ANN: archetypes.schemaextender 1.0a1

[Martin Aspeli]

Hi all,

A few people have expressed an interest in ContentFlavors and other ways 
of extending the schema of existing Archetypes.

Florian Schulze and I have been working on such a thing called 
archetypes.schemaextender. It requires a slightly different pattern to 
ContentFlavors (you need to subclass fields, basically), but it's 
working pretty well.

The package is in the Cheese Shop and Archetypes svn.

I would really like to get some eyes on it, and for people to try it 
out. There's a TODO that outlines some of the issues we think may be 
outstanding, but we need to test:

  - performance: we will almost certainly need some caching, but it's 
unclear whether we want a global cache or just _v_ attributes, and 
how/when the cache should be invalidated

  - api: we've designed it so that it strongly encourages one use case 
(adding new fields) over others (modifying the schema directly, which 
can be dangerous), but it may not work as naturally as we'd hoped

  - pattern: the trick that makes archetypes.schemaextender work much 
more cleanly than ContentFlavors, is to provide custom implementations 
of getAccessor(), getMutator() and getEditAccessor() on fields. We could 
provide wrappers for all the standard AT fields for use in extended 
schemata (we already have a mix-in class that does the work), but we'd 
need to test each field.

Take a look at the README.txt doctest to understand how to use it. 
Feedback welcome!

Martin + Florian

-- 
Author of `Professional Plone Development`, a book for developers who
want to work with Plone. See http://martinaspeli.net/plone-book