I have a very frustrating start learning Plone development. I would like to develop a dexterity based content type for Plone 4. I'm an experienced python developer, having some knowledge of Zope and Grok, being rather new to buildout. That said, I read "Professional Plone 4 Development" by Martin Aspeli, but quite some version information in the book seems to be outdated.
Using buildout I was able to get a Plone instance up and running. ZopeSkel is installed but when I try to create a new package, I get an error like this:
**************************************************************************
** Your new package supports local commands. To access them, change
** directories into the 'src' directory inside your new package.
** From there, you will be able to run the command `paster add
** --list` to see the local commands available for this package.
**************************************************************************
ERROR: No egg-info directory found (looked in ./domma.voucher/./domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/bootstrap.py/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/bootstrap.pyo/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/buildout.cfg/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/CHANGES.txt/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/CONTRIBUTORS.txt/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/docs/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/domma/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/README.txt/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/setup.cfg/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/setup.py/domma.voucher.egg-info, ./domma.voucher/src/domma.voucher.egg-info)
If I try to run paster from within the given directory, it tells me, that the command "add" is not know. I tried different versions of ZopeSkel and tried the raw plone templates and also zopeskel.dexterity. The output changes slightly depending on version and template, but the result remains the same.
Obvisouly Plone development seems to be very sensible to version changes, which makes older documentation quite useless. http://plone.org/products/dexterity/documentation/manual/developer-manual tells me, that it has been updated last time 1114 ago.
Could somebody give me a starting point to develop a very simple dexterity content type for Plone 4 which really works?
For what it's worth, whilst there are a few newer versions of some packages, Professional Plone 4 Development is current with Plone 4.1. I would suggest you use it, and start from its sample code. Don't try to arbitrarily upgrade things until you know you have a working starting point, and you should be OK.