New Plone Content Types Added!

I've been hard at work learning both Zope and Plone, and in the recent day, my focus has been back on Plone after the creation of my Zope TestProduct.  I have been working with actual add-on creation, but all of these new custom content types are actually built entirely in the web browser with no external file system code.  The only pieces that live in the file system are public assets, such as the JavaScript and CSS files required for these new content types to work.  The actual content these new content types in Plone display, are also stored on the file system for performance reasons, as nginx is stellar at serving up static resources.

With the introduction out of the way, let me introduce you to these new content types on this Plone website in the order they were developed:

Video

This content type is very simple, as it will allow me to point to any video I've uploaded to the server's file system, and embed it right into the Plone website with complete ease.  It also supports standard searching as well, as all the other typical Plone features.  You can see an example with my Daily Tech video that I copied over from my other website.

AppleSoft BASIC Program

This one is rather interesting, in that it uses a fun JavaScript library which can run pure AppleSoft BASIC programs from the Apple ][ without any Apple ROM, or full system emulation.  It only implements the BASIC interpreter, and as a result, it's also very limited in what it can do.  I created a very BASIC Hello World program you can check out to see how it actually works and functions here in Plone.  This content type is entirely self-contained, besides the required external JavaScript and  CSS for the interpreter itself, as the entire AppleSoft program itself is written right in the content type editor inside Plone.

AppleSoft File

This is a very special content type that isn't meant to be accessed directly, it's purpose is to allow the AppleSoft BASIC virtual file system to function correctly within a Plone website.  There isn't currently any demo of this content type on this website, but I have tested it on my local development Plone.  This content type is also interesting in that it's view isn't a Page Template, but rather it is a  Python script which just returns the data from the file itself, so that only the data is given to the interpreter and not a full HTML page.

Asciinema Video

This is the latest content type I created on my Plone site, and it allows for easy embedding of Asciinema video recordings, which is a special file format that their program generates.  They provide documentation on how to self-host these recordings with minimal effort, and so this custom content type will include the needed JavaScript and CSS into the view, and then display the actual player on the Plone website.  This content type allows for almost effortless hosting of such terminal recordings, so stay tuned for some new recordings to appear on this website soon.  As a fun example of how it works, I decided to play a Pac-Man game in my terminal and record it.