zopemetadatamaker 0.1.0

Bulk creation of .metadata files for Zope skins resources

Table of contents

• Main idea
• zopemetadatamaker
  • How to use
  • Complete list of options
  • What to put in the .metadata content
• Changelog

Main idea

Old Zope2 products were heavily based on skins resources. A lot of additional information for those resources are taken from .metadata file, so commonly if you have a:

my_icon.gif

…you will want to have also a:

my_icon.gif.metadata

In old Zope/Plone installation (let me say “before Varnish begin to be a Plone standard”) you can use those metadata for performing associations with HttpCache objects, making the user browser to perform some cache of resources:

[default]
title=my_icon.gif
cache=HTTPCache

zopemetadatamaker

This product will install for you a new executable: zopemetadatamaker. Using this you can automatically create your .metadata files. when you have a lot of static images, css and javascript files this can save you some times, for example: you downloaded a big Javascript library with a lot of sub-directories inside and other related resources.

How to use

The basic use of the command is something like this:

zopemetadatamaker *.gif

This will create for you all “.metadata” related to all gif file found in the current directory. You need to know that:

• you must provide at least one filter patters
• the directory where files are searched is the current working directory (but you can customize this, see below).

Complete list of options

Here the full documentation:

Usage: zopemetadatamaker [options] pattern [patterns]

Bulk creation of .metadata files for Zope skins resources

Options:
  --version             show program's version number and exit
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit
  -c METADATA, --content=METADATA
                        choose a metadata text different from default; use
                        quoting for multiline input
  -d, --default         print default metadata (if --content is not provided),
                        then exit
  -p PATHS, --path=PATHS
                        directories path where to look for metadata. You can
                        use this multiple times. Default is the current
                        working directory
  --dry-run             dry run, simply print what I would like to do
  -f, --force           force .metadata creation; if another one exists it
                        will be replaced
  -r, --recursive       search and create recursively inside subdirs

What to put in the .metadata content

The default metadata content is like this:

[default]
title=%(filename)s
cache=HTTPCache

The %(filename)s section will be replaced with the original file name. You can use this, or omit it, when defining you custom .metadata.

I use this default content because it is the minimal “cache” information for Plone CMS static resouces.

Changelog

0.1.0 (2011-04-04)

• Initial release