So, the weather here in Berlin has finally turned into something resembling Summer and what happens? Right, I catch a nasty cold! That was Wednesday. Today - Saturday - after spending the past three days entirely indoors, in bed with drawn curtains and herbal tea with outside temparatures reaching 31 degress centrigrade I finally feel well enough to actually do something (as opposed to just being a vegetable).

Of course there are piles of real work[tm] that need to be done, but I be damned if I did any of that kind of stuff, while the rest of city is sitting in cafes or at lakes (or both) enjoying all those nice summer things that my current state of health makes me loath rather than cherish: sun, water, grilled food and alcoholic beverages…

So while the wife and kids are at the municipal pool I’ve decided to tackle a small mini project that I’ve had in my mind for a while: writing a script that automatcially creates a Plone Product Skeleton . You see, the best way to customize a plone site is to write a Product for it to which you then add your custom templates and what not - but the actual process of setting up such a product is rather tedious (and error prone - I don’t know how many times I’ve restarted a zope instance wondering why that damned new product of mine wouldn’t show up in portal_quickinstaller just because I missed a hyphen somewhere.)

So here you have it: written under the influence of Dolo-Dobendan a nice little convenience script that takes two arguements: the name of your product and the folder where it will create it (usually simply the Products folder of your Zope instance). Check out the details and the downloadable archive in the geek section.