Problem:

After installing Plone 3.3.2 as a standalone server from the Unified Installer in Ubuntu 9.04, adding a new plone-site (from the ZMI) produced strange error. I have been facing this for quite sometime now.

The Error Message:

Site Error

An error was encountered while publishing this resource.

Error Type: KeyError
Error Value: ''

Here’s the error log taken from the file instance.log.

Solution:

In the instance section of the buildout.cfg file, add the following (replacing your own timezone if necessary):

zope-conf-additional =
    <environment>
        TZ Asia/Katmandu
    </environment>

Run the buildout again, start the Zope Server and the problem will be gone.

What happened:

For some strange reason, Python couldn’t pick up the timezone of my machine. We fixed that by explicitely providing one in the buildout.cfg file.

Matthew Wilkes told me on IRC, “when Zope creates a date object it uses the timezone of the local machine, if not otherwise specified. Every object gets a creation date, which is then stored in the portal catalog so it can be searched for. The catalog tries to normalise the timezones so searches don’t have to take account of the fact that 1pm EST is the same time as 6pm GMT. Zope couldn’t find my machine’s timezone for whatever reason, so used the timezone ”, which caused a key-error when the date-time machinery tried to look up what the offset from GMT is.” He said that they will have to work on making the installation process adress this strange problem.

Matthew has added a ticket for this bug: #9857.

Thanks, also to cbess (I guess he is Christopher Bess) of the #plone IRC channel.

More Help:

How to install Plone with the Unified Installer and managing projects with buildout. The later link also explains how to install Plone using paster, which I’m told is the ‘advanced’ way to do the thing

I’d prefer installing from my Package Manager. But there also seems to be some problem in Jaunty’s plone3-site package as attempting to install plone3-site from synaptic gave this error:

Setting up plone3-site (3.1.7-1) …
dpkg: error processing plone3-site (–configure): subprocess post-installation script returned error exit status 10
Errors were encountered while processing: plone3-site

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