Paster is your friend

If you are starting a new Plone project, paster is definetely your friend. Your necesary and helpful friend.paster can be seen as a code generation tool, and perhaps it can be seen as something to avoid, but it helps, and helps a lot, to write all that boilerplate code you need to write each time you start a Plone project, such as the buildout.cfg file (now that zc.buildout seems to be the de facto standard to manage both development and deployment of Plone projects), skin, css and javascript registratin in a so called theme product, or new profile and content-type registration ina content-type or archetype product.

One of the thing I like the most from paster is the '--svn-repository' option. Before using paste, I found myself many times importing incomplete projects to our svn repository or deleting and later checkouting products. Now, each time I create a new product, or egg, I only have to add a '--svn-repository=http://url-to-my-svn' and I'm done. paster creates the trunk, branches and tags structure, it checkouts the trunk, adds the files, and everything is set to start working.

paster would be nothing for Plone if ZopeSkel wouldn't exist. ZopeSkel is a collection of paster templates you can use to create your producs. For example, there is a template to create a theme product or a buildout file or an archetypes based product. To use is, you just have to invoke paster with the name of the template:

erral@lindari:/tmp$ paster create -t plone3_buildout myproject --svn-repository=http://myurl

Answer just a couple of questions and you'll have a ready-to-go buildout configuration file in your repository.

The archetype template and the support of local ZopeSkel commands (as explained by Mustapha helps you to create a new Archetypes based content-type. But not only it creates the base boilerplate code. Thanks to the local-command support, you can add new content-types, new portlets or even new browser views, just anytime after creating the project. You can add today a browser view, and tomorrow a new content-type. You just have to worry to invoke the correct `paster`command, everything else (add configure.zcml lines, new Generic Setup profile configuration files, etc) is done by paster:

erral@lindari:/tmp$ paster create -t archetype my.content
...
erral@lindari:/tmp$ cd my.content/
erral@lindari:/tmp$ ls
erral@lindari:/tmp/my.content$ paster addcontent --list
Available templates:
  atschema:     A handy AT schema builder
  contenttype:  A content type skeleton
  portlet:      A Plone 3 portlet
  view:         A browser view skeleton
  zcmlmeta:     A ZCML meta directive skeleton
erral@lindari:/tmp/my.content$ ls my/content/
browser    configure.zcml  __init__.py    portlets  tests
config.py  content         interfaces.py  profiles  tests.py
erral@lindari:/tmp/my.content$ paster addcontent contenttype
...
erral@lindari:/tmp/my.content$ ls my/content/content
configure.zcml  __init__.py  mynewcontenttype.py

Awesome !!!

Many people don't like code generation tools. I don't know I should call paster a code generation tool or a helpful-boilerplate-writing-avoider-tool. Is something you will want to use after trying it for the first time.