Any experience with the Deliverance system ?

Question

My new boss went to a speech where Deliverance, a kind of proxy allowing to add skin to any html output on the fly, was presented. He decided to use it right after that, no matter how young it is.

More here :

http://www.openplans.org/projects/deliverance/introduction

In theory, the system sounds great when you want a newbie to tweak your plone theme without having to teach him all the complex mechanisms behind the zope products. And apply the same theme on a Drupal web site in one row.

But I don't believe in theory, and would like to know if anybody tried this out in the real world :-)

Answer 1

I will start answering this question here while we perform tests but I'd love to have feedback from other users.

Install

We have spent a small afternoon from tuto to "how to" to finally install and run the thing on a virtual machine.

This one is ok : http://www.openplans.org/projects/deliverance/getting-started

There are setuptools packages but this does not works out of the box (and certainly not without compiling anything). We had to install :

• setuptools >= 0.6c5 (tested with 0.6c9 from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools/).
• of course, compilation implies installing gcc, linux-header et lib6-dev
• libxslt in dev (we used libxslt1-dev)
• linking with zl so zlib (we used zlib1g-dev)
• you'd better install Pastescript BEFORE starting the Deliverance install
• installing python-nose is not mandatory but it helps to check if everything went fine

We did not manage to make it works with python-virtualenv to we definitly messed up the debian system but it seems to run ok.

Hope it can help.

Answer 2

The plone website itself (http://plone.org) is themed using deliverance. So far as I know, it is the first large-scale production plone site using deliverance.

Answer 3

Note, plone.org uses xdv, a version of deliverance that compiles down to xslt. The simplest way to try it is with http://pypi.python.org/pypi/collective.xdv though plone.org runs the xslt in a (patched) Nginx.

Answer 4

Having used Plone professionally for the last 4 years or so, and Deliverance on 4 commercial sites, I would advise all new front end developers (and old hands alike) to use Deliverance to theme Plone sites.

It is much easier to learn (a couple of weeks Vs couple of months) and potentially much more powerful than the old, confused, methods - few of which you will still need (and even then at a much later point in the life of the site).

Not only that, but it uses XPath and CSS selectors and can be used on non-Plone sites, so the time invested is easily transferable.