plone.pgcatalog

PostgreSQL-backed catalog for Plone, replacing ZCatalog BTrees indexes with SQL queries on JSONB.

Requires zodb-pgjsonb as the ZODB storage backend.

Features

• All standard index types supported: FieldIndex, KeywordIndex, DateIndex, BooleanIndex, DateRangeIndex, UUIDIndex, ZCTextIndex, ExtendedPathIndex, GopipIndex
• DateRecurringIndex for recurring events (Plone's start/end indexes) -- recurrence expansion at query time via rrule_plpgsql, no C extensions needed
• Extensible via IPGIndexTranslator named utilities for custom index types
• Dynamic index discovery from ZCatalog at startup -- addons adding indexes via catalog.xml just work
• Transactional writes -- catalog data written atomically alongside object state during ZODB commit
• Full-text search via PostgreSQL tsvector/tsquery -- language-aware stemming for SearchableText (30 languages), word-level matching for Title/Description/addon ZCTextIndex fields
• Optional BM25 ranking -- when vchord_bm25 + pg_tokenizer extensions are detected, search results are automatically ranked using BM25 (IDF, term saturation, length normalization) instead of ts_rank_cd. Title matches are boosted. Falls back to tsvector ranking on vanilla PostgreSQL.
• Zero ZODB cache pressure -- no BTree/Bucket objects stored in ZODB
• Container-friendly -- works on standard postgres:17 Docker images; for BM25 use tensorchord/vchord-suite:pg17-latest

Requirements

• Python 3.12+
• PostgreSQL 15+ (tested with 17)
• zodb-pgjsonb
• Plone 6

Installation

pip install plone-pgcatalog

Add to your Zope configuration:

<!-- zope.conf -->
%import zodb_pgjsonb
<zodb_main>
  <pgjsonb>
    dsn dbname=mydb user=zodb password=zodb host=localhost port=5432
  </pgjsonb>
</zodb_main>

Install the plone.pgcatalog:default GenericSetup profile through Plone's Add-on installer or your policy package.

Usage

Once installed, portal_catalog is replaced with PlonePGCatalogTool. All catalog queries use the same ZCatalog API:

# Standard catalog queries -- same syntax as ZCatalog
results = catalog(portal_type="Document", review_state="published")
results = catalog(Subject={"query": ["Python", "Plone"], "operator": "or"})
results = catalog(SearchableText="my search term")
results = catalog(SearchableText="Katzen", Language="de")  # language-aware stemming
results = catalog(Title="quick fox")  # word-level match (finds "The Quick Brown Fox")
results = catalog(path={"query": "/plone/folder", "depth": 1})

# Recurring events (DateRecurringIndex)
results = catalog(
    start={
        "query": [DateTime("2025-03-01"), DateTime("2025-03-31")],
        "range": "min:max",
    }
)

Migrating an Existing Site

If you have a running Plone site and want to switch from ZCatalog to plone.pgcatalog:

Prerequisites: Your site must already be running on zodb-pgjsonb. If you're migrating from FileStorage or RelStorage, use zodb-convert first.

Steps:

1. Install plone-pgcatalog into your Python environment:

   pip install plone-pgcatalog
   

2. Restart Zope (plone.pgcatalog is auto-discovered via z3c.autoinclude).

3. Install the plone.pgcatalog:default GenericSetup profile -- either through the Plone Add-on control panel or programmatically:

   setup = portal.portal_setup
   setup.runAllImportStepsFromProfile("profile-plone.pgcatalog:default")
   

   This replaces portal_catalog with PlonePGCatalogTool, preserving any addon-provided index definitions.

4. Rebuild the catalog to populate PostgreSQL with all existing content:

   catalog = portal.portal_catalog
   catalog.clearFindAndRebuild()
   

   For a site with ~1000 documents, this takes about 15 seconds.

An automated migration script is included in example/scripts/migrate_to_pgcatalog.py that performs all steps and verifies the result.

Using with plone.distribution

An example distribution package is included in example/pgcatalog-example-distribution/. It registers a "Plone Site (PG Catalog)" distribution that appears in the site creation UI and automatically applies the plone.pgcatalog:default profile.

To use plone.pgcatalog in your own distribution, add it to profiles.json:

{
  "base": [
    "plone.app.contenttypes:default",
    "plonetheme.barceloneta:default",
    "plone.pgcatalog:default"
  ]
}

Documentation

Rendered documentation: https://bluedynamics.github.io/plone-pgcatalog/

• Architecture -- design, index registry, query translation
• BENCHMARKS.md -- performance comparison vs RelStorage+ZCatalog
• CHANGES.md -- changelog
• example/ -- runnable example with multilingual content and an example distribution

Source Code and Contributions

The source code is managed in a Git repository, with its main branches hosted on GitHub. Issues can be reported there too.

We'd be happy to see many forks and pull requests to make this package even better. We welcome AI-assisted contributions, but expect every contributor to fully understand and be able to explain the code they submit. Please don't send bulk auto-generated pull requests.

Maintainers are Jens Klein and the BlueDynamics Alliance developer team. We appreciate any contribution and if a release on PyPI is needed, please just contact one of us. We also offer commercial support if any training, coaching, integration or adaptations are needed.

License

GPL-2.0