Installing PloneSoftwareCenter on Plone 4

In addition to the Plone Help Center, I also wanted to have PloneSoftwareCenter for project management capabilities. The normal method for installing PloneSoftwareCenter is to add Products.PloneSoftwareCenter to the eggs = section of the zinstance/buildout.cfg file in the Plone installation. Trying to build and then run Plone, I ended up adding three additional lines to the buildout.cfg. I’m not sure why these dependencies were not automatically added.

Figuring out dependencies

Each time I ran the buildout command, I received an error message similar to this one reported on the PloneSoftwareCenter issue #84:

2009-02-24 10:03:06 ERROR Application Could not import Products.PloneSoftwareCenter
Traceback (most recent call last):
File "/home/encolpe/zopes/ve-p31-eurocontrol/management/parts/zope2/lib/python/OFS/Application.py", line 709, in import_product
product=__import__(pname, global_dict, global_dict, silly)
File "/home/encolpe/.buildout/eggs/Products.PloneSoftwareCenter-1.5-py2.4.egg/Products/PloneSoftwareCenter/__init__.py", line 15, in ?
from Products.PloneSoftwareCenter.content import validators
File "/home/encolpe/.buildout/eggs/Products.PloneSoftwareCenter-1.5-py2.4.egg/Products/PloneSoftwareCenter/content/__init__.py", line 7, in ?
import root
File "/home/encolpe/.buildout/eggs/Products.PloneSoftwareCenter-1.5-py2.4.egg/Products/PloneSoftwareCenter/content/root.py", line 22, in ?
from Products.ArchAddOn.Fields import SimpleDataGridField
ImportError: No module named ArchAddOn.Fields

The last line indicates that ArchAddOn.Fields was missing. A quick search for ArchAddOn revealed a Products.ArchAddOn, with a few of these hits also referencing PloneSoftwareCenter. I received a similar error for fancyzoomview and AddRemoveWidget.

Procedure

To get PloneSoftwareCenter working, I added the following lines to the buildout.cfg file in the eggs section:

eggs =
. . .
Products.PloneSoftwareCenter
collective.fancyzoomview
Products.ArchAddOn
Products.AddRemoveWidget

Running the buildout and instance commands then started Plone so I could use the portal_quickinstaller in the Zope Management Interface (you.site.address/manage) to activate all of the packages. The Software Center then appeared under the Add New menu on the Plone site.

Tip: If you are behind a proxy server, make sure you export your proxy server using the command line option export http_proxy=proxy.addy.com. Make sure you replace proxy.addy.com with the appropriate proxy address.

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