It seems like simple repurposing through a filesystem product should be a walk in the park. But it involves pulling together a few key pieces of Zen. There are a few documents around (like this) which show you how to write a full filesystem product. But I'm doing something a bit simpler, so I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Call it an exercise in supreme laziness if you want (but keep in mind that an ex-Perl programmer regards this as a virtue).

So I started with something simple first. I've put together the various skin methods that I want the repurposed product to have, and I wanted to put them on the filesystem. FSDump is the way to do this simply and easily - and since I'd never really used .properties files, I was interested to see what would result. It took about 5 seconds to add a dumper, tell it where I wanted the files to be created on the filesystem, and do the dump. I then just copied them to my skin folder and I was done.

Next instalment of my lazy approach to product development will involve Archetypes and Eduplone - using the CMFArticle guide written by Limi as a guide, and the Eduplone Plone Folder type written in Archetypes, I'm going to repurpose my folder, add in my skin methods and do a trial deployment.

I'm probably going completely the wrong way about this, but it is the path of least resistance. And although involving Archetypes means that I have a possibly unneccessary dependence introduced, but if you think about it, this way I have a product type which if it gets more complicated i can easily extend.

For a final tribute to laziness, I think I'll modify the DCWorkflow for plone to fit my new type. Stay tuned ...