I’m currently developing an Archetypes-based Product which will need to implement lots of relations among its content objects and I sort of brought it with me as a “pet project” to the sprint. Because as I was happily implementing those relations using ATCT and ATReferences I suddenly realized (with horror!) that these relationships are not preserved upon export and import using the standard .zexp method!

At first glance what seems to happen is that (at the very least) upon import the content objects receive a new UID, so any reference to that object will now point to a non-existing object.

This is a big issue – fortunately, some folks smarter than myself are already working on it. And that’s another example of how incredibly useful such a sprint can be: I was able to ask jensens (the maintainer of Archetypes) about it and he alerted me to XMLForest. It’s currently not yet in a releasable state (it depends on modifications to the Marshall product that currently are still incompatible with Plone 2.1.2).

I’m now trying to help the author Gogo to hunt down the bugs – I’m not in the position (yet?) to actually fix them because I simply haven’t got enough knowledge about the inner workings of Archetypes but at least I’m very diligent in hunting them down and reporting them – and it’s really a good feeling to be able to contribute back, even just a little.