Getting Started

by Sean Fulmer — last modified Dec 30, 2008 03:06 PM
Installing and configuring PIDA for Plone development

Installing PIDA

You can download PIDA from the project download page. At the time of this writing, PIDA is at version 0.5.1.

Installation instructions are in the docs subdirectory of the tarball, but the basic steps for *nix systems are:

  1. tar -xvf PIDA-0.5.1.tar.gz
  2. cd PIDA-0.5.1
  3. python setup.py build
  4. python setup.py install

PIDA depends on PyGTK and a number of other dependencies. If the build fails, just read the traceback carefully and fix whatever it's complaining about. If you get stuck, ask for help on the PIDA users group.

Windows users: you can find some supplemental instructions for building PIDA on Windows here. Best of luck to you :)

Be sure to install PIDA and its dependencies using the same Python interpreter that your Zope uses! This will make it possible to use the integrated debugger with your Plone products.

Once you've got PIDA installed, run 'pida' from a terminal to start.

Configuring PIDA

The first time you run PIDA, you'll be prompted to select the editor that you want to use. The list may include vim, emacs, and possibly others, depending on what's installed on your system. I'm running Ubuntu 7.04 with vim and emacs installed, and those were the choices available to me.

Caution: I'm firmly on the vim side of the Editor Holy War, but I selected emacs just to see what the integration was like. This didn't work for me - when I launched PIDA, emacs would launch in its own window, but the PIDA UI would never load. This prevented me from going to PIDA's preferences to change my editor setting. If this happens to you, do the following:

  • Exit emacs
  • Kill any running PIDA processes
  • Delete the file 'first_run_wizard' from ~/.pida2
  • Relaunch PIDA and select vim as the editor. It's the right thing to do :-)

Installing Plugins

Once you've got PIDA up and running, you'll want to install a few plugins. Select Tools > Plugins Manager from the menu, then click Available Plugins in  the Plugins Manager panel. If the plugins list is empty, click Refresh at the bottom of the panel.

You'll want the following plugins at a minimum:

  • Python - this is the Python source browser, which gives you an expandable tree of modules, classes, methods, etc
  • Python Debugger - this is the debugger that we'll use to debug our code later in the tutorial. It's a remote Python debugger, modeled after (or perhaps taken from?) Winpdb.

Feel free to try out some more - I find the TODO parser plugin to be very useful.

To install any plugin, select it from the list then click Install/Upgrade.

Once you've got your plugins installed, it's time to create a project...