Posted Nov 20, 2008
GloWorm 1.0b1 now available
The first version of GloWorm that I'd be willing to use on one of my own sites is now ready for download.
I'm pleased to announce that Products.Gloworm is now an actual product and available for download from PyPi.
What's it do?
GloWorm is a theme inspection tool for Plone. Click on a part of the Plone interface to see what it is, where it came from, how it was generated, and what TAL statements are acting upon it. Show, hide, move, and customize viewlets through Plone. Get information about Archetypes widgets. See a tree-structured view of all viewlets and viewlet managers active on the page, including those in the html head.
What's new in this release?
- Resizable panels. The GloWorm panel and navigation tree can now be drag-resized.
- Better browser support. I've confirmed that it works in Firefox 3.0.3, Safari 3.2, Opera 9.62, and IE 7.0.5730.11. I'd appreciate it if you'd add any other versions, working or non-working, to this ticket. Yay crowdsourcing!
- Inline display of template errors. No more hidden-in-the-traceback failures of template saves.
- Display the results of a tal:attributes statement. Now see the variable name, expression, and result of tal:attributes calls.
- Stability! The flakiness has been removed and I completely trust it on my own sites now.
Why the name change?
Er, I made a bad assumption about namespaces when I first started the project. Later, when I realized I what the old name implied, I felt a bit of a jerk and changed it to something more reasonable. Any chance we could get a best-practices doc for package naming?
Where's that move-a-viewlet-to-a-different-manager thingie?
Hidden, for now. I'm not yet convinced of the stability of that feature, so I've disabled it. It'll be back once I feel comfortable with it. (If you really, really want to use it, you can uncomment the button in browser/panel_inspect_viewlet.pt)Is GloWorm going to have the ability to dump my customizations to a filesystem product?
I think every person I talked to at the conference asked the same thing and I'll give the same answer: Sure, when someone writes a product to do that, GloWorm will happily talk to it.
Is there anyone out there that wants to step up and write such a thing? Several of the in-the-know developers I talked to said that the ability is there, it just needs to be tied together and polished. Great! When can you start?
Special thanks to Alex, Alan, and many others for encouragement; Joel for evangelism and suggestions; and Mike and Christian for letting me run with this crazy idea.
