Plone Meets Snow Leopard

After a rough honeymoon, Plone and the new cat are cohabiting happily.

Plone installers are now available for Snow Leopard, the latest version of Apple's OS X.

Pick your flavor of installer depending on your needs:

  1. The OS X installer, which includes Python 2.4.x, Zope, and Plone with pre-compiled binary components;
  2. The Unified Installer, a source kit that builds Python, Zope and Plone for you. Requires that you pre-install the X Code tools.

Note that there are now two OS X-specific installers, one for Snow Leopard, and one for Tiger and Leopard, PPC or Intel.

For those who really want complete control, Florian Schulze and his collaborators have been working on a buildout that will generate usable versions of Python 2.4.x, 2.5.x or 2.6.x on Snow Leopard. It's available in the Collective repository. Florian's 2.4 patches are incorporated in the installers.

What took so long?

Snow Leopard has a hybrid 32/64-bit set of supporting libraries, a new version of gcc, and several new oddities in the development kit that required considerable exploration. Also, many MacPorts build kits that we depended on for examples in getting Python builds for previous OS X versions no longer work in 10.6. Even the distribution Python 2.6 had trouble setting up with new binary libraries. And, the OS X installer was also slowed up by the fact that the distribution Python's wxwidgets module doesn't work without some special fiddling. So now you know.

PS: We'd like to again plug the Plone-powered snowleopard.org site — featured in Wired since we last mentioned it — and encourage you to donate to save this endangered animal.