > source_users, but that became tedious quickly. So I wrote a command-line script to do the job for me.

In my case the spambot wasn't super smart, all the usernames created by the bot started with capital letters. All my real users had usernames with common letters. This made it easy to filter out the bad guys.

Here's my script in a nutshell:
.
.

I used the special --object-path option to indicate the location of my Plone site, relative to the root of the Zope application server.

My final command looked something like this:

bin/instance_debug --object-path='pathto/sitein/zodb/plone' run member_cleanup.py > members_cleanup_report.txt

The resulting output went to a members_cleanup_report.txt.

Many thanks to the plone.api and plone.docs teams, being able to make use of plone.api.user made it 20 times easier to write the script.

A note about transactions

Before my script would run successfully I had to add a transaction.commit() line, it seems commandline scripts require this.

Parting thoughts

There's a lot more that can be added to the script to make it smarter. For example for certain kinds of sites you could filter based on whether the user has created any content or perhaps it might be based on log in patterns, if they have never logged in or only logged in once.

I'm weighing the pros and cons of having a captcha. At the moment members can't do much except change their portrait pictures and profiles, but I know that some spammers use the portrait for hosting "bad" images, so captchas may have to be introduced.

References

The resources I used included the following references:

http://docs.plone.org/external/plone.api/docs/api/user.html
http://docs.plone.org/develop/plone/misc/commandline.html#scripting-context
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/plone.recipe.zope2instance

A vertical image slider with jQuery and Plone's Products.Carousel

My goal was to create a vertical sliding effect to allow a visitor to experience tall images in a small area.
The images were made too tall for the viewing area and then, using jQuery's animate, were made to slide upwards through the viewing area. I used Products.Carousel but I'm sure a similar effect could be achieved with collective.carousel.

Products.Carousel is a Plone add-on that provides a point and click interface for managing banners, this makes it possible to appoint non-technical persons as banner administrators. Products.Carousel also builds on Plone's built-in workflow support so banners can be scheduled for publication and expiration among other things.

(Products.Carousel has a simple javascript event system with basic documentation (see: http://plone.org/products/carousel/#carousel-events), so it is possible to take advantage of event listeners to do fancier stuff).

The Structure

The viewing area is wrapped with the css selector span.carousel-image 
The carousel images can be selected based on a general selector such as .carousel img or based on the unique id associated with the slider

The Implementation

The key ideas are as follows:

• We add custom css to match the viewing area class (called "carousel-image") to size we configure for the carousel.
• We make the source images taller than the carousel viewing area.
• We add custom css that enforces the height of the carousel images so they inherit the viewing area size.
• We add custom javascript which will slide the image through the viewing area and is triggered upon changing of slides.

The CSS

To save on further explanation I've included annotations that explain the key CSS (There is other supporting CSS but it is more incidental to the functionality). In this example the carousel has the unique id "carousel-14937891799".

/*
 rule for image, overrides the default image size and enforces
the height of the carousel images to 400px tall
 */
#carousel-1493789179 img {
width: 961px;
height: 400px;
position:relative;
}
/* rule for the span on top of the image.
switches it to behave like a block then makes the viewing area only
200px tall while preventing overflow
 */
.carousel-image {
height: 200px;
overflow: hidden;
display: block;
}

The Javascript

I had to use a CSS Inspector (the one that comes with Chrome) to determine the ideal displacement of the image which worked out to be 197px. Here's the jQuery animate syntax.

jQuery('.carousel img').animate({top:"-=197px"},9000);

A simple and complete script might look like this (In my case I just added the line to a existing jquery custom script that runs on load).:

jQuery(document).ready(function () { 

     jQuery('.carousel img').animate({top:"-=197px"},9000); 

)}; 

update: I decided to make use of Products.Carousel's event system, as a result I added the following lines of code to my custom javascript:

jQuery(document).ready(function () {

    $("#carousel-1493789179 img").animate({top: "-=197px"})
/* reset the slides to the top just before animation */
    $('.carousel').bind('beforeAnimate',

        function () {

             jQuery('.carousel img').css('top','0px');

        });

/* initiate slide up animation after a new slide has been displayed (ie. on new animation) */

    $('.carousel').bind('afterAnimate',

        function () {

            jQuery('.carousel img').animate({top:"-=197px"},6000);

         });

)};

Parting Thoughts

There are some weaknesses with this approach, for example it assumes that all banner images will always be 400px high. When there are multiple images in the Carousel the sliding up effect is lessened, this can be improved by tying the slide up effect to a Carousel event. It would also be good to add some easing for a smoother scroll effect.

Currently the script is fired even if there is no carousel present, making it detect the presence of a carousel first is a sensible next feature.

It might be useful to package this as an add-on for Products.Carousel so that it is 100% site administrator friendly in the future.

For the record, this was easier to do, back in the day with Flash, but then Android and iOS users would not be able to see it, plus my primary machine is now a Chromebook so there isn't much of an option for using the Flash IDE anyway. I would still be left to do the integration work so that mortals could manage the system when we're done.

MySQL admin access on a plesk managed server

The following got me straight to the mysql prompt with all the privileges I needed.
mysql -uadmin -p`cat /etc/psa/.psa.shadow` -P8306 psa

Only works as the root user though.