Installing Dexterity¶

How to install Dexterity and use it in your project

Dexterity is distributed as a number of eggs, published on PyPI. The plone.app.dexterity egg pulls in all the required dependencies and should get you up and running. This how-to explains what you need to do use Dexterity in a standard Plone buildout.

Installing Dexterity on Plone 4.3¶

Note: Plone 4.3 is the latest release of Plone. Dexterity is included with Plone 4.3, but must be activated via the "Add-ons" configlet in site setup.

If you are using grok-style configuration, you must do one extra installation step: activate the grok extra for Dexterity. To do so, add the following line to the eggs section of your buildout:

                        eggs =
    Plone
    ...
    plone.app.dexterity [grok]

                      

Important: If you installed Dexterity on a Plone site that you upgraded to Plone 4.3, you must include the relations extra. Otherwise your site will have a broken intid utility.

eggs =

Plone ... plone.app.dexterity [grok,relations]

Installing Dexterity on Plone 4.2¶

Plone 4.2 is the previous stable release of Plone. The Plone KGS (known good set of package versions) includes version pins for the packages that make up Dexterity, so all you need to do is add plone.app.dexterity to the eggs in your buildout, and re-run the buildout:

                        [buildout]
extensions = buildout.dumppickedversions
unzip = true
parts = instance
extends =
    http://dist.plone.org/release/4.2.1/versions.cfg
versions = versions
develop =

[instance]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
user = admin:admin
http-address = 8080
debug-mode = on
verbose-security = on
eggs =
    Plone
    plone.app.dexterity

                      

Note that:

We use the buildout.dumppickedversions extension to help show what versions buildout picked for any dependencies not pinned in the buildout. This helps trace any dependency issues.
We extend the official Plone release known good set for Plone 4.2.1.
In the instance configuration, we load the Plone egg and plone.app.dexterity. The latter will pull in all the Dexterity dependencies.
Since plone.app.dexterity configures a z3c.autoinclude entry point, there is no need to load a separate ZCML slug.

Your own buildout may be more extensive. The developer manual shows a more comprehensive one with some debugging tools, for example. However, the buildout above should be enough for creating types through the web. If you are using a package that itself depends on plone.app.dexterity, then the second eggs line becomes superfluous as well, of course.

Installing Dexterity on older versions of Plone¶

Prior to Plone 4.2, the official Plone KGS did not include version pins for the packages that make up Dexterity. Instead, you can extend a KGS from the good-py service. That looks like this:

                        [buildout]
extensions = buildout.dumppickedversions
unzip = true
parts = instance
extends =
    http://good-py.appspot.com/release/dexterity/1.2.1?plone=4.1.6
versions = versions
develop =

[instance]
recipe = plone.recipe.zope2instance
user = admin:admin
http-address = 8080
debug-mode = on
verbose-security = on
eggs =
    Plone
    plone.app.dexterity

                      

Notice that the extends line has been changed to point at good-py and specify both a particular version of Dexterity and a particular version of Plone. good-py returns a set of versions that will work for that combination.

Dexterity 1.2.1 is the last version of Dexterity supported for Plone < 4.2. No version of Dexterity is compatible with Plone < 3.3.