Installation instruction question about collective.exportimport HOT 4 CLOSED

That sentence may be confusing. It means that you do not have to install it in the Add-on controlpanel (https://demo.plone.org/prefs_install_products_form) to be able to use the forms @@export_content and @@import_content in your site.
You still have to to add it to you buildout configuration and run buildout to make these features available at all. See https://docs.plone.org/manage/installing/installing_addons.html for details.

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Hi @TechnologyClassroom ,

This is one of the layer issues I tried to address in my '7 things that might surprise you...' from thursday. The relevant slide:

As Philip explains there are multiple cases of installing. The collective.exportimport add'on needs to be available on the sys.path of they Python interpreter process when it starts up. This is typically done by buildout at the moment (in the near future possible pip) which downloads the add'on from pypi, installs it in a subdirectory and adds the path to the sys.path (PYTHON_PATH) in bin/instance. And also the configure.zcml is registered in another directory.

Then when Python starts up, ZCA is activated and the views (@@export_content / @@imnport_content) are registered on the Plone Site Root object.

The install that is NOT happening is the installation in the add'on controls panel, behind the scenes the GenericSetup step. This step would modify required persistent 'configuration objects' in the ZODB for other functionality that is in Plone, but which this add'on doesn't need (registering content types for example, it modifies the portal_types object, in the Plone Site Root). You can only see this tool if you go to the ZMI.

That's why this add'on is 'non invasive' and without install risk. If you remove it from your buildout config and rerun bin/buildout, or it is gone from the PYTHON_PATH / bin/instance by some other scaffolding tool , nothing will break your site, as nothing else in the zodb/object tree is referencing any code in the add'on on filesystem Only the 2 views are necessary.

You see this a lot with other 'admin category' tools as well.

Hope this helps. I'm actually interested if showing you these layers makes things 'click' for you on what actually is happening during startup/install.

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I think we should update the docs to clarify what @TechnologyClassroom found confusing

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@pbauer @fredvd, thank you for clarifying! Thank you both for the migration talks as well! The 7 things talk was very good. If it was cleaned up into documentation format, I believe it would help newcomers understand the big picture of how Plone works and become a great resource.

@tkimnguyen, that documentation change makes sense. Thank you!

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